As for the question of whether we help people or not, I don't think many people who know what goes on inside YC would argue that we didn't improve startups' prospects by 6.4%, which is what we have to do to earn our keep. Considering the amount of effort we put into it, we'd have to be pretty ineffective not to manage that.
EDIT: Just reading the TC comments, it amazes me how often this basic misunderstanding comes up, even after an article that explains it.
No but explaining this might help HN readers to resist posting these types of stories.
Competition of any sort generates "trash-talk" from competitors and the like. Joel has a nice explanation in "Fire & motion" ~ http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html why competitors might do this. HN readers are ( "unnecessarily" ) getting caught up in the cross-fire.
In the case when journalists are those who "dislike" and not people, someone could think that their motives to write something bad are not so innocent, if not directed by someone who pays to create a bad impression.
Although to be honest the majority of press I see about YC is really positive.
In some ways, YC represents the purest form of the capitalist ideal - people risking their OWN money and resources to help develop a productive enterprise, and then reaping the rewards if it's successful (presumably the YC founders are risking their own money and their time with the startups they fund...).
I think most people reserve their anti-capitalist vitriol for things like hedge funds, where the managers of said funds can get insanely rich taking risks with other people's money.
I find the YC model very hard to hate.
distinguishing teams which have a 50%+ chance of success from those with a 5% chance of success"
Perhaps we should give them a few more years of operation before we assume those to be facts. So far the vast majority of funded teams haven't resolved one way or the other, which is actually a pretty good sign, but I think I'd still bet the under on 50%.
Pre-emptive note to anyone who replies to my comment above: I'm not likely to respond to anything you say, but please assume that I'm not being an idiot.
/me wanders off to find some ice for his wrists...
The startups offered YC-funding, who declined it... how did those guys work out, in comparison? (although the offer itself is an important YC input).
Also, the YC guide says they they decline funding to many very good applicants (because YC has limited places and they go to the very very good applicants). It sounds like these guys would have been selected, in some other batch... YC knows who the "almost selected" guys were and could do a comparison.
The only way to measure YC's ability in picking winners is to to have PG & co rate a bunch of non-YC founding teams at the early stage of their startups, wait a few years, and see how well their predictions held up against more or less random predictions. The experiment must involve non YC startups is that YC enhances their startups' chances of success, which can create the likely false impression that YC excels at picking successful teams rather than at guiding the teams it happens to pick to success.
In poker, if a pot is very large, calling a bet (ie investing some money) can have positive expectation even if the probability of winning the pot is quite low.
Similarly, YC's filtering ability only needs to be "good enough" to generate positive expectation, which can happen even if their predictive ability for selecting winners is quite low. Picking winners at a slightly better rate than the competition gives them an edge, even if they're not actually good at it. ie being "barely competent" at something extraordinarily difficult can often be enough to achieve considerable success.
Of course, I don't see any reason to believe that they aren't actually quite good at choosing winning startup teams -- it would certainly be interesting to be able to measure that. It will also be interesting to see if their hit-rate goes up over time.
none the less it's obvious by now that YC at least acts as a proven talent filter which I think is highly desirable by VCs
The valuation YC offers -- a median of 250k for a two-person team -- would be absurdly high if it was being offered to any team of two recent college graduates; but YC doesn't make offers to just any team. YC only picks the best teams (about 5% of applicants if I'm remembering the statistics correctly)... and it's not unreasonable to expect that the top 5% of teams are worth far more than average.
Similarly, the chance of a YC-funded team succeeding (for whatever definition of "success" you choose) is much higher than the chance of a non-YC-funded team succeeding -- but this doesn't necessarily imply that YC is helping the companies it funds. It might just be that YC is very good at picking winning teams.
This isn't to say that YC is making all of its money by taking advantage of the people it funds, though: Simply by selecting those top 5% of teams, YC provides a very valuable service -- distinguishing teams which have a 50%+ chance of success from those with a 5% chance of success, and encouraging the teams with a 50%+ chance, is certainly economically useful; and the profit which accrues to YC as a result of that is not qualitatively different from the profits which any other smart investor makes by figuring out that a stock is undervalued -- in both cases, the investor is doing work to increase the efficiency of a market.
The economist in me wishes that we could experimentally separate the selection process from the 3 month YC program in order to determine their relative importance -- but somehow I doubt the YC crew would be interested in running an experiment where they either (a) pick good teams and only fund half of them (in order to determine whether the teams they identified as good were likely to succeed with or without YC), or (b) fund a "good cohort" and a "bad cohort" of applicants simultaneously (in order to determine if being funded by YC is enough to make anybody successful).
(In addition to the difficulty of running such an experiment, the YC crew might not want to have this question answered: They probably don't want to be confronted by teams saying "well, were interested in being funded at a valuation of $200k -- but knowing that YC thinks that we're a strong team has resulted in us increasing our self-valuation to $800k".)
But in the absence of experimental data, the question remains open, with all the attached room for anti-capitalist hatred: Does YC help the teams it funds... or are they just shrewd investors?