I think it's useful to hear the stories. When you're a 1-3 person startup early stage rejection is harder to get over, and it helps to know others have succeeded regardless.

YC reject here. Created a B2C company doing 5M/month revenue in 4 years. Exited. Applied with second company to YC (B2B), rejected again. Hoping to grow it bigger than last time.

Were you not from the states? Are you a solo founder? Are you not "politically" aligned with California? I'm just wondering how can they reject someone of this calibre. Even if your application was different to your eventual success, a mantra is "we invest in people, not ideas".

Hi, I’m also really interested in scalable projects that are focused on environmental and social amelioration. Please email me (in profile) if you’d like to connect.

50M+ ARR is insane! Congratulations on the exit, btw.

Congratulations on your success. What was the business

YC reject. > $40m raised.

Separately: I'm not saying this to denigrate YC or anything; they get thousands of (at least moderately) serious applications and probably 10x that that are nonsense, but the interview we got had interviewers that seemed pretty unfamiliar with the sales processes of b2b companies that sell to midmarket or enterprise. I assume the people who did the 10 minutes with us were luck of the draw. And major props for promptly responding and saying no thanks; lots of vcs we talked to fucked around with responses and/or two even ghosted us.

So, YC for dev tools or b2c stuff? Probably great. YC for sales enablement or tooling for midmarket or enterprise sales teams? It may be very hit or miss. (Just like any vc.)

You really don't need YC rejects to validate that being rejected by YC isn't a death sentence. 90% of all startups that are successful have done it without YC. Many have done it without any VC.

Of course! But it doesn't hurt.

In my founder "generation" at least, many of us got excited and felt heard reading PG's old blog posts. A YC rejection can feel more personal when you've lionized them for years.

There’s also a lot of YC companies that failed to gain traction. This is also seldom talked about

Some don't even feature on https://ycombinator.com/companies