actually, I believe kulveer and harj (boso now auctomatic) applied with no technical skills and got accepted. they have now hooked up with pat collinson etc.

So you are telling me that if you find someone who gave away 5 % of his stock to get an alpha product out, asuming you like the idea, you still would not consider being a cofounder to his startup ? The way startups are made today is almost the same 1.have a unique idea 2. Work hard at building the alpha and demo it 3. Get funded and grow it. Etc....

All I want is to have step 1.5 get someone who understand your vision to help you build the alpha.

I'm saying that Y Combinator is a very small number of people providing startup and venture capital mentoring to a correspondingly large number of bright young people (not all of whom are technical). I'm saying that if you tried to take a similarly small number of technical experts to support a similarly large number of fledgling companies, it probably wouldn't work.

I'm not saying you have a bad idea, but it's an important question and "hiring programmers" isn't really a good answer. If I was a good hacker, and I could take 6% from 30 little companies and do all their coding in 3 months, that might be fun and profitable. I think the chances of you finding someone that capable and willing to take the risk are slim, is all.