The Irony of Applying to YC
As we were clicking "submit" the other day, I was thinking about what separates the teams that get accepted from the teams that don't. There are a bunch of criteria we're judged on, but perhaps the most important (and the source of the irony I'm talking about) is that for a team to be accepted, it can't need YC.
That doesn't mean, of course, that being YC alums isn't wonderful and helpful and all the rest. What it does mean is that the people who get in are exactly the kind of people who would respond best to not getting in--namely by keeping busy on the company as if nothing had happened.
It's a frequent theme in PG's essays that YC takes people for whom building cool things is a bodily function, not something they need external incentives or security to do. This same irony applies to nearly every competitive application process (e.g. PG's other advice that companies obsessed with getting bought are the very ones that don't get bought). I feel that keeping that in mind is a very useful approach to these things.
And good luck!
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People post all the time on Slashdot/Reddit complaining about the unfairness of honorary degrees. That being said, if you're about to go into surgery then which would you prefer, the doctor who earned a degree from the best medical school in the country or the doctor who was awarded an honorary degree from the best medical school in the country? I'll take the surgeon with the honorary degree any day. All the traditional degree signals is that you had good grades is college, and who cares what grades your doctor had in college? I'd much rather go for the doctor whose already recognized as the best in their field.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this exactly, but I guess my point was that the people who are already most likely to succeed on their own are the ones who get the biggest social signaling value from joining YC, if in fact the system works as you say.
edit: The appropriate buzzwords here would have been "selection effects" vs. "treatment effects" (and that selection is better than treatment for social signaling purposes).
Good luck. Make something people need.
It's completely natural to appear to want something that you want/need.
1)Be Desireless 2)Be Excellent 3)Be Gone
However, we think that YC is one of the best deals out there. There's the networking of course, but then there's the PR, or the 'social capital'. If we impress PG enough, he'll say something shiny about us in an essay, and suddenly our website grabs the starry eyes of thousands of readers. It's also probably worth a lot in confidence to be picked as a probable winner out of an application pool of more than a thousand.
How about "Catch 4!-2".
To equalize matters, a price is set until the two are in balance and a relationship established.
If YC offered more cash and demanded less equity - ie. it lowered its price, then it would be seen as better value to those who would otherwise ignore it for having better alternatives... the Googlers.
Furthermore, in other areas of life, at some times people give up their soul connection to become corporate drones, not knowing the true value of their creativity - yet they think they are gaining... Also, sometimes establishing a relationship can be mutually advantageous for both but for some reason one wants to 'extract more' - they have to feel they are getting the better deal always and anything they give up is a burden and unjustified. This can blow the deal for both, or else cause a poor relationship unlike the one originally envisaged.
^A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. A non-scalable job is something like dentistry, where the amount of money you make always stays pretty closely tied to the hours you work.
That's a terrible misuse of the term scalable.
it's not about luck, it's about odds. successful people fail on a consistent basis. the more you put yourself out there the more likely it is that the next time you do you'll get lucky.
To me, being successful is flying around the world blowing oil and spewing carbon in a decadent state of material excess, until I attain immortality and start meditating while bombarding myself with all of the energy around me.