It's the same thing when you're creating a startup -- you got to stand out.

One of the factoids taken from my application was "One student took 8 AP tests, scoring 5s on 5 of them, without ever having taken an AP class." And I remember thinking, "What a dumb thing to fixate upon! My school didn't offer APs, so I couldn't take the courses. And the test was only $75 and could let me place out of several thousand dollars of college credit, so I'm not going to let something silly like not having taken the course stop me." My application had plenty of other impressive things on it, like starting a dot-com run exclusively by teenagers and watching it fail or placing tops in a couple of national math competitions. Yet what stuck out for them was the test scores.

I guess the moral is to put down everything that might conceivably be impressive, because you never know what'll stick in the mind of the admissions person.

If I were an admissions officer, I'd be a lot more impressed by that line of reasoning than by the result. When I was in high school, AP exams had this impenetrable mystique about them, like they're the Weighing of the Heart in Duat or something. From the perspective of the school administrators it was even more ridiculous. My school didn't offer AP Comp Sci, but I wanted to the take the AP exam anyway. When I asked the principal about it, he almost went into conniptions, because if I failed the exam it would mean that the school would be on public record with a 0% pass rate. Eventually I got him to agree to let me take the introductory CS course at the local community college for high school credit, and then take the lower-level of the two Comp Sci exams offered. (This was a fantastic deal for me, because it meant I got to leave that hellhole two hours early every day, and then sit down in the computer lab at BCC, ssh into my home computer, and play Nethack while the instructor gave his sixth lecture on 'for' loops.)

The mystique is total bullshit, of course. AP exams test a very small body of knowledge that you can acquire by sitting down with a Barrons or Princeton Review book for a week or two. The Calculus and Physics exams are a partial exception, because they require some degree of understanding rather than just regurgitation, but that degree is minimal. The fact that you saw through this charade speaks a lot more highly of your character than your scores do.

The ease by which even minimal feedback can be given which can lead to great benefit to the recipient is obvious, and therefore should be embraced. There may be risks that the recipient makes some kind of rebuttal and wastes time, the reasoning itself behind the rejection causes bad publicity or the feedback process takes time however the benefits to the [in this case YC] ecosystem I think outweigh the disadvantages.

I've been, and still occasionally am, in both sides---sometimes in a position of selecting people, and more likely, in a position being selected. And I can assert the observation PG stated somewhere in one of his essays---in almost all circumstances there are a few stand-outs, a few obvious inferiors, and large number of the rest in the middle ground. Unless you're in either extremes, whether you pass or fail largely depends on small bits of random factors. And it doesn't help whether you know which of those small factors you missed. Because in highly competitive fields, you have to get into the few stand-outs eventually. Don't take the real life tests as if they are school exams where you can earn several points here and there to cover up some minus points elsewhere. You can tell excellent work from not-so-great work, can't you? Just aim at excellent work. If you think your work is less than excellent, then that's the reason you're rejected. If you think you did an excellent work and still rejected, then they are wrong.

In any case, this busy manager had 200 unread applications to evaluate. He had perhaps a day or two to do this in. The first thing the manager did was to grab half of the applications from the pile and remark, "you see these people. They are unlucky. And we don't want to hire unlucky people." And with this he threw these applications into the trash.

A lot about success is playing the numbers game and not freaking out/wasting time over rejection. Of course that is easier said than done.

Sure you want to commit to that blanket statement? Do you expect every woman in every room you walk into to stop and think about why you didn't draw her attention, and then come and tell you?

In general, I'm not seeking sexual interest from every woman in the room. In fact, there's quite a few I'm specifically seeking to avoid.

For those I am interested in, I make every effort to look good and be an engaging, interesting person. I'm fit, I dress well, I'm good looking and can engage strangers in conversation easily, and usually make them laugh.

If a woman I'm interested in still isn't interested in me after I've engaged her (and provided I'm still interested in her after the conversing with her) I ask myself why. If I don't know the answer, I think it's quite reasonable to politely ask her.

Conversely, though, I'm prepared to accept her reasons why. For example, she might believe that I'm rough, but even if I know this not to be the case, I know there's a reason for this perception.

Or she might prefer something I'm not willing to be - eg, really big guys - I'm tall and thin and can't be bothered spending more than a few days at the gym. Fair enough, it would have never worked out.

But sometimes I find out something that's really valuable, and I can take that and work on it. I have to be in a frame of mind that makes her comfortable to be honest and direct.

Unfortunately, there's probably a lot of guys who don't realize there's a reason behind her perception, or who would argue about why they're they the right guy. These guys make it hard for girls to be honest for those of us who are interested in the basis for a perception, rather using it as a pretext to continuing to attempt to be accepted.

These also have no idea how many other great looking, witty girls there are, and put too much value on one opinion.

Everything above is applicable to YCombinator.

I exaggerate, of course, but whatever reason you get I can guarantee won't be satisfying. I mean, you can go to the store tomorrow and pick up a huge stack of books on selling, which all boil down to "Sometimes you strike out for no reason at all. Keep trying" In a vain attempt to pump readers for money, some books give you a huge list of reasons for why you can strike out. I'm a firm believer in controlling all those factors you can -- wear the power tie, turn the temperature down in the office, sit in the proper locations in an important meeting, use body language and NLP, show instead of tell, etc. But I've never had a client say "You know Daniel, we really like your work, but gosh, those shoes are just not doing it for us". That kind of thinking is just grasping at straws. It never works that way.

Look at it this way: a couple of years ago I sent a business plan into a local VC group for their paid-evaluation service (pretty good deal for them, huh?). This time, for my $200, I got back a bunch of comments. What did they tell me? That the reviewers were idiots, that's what. And how exactly could I use this information? Except to be bitter, not at all. So not knowing when it's qualitative is a pretty good thing. As for me, I'd rather save my money and get rejected for free.

I got comments once from judges in a startup competition and they were harsh, and offered no imaginative answers.

In most selections that draws a "pass or fail" line among applicants, giving feedback benefits neither. I explained the reason in my comment in this tree ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68895 ). I assume whether you're called back for YC interview or not is this kind.

What I didn't explain is that there are other cases; where "the few stand-outs" compete and ultimately the winner is chosen. If you couldn't win because of your shortcomings (that is, you would've won if you hadn't had them), then you should know what dragged you. But you don't need to worry; in such cases, somebody will tell you the reason you couldn't win. Most likely, in such circumstances, the officials make comments on each candidates. Even if there's no official comments, sombody inside will eventually tell you that you were so close.

Of course anybody who wants to improve himself needs feedback. But when you're in the first kind of selection and can't make it, those who made selection are wrong person to ask feedback.

Also, it would be great to see a YC applicant actually develop a system for the applications themselves making feedback and follow-up easier for YC staff.

So, if systems were in place to handle these types of apply-check-judge-accept/reject-feedback-followup processes better, I'm confident better outcomes could be reached.

Anaphoric's comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68979) such a system could be used by that manager who rejects at random.

The same remark can be applied to other fields; recruitment, record companies, auditions to cast a role, men/women relationships, .... what's common here is that, although you can tell success or failure retrospectively, you cannot nail down the systematic criteria beforehand.

Not to mention the issues that come up once the system is changed. If the system is changed next year, and some companies that failed under the old system would pass under the new system, wouldn't that be a huge problem?

You're taking people at the top of their game, with knowledge in the industry and technology, and having them make a fine-tuned judgment call.All this for a dynamically changing business environment. If the decision is of a well-considered and thoughtful nature at all, that's going to be very hard to systematize. The more you formalize it the more you lose your special sauce. There are qualitative scorecard-type solutions, but those by nature are personal opinions and would have to remain proprietary.

Which brings up the advice I've given to folks that I've talked to about getting to the interview: Demo early. We only had a couple of minutes to demo, after running through everyone's questions...and it was almost certainly only on the strength of the demo that we got the yes.

One of the weird consequences of dealing with very large numbers of startups is that you really can't remember anything except essentials. When the 19 new startups showed up for the first dinner this summer, I probably could have only told you what 3 or 4 of them were doing. The rest had to remind me. (Of course, once the summer gets going, I keep them all loaded in memory all the time.)