This is terrible. I had no idea this had happened till now. I am so sorry. If I had known we'd accidentally sent these people an invitation to interview, we would have just gone ahead and interviewed them.

As far as I am concerned, this is the worst mistake YC has ever made, and we will try never to let this happen again.

None of my business, Paul, but you might want to contact the guy and apologize. That had to suck big time.

Good idea; I just did.

Oh, please. Shit happens.

Sure does. And when it happens to your users, you'd better be able to do some scooping real quick. But like I said, not my call.

Sheesh. An administrative error.

Hate to sour this little love-in, though.

Its easy to create perceptions of yourself that are simply not true. I was one of the people who got that mail. I really thought about shooting an upset sounding email to Paul. But thought the better of it -- amazing that every other person on that list did the same. Only when I met the YCombinators on the interviews to a subsequent cycle did I figure that they were nice people (inspite of not making it). Absolutely no hard feelings, though. Looking back, I simply was not prepared enough to do a startup. I eventually got around to realizing that I did not need money to built a product -- just a committed co-founder -- and so thats what I did. Yesterday's rejection did not sting at all.

He went to UNC. I didn't know Adi personally - but from what I hear, he's a great hacker and is working at Microsoft.

Yeah, looks like they did get an interview eventually, but didn't make it all the way:

http://www.adiunnithan.com/blog/?p=100