It's ironic that YC membership might become exactly the kind of credential to investors that a college degree is to employers, given PG's distaste for such things. Makes me a little sad, actually.
Fortunately we have powerful forces keeping us in line. If we make a bad decision, we tend to have that fact thrust in our faces within a year, if not sooner. Whereas college admissions officers do not, as far as I know, look at applicants' later careers to determine whether they chose well. Even if they did, they'd have to wait 5-10 years.
Say a company is rejected by YC. Do you want to hear about their future success, like fundraising right afterwards? Being a fan of YC and hoping YC learns from its "mistakes" seem synchronous from where I sit.
Yes, definitely. We say so explicitly in the email we send to the groups we don't invite to interviews.
When a startup we rejected does well, we usually know about it without them telling us though. And when one does we go back and try to figure out how we missed them. We've already made several changes in the application process because of good startups we missed.
What about something that seems too radical for the model, like energy sources or medical devices? Those lessons could take 3-5 years to become obvious.
Speaking as a guy in medical devices, I would love for a YC-like organization to exist for my industry, though I think the structure of any such organization would be quite different than what PG & Co. do now.
Just three examples: First, the capital requirements of a med dev company are much higher than a software company. 11K + 3K*n wouldn't even cover the early biocompatibility and animal trials needed to demonstrate proof of concept.
Second, there is less measurable progress in 10 weeks relative to a software company, due in part to the length of the aforementioned trials.
Third, there's no ability to release a minimum viable product to customers and quickly pivot based on their feedback. That's partly because in medical technology 'customer' is an unclear concept and partly because your product won't get used in a meaningful way until feasibility human trials, which are at minimum several months after prototypes are created.
...making great progress with the newly re-branded his "innie" and his/hers "outie" models. Since I'm bootstrapping (at the moment) my target markets are individual consumers, though the long-term roadmap calls for FDA Pharmaco-Therapeutic classification and Class II medical device approval by year 3.
What if I told you that this product sits at the forefront of a $15bn industry. Is that something you might be interested in?
