To all you guys & girls that got 'rejected', don't be down, be UP. This is your chance to prove the spotters at YC wrong. Do it anyway, by any means that you can think of and make them regret not selecting you.
Even if only stellar ideas were presented with great teams behind them then YC would still be able to select only a limited amount of those. Chances are that you'll make it and those chances are not that much different from the projects that did get selected.
And you have at least one extra motivation, to make whoever made that selection at YC think, oops... we should have picked that one.
Being selected by YC is not a guarantee of success and not being selected by YC is not a guarantee of failure!
Best of luck to all of you, both those selected and those not selected.
I understand that you're probably angry, perhaps a little confused too - but insulting the intelligence of people who have in the past proven that they are anything but stupid, isn't going to earn you any brownie points.
I see YC as a tool to be used in helping your startup achieve it's goals, there are many others out there of varying qualities - you shouldn't see it as the destination of it.
Personally, I'd love to hear about your startup in 6-12 months time (if you've continued with it) and how well you're doing, so if you do continue with your idea and you're a squijillionaire by that time, drop me a line. My email is in my profile. Feel free to call me all sorts of four letter words and tell me I was wrong :)
And I will report back about my startup on demo day in August -- I'd rather it be a "you can succeed if you weren't accepted" story rather than a "told you so" one, because frankly I think pg et al. are perfectly confident with the startups they have chosen. Unfortunately I have two very challenging startups at the same time, but fortunately both are well under way!
Edit: None of the websites in my profile are my startup unless it explicitly is prefaced with startup:.
Ah gotcha, well then I shall retract my previous statement.
I wasn't aware of the quote :)
But still the offer stands, I love talking to people about their startups (as well as my own) and discussing various perspectives. I think lines of communication are important!
Well actually I'm glad you pointed it out. I'm sure several people had thought/would have thought it was an arrogant quote.
Yes, there should be a way of communicating more easily. Why isn't chatterous embedded in HN? I've been tempted to create a portal that keeps track of startups (techcrunch and wikipedia are no good for this). It would probably be a waste of time... or would it?
