YC: Requests for Startups

To those who think this list will help them get into YC, or lament "why didn't I get into YC when my idea was squarely on this list":

The YC application is a sales pitch, and you're not selling your idea, you're primarily selling your charisma and capacity to spin vision and sell. Second, you're selling your chemistry with your cofounders and stability of your relationship. Third, you're selling your capacity to build, at least some usable prototype, but this a low bar.

At no point are you actually selling the concrete idea, unless you're doing something extremely specific that seems valuable and you're one of the few who can build it. For the rest, the idea is a rhetorical vehicle to sell the other things.

Spot on. Add in an ivy league or similar pedigree as social proof for a better chance.

Having met a bunch of YC companies now, I wouldn't say the Ivies are exactly under-represented but it always seems like there's more Stanford than UPenn and more UWaterloo than Cornell. If school means anything it's the quality of their CS programs.

Don't let your school hold you back from applying :)

going of a tangent but would you say it's worth going to a similarly ranked uni(oxford) if one wants to go into entrepreneurship given its more 'academic' emphasis? as opposed to somewhere like UCSD where it's not as prestigious but close to the tech scene.(bonus points for california weather ha!)