I wish I could say it means a lot if you don't make it to the interview stage, because that would imply we're really good judges. But unfortunately we know we miss a lot of good applications. We have thousands of applications to read, and not much time to do it in. It's difficult for us to distinguish between applications that are genuinely weak, and those where the founders just don't present themselves very well.
Do you have a system that would allow you to detect and prevent patterns analogous to "justice is what the judge ate for breakfast" (more formally known as "legal realism")?
Couldn't the point be made that those founders who don't present themselves well, might have a bit more trouble presenting their startup to customers? i.e. They can't sell themselves well, so it could be argued that they might have trouble selling the benefits of their startup to customers?
Good point, but there are still two ways YC could miss good applicants: (1) they present themselves better in some other medium that customers care about, or (2) they don't know how to sell yet, but have an aptitude for learning to sell.
That said, I don't know how the YC application process could be changed to catch either of those situations.
Yes, those two things are correlated, although they are not the same. I imagine based on what pg said that there are startups that are great in every respect except how they present themselves to YC.
