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Ask PG: How many applications?

14 points by regularjoe ↗ HN
Unlike other cycles, Y Combinator has recieved a lot of publicity lately. This has changed somewhat the number of applications? How many have been received?

18 comments

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pg
We're not quoting numbers anymore, but more than last time.

It was over a year ago when we started to get a lot of press, though.

davidw
> We're not quoting numbers anymore

I'll be blunt and ask: why not?

gibsonf1
I'm guessing it would discourage potentially good candidates from trying if the odds look too long?
staunch
My very vague recollection is that it's because there are lots of YC competitors/clones now. Not wanting to get into a pissing match over the number of submissions or something?
pg
Yes. And more precisely, anyone could inflate their numbers by encouraging large numbers of weak groups to apply (e.g. college students during the summer), knowing that they were going to reject them.

So if we quoted numbers, competitors would be tempted to do bad things in order to get higher numbers, and then we'd either have to the same bad things ourselves, or look as if founders liked us less.

joseakle
Are you doing this for profit?

If you are congratulations for sharing so much of what goes on at ycombinator, you have been a great inspiration.

If you are not why not help other "clones" become better by opening up a little bit more about how you achieve your magic, kind of open sourcing technology "incubation" processes, so that people from the rest of the world can enjoy such an opportunity.

testapplication
Does that really outweigh being transparent in this case? I think one thing that a lot of people admire about YCombinator is how up-front you guys are with everything reasonable to be up-front about.
vegashacker
PG says it's cause of the competition. The comment is "pre-10K-era", so it doesn't seem to be available on news.yc, but you can see it here:

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/search1/?q=disclose+application+...

pg
The old items are back. They were only gone for a couple days.

The problem is bitrot in that search app; they use the old url. Try http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9066

akkartik
Bitrot isn't the primary problem - you broke the old url. I save notes on what I read, so it'd be nice if the urls were real permalinks.
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Mistone
okay - so no exact numbers for quantity - any comments on quality?

How original are the applications and product ideas this round?

nailer
(these numbers are completely rough, but what I've been working out in my head)

Last season they had around 10 companies. These were the top 5%. So I gathered there were two hundred applicants for that season.

PG says in another comment there were a lot more than before (probably because of news.yc), so maybe double that for this year.

pg
The numbers from last cycle are public knowledge: 435 applications, 20 of which we funded.
ryanspahn
Does YCombinator each semester fund 20 or sometimes it is less?

Also, who are the other organizations like YCombinator?

rms
They fund however many they think are qualified.

Techstars directly copied the model, Seedcamp is inspired by YC and invests a little more for a bigger stake.

Two VCs, Lightspeed and Highland Capital have summer programs for student entrepreneurs.