Do people think it would be helpful if YC gave a rating to rejected startups?

3 points by nickhuh 11 years ago | 4 comments

It's very understandable that YC can't give individualized feedback for people who are rejected, that would be an incredibly expensive job; however, I'm sure that YC has an internal rating system of some sort for the applications, people need to communicate, right? I was just thinking that I would really appreciate something simple like a 1-10 rating (or an estimated 0-1 probability of success?) of what they thought of the idea. It's really hard to get an honest and experienced opinion on how likely your startup is to be successful, and if I knew I was scoring straight 1s-3s on my applications, I'd stop applying until I had more experience/traction/etc..., it could even reduce the load of applications that YC has to process.

Obviously there are a lot of complications that I'm not addressing, and that could totally derail this whole idea if not properly addressed, but I figure that's why it's worth bringing up for discussion.

Also, please don't take this as me telling what YC should do with their business, they can do whatever (reasonable/legal/etc...) thing they like with it. It just seems like an open culture, so I thought I'd bring this question to the table.

benologist 11 years ago |

Your YC application is a snapshot of your idea at the time you applied. The assumptions you make in that snapshot will be proven wrong and tossed out faster than the ink dries, and they have much less data to work from.

I don't think it would be very helpful for that reason, as well as a general inability to quantify success and failure even amongst the startups they do fund.

nickhuh 11 years ago | |

Interesting point. Still, I think even some really coarse feedback would be helpful. For example, just a three tiered system where a 1 means you get an interview, a 2 means your startup is interesting, and a 3 meaning that it's totally off-base would be helpful, cause if I keep throwing 3's YC's way, I'd rather just not waste their (or my) time.

benologist 11 years ago | | |

They explicitly want people to try again, some of their biggest successes were accepted "eventually".

    Many of our successful founders applied multiple times 
    before we funded them (including Drew Houston of Dropbox).

http://blog.samaltman.com/applying-to-yc

I think they would be very hesitant to call any ideas terrible - recently they instigated changes here in comments outlawing "gratuitous negativity" and one of the stated reasons was they don't want to risk people abandoning ideas because of criticism -

    New work and new ideas are fragile. Too much gratuitous 
    negativity might be the difference between someone giving 
    up on a crazy idea and building the next Airbnb.

http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-hacker-news-guideline

Rejections won't always be actionable reasons or even you/your idea/your team, you're also being measured against everyone else's applications and YC's collective experience and knowledge of ~700 other startups.

rajacombinator 11 years ago |

If a score out of 10 from someone who likely spent <15 min considering your pitch is going to influence you, you're probably not committed enough to see it through anyway.