The other week I put an application into the YCombinator Startup school. It was far from fully fleshed out and without even a website. This morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email that I had been accepted.
But hang on. That was followed by another email sent 2 hours later that a mistake was made and it was a no. Seems they got their Boolean logic wrong and the accepted (4000 applications) got initially rejected and the rejected (11,000) got accepted emails :-)
There was a lot of complaints and apologising on HackerNews and elsewhere and about 8 hours later they decide to accept all the applications. Will be interested to see how this works.
Some reasons given for who was accepted v rejected is:
– Founders are working full time
– Founders have technical expertise within the team to build the MVP
– Any progress/traction in the form of users and/or revenue
Doesn’t really seem to give much of a chance to very early stage startups which I thought was the idea.