Related to that, I have a question that's been bugging me:
If the application is assessed primarily on the founders, is it really worth failed applicants applying again? Speaking as someone who has applied (and failed, with cause!) twice relatively recently, and as an experienced 14 year 'veteran' of web technology, I can't say that my experience, skills or business-savvy have drastically changed since the application from 6 months ago.
As there's (understandably) no feedback for previous rejections (e.g. "Your idea sucks" vs "Your founders suck"), it's difficult to tell whether it's a waste of time to apply again. (Having said all that, we will of course be applying again anyway!)
We've funded people we previously rejected at both stages. I don't think we interviewed Drew the first time. I believe we interviewed the PagerDuties 3 times out of the 4 they applied.
I was under the impression that for YC the the idea was less important than the team.
How did the teams change between rejection and acceptance?
Was a different idea enough to consider them in a different light or is the interview process just sufficiently noisy that they were false negatives earlier?
If the application is assessed primarily on the founders, is it really worth failed applicants applying again? Speaking as someone who has applied (and failed, with cause!) twice relatively recently, and as an experienced 14 year 'veteran' of web technology, I can't say that my experience, skills or business-savvy have drastically changed since the application from 6 months ago.
As there's (understandably) no feedback for previous rejections (e.g. "Your idea sucks" vs "Your founders suck"), it's difficult to tell whether it's a waste of time to apply again. (Having said all that, we will of course be applying again anyway!)