Acknowledging that it “grew too fast,” Y Combinator chief Paul Graham says the high-profile startup factory is cutting the number of startups it accepts into its classes from a current 84 to “less than 50″ for the winter 2013 class.
Graham wrote a blog post about the changes, saying it was never his intention to put a cap on the number of startups in his program. “The reason we accepted fewer applications was that in summer 2012 we grew too fast,” he writes. “We had 66 companies in winter 2012, and that was fine, but for some reason more things than usual broke when we jumped from 66 to 84.”
It’s not clear what exactly broke, but it’s not hard to guess. Y Combinator has had an elite status in Silicon Valley, churning out startups under the watchful and experienced eyes of investors Graham, Paul Buchheit, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston. But when there are 84 companies in one YC class, you have wonder how many are really the best of the best. YC’s Summer 2012 demo day was packed to the rafters with press, entrepreneurs, and investors. And while the event drew crowds, it seemed to lack the same level of excitement and innovation of past classes.
There are also the logistical problems with a class of 84 startups, most of which have at least teams of two. One of Y Combinator’s biggest perks is the office hours with each partner where you can get advice on everything about your startup. Then there are the family startup dinners where startup teams are encouraged to chat about their challenges. How exactly do you give 84 startups the time they need to chat with veterans in the startup community, let alone fit them around one table for dinner? Apparently you can’t.
That’s not to say there aren’t great companies that graduated from YC’s biggest class. One of them, BufferBox, was just acquired by Google, and one of the few hardware startups in the class, Double Robotics, is gaining popularity for its sleek iPad telepresence devices.
In order to keep the numbers down, Y Combinator has to be much more picky, Graham writes. The team took a hard look at the failures of the startups it has funded, and the way it vets and accepts startups. (For example, the team was more tolerant of bad companies after eating lunch.) This time around, Graham says it has applied what it has learned to keep the numbers down, and is shooting for more Airbnbs and Dropboxes, both YC graduates, and fewer duds. We’ll see if that is true at at the next demo day in the spring.
It Just Got a Lot Harder to Get Into Y Combinator
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It Just Got a Lot Harder to Get Into Y Combinator
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It Just Got a Lot Harder to Get Into Y Combinator
