Comment by lurker19
15 years ago
Your comment made me look at YC as an extended extremely thorough onsite interview, and it really clicked. But then I remembered that YC companies pitch demo day to a bunch of relative strangers-to-the-teams, not the YC investors themselves. Or do Demo Day investors get quality time with the teams during the season?
Of course YC is overall a mix of interview and internship and summer camp and summer classes and more. The above is an attempt to think through one of the threads.
The angels get one extraordinarily significant bit about all presenters prior to the Demo Day presentation: they were in YC. That is a very significant bit relative to another similarly situated twenty-something which a gleam in their eye and prototype on their MacBook.
It used to be implicit that some angels were saying "If you're good enough to be in YC, you're good enough to get investment from me." That is now 100% explicit for at least one deal. The vetting is getting outsourced, streamlined, and productized.