Why We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews

Many groups that don't receive interview invitations want to know why. It's a reasonable question—if something is wrong with your project, you want to understand it.

The straightforward answer is that there often is no specific reason. The median application is usually quite good. Rejection typically doesn't mean your project seems particularly bad; it means there are enough other applications that seem particularly good.

How We Evaluate Applications

People often expect feedback about rejection because they think of applying like taking a test and receiving a grade. But this process isn't graded that way. Only a fixed number of applicants can move forward regardless of the average quality of applications.

There are physical limits on how many teams a YC Partner can reasonably work with during a batch. We interview as many great teams as needed to fill that capacity, then generally stop—no matter how many good applications remain. From that cutoff point down to about the halfway mark, applications are quite good. Teams in this range didn't get invited not because something was specifically wrong with them, but because other applicants were particularly stellar and pushed them below the threshold.

Why We Can't Provide Rejection Feedback

We can't respond to emails asking why teams were rejected because, in many cases, there literally is no answer to give. Making one up would mean lying in many instances—and the better the group, the more likely we'd be lying.

For roughly the top third of applicants who don't get invited, the reason isn't found in their application itself. Instead, it's distributed across the top few applications that happened to push them down below the cutoff.