Why Do Two Y Combinator Years Beat Twenty in Venture?

Two or three years of YC time as a partner is equivalent to 20 years in venture. The 15 partners are practitioners of product market fit. Tom Blomfield created Monzo, worth billions of dollars and one of the top fintech companies in the world. People on the team have sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

The reps are why the organization learns. A partner reads a thousand to two thousand applications every single year and writes 50 seed checks in a given year, sometimes 75. Pulling out the billion dollar idea for founders is hit or miss and requires inspiration. Paul Graham and Vinod Khosla are the standard, and all of the YC partners are in the top two to five percent in the world at it. The reps also stop a founder from blowing up on 10,000 landmines: co-founder conflict, taking money from the wrong investor, and single channel concentration. The partners have seen everything, so they never freak out. Good investors are soft advisors. They can point to three people who have done it before and send the founder to the person where it happened. It takes a village.

Whoever is in the batch is the top 1% of what is going on. Put in a room, the founders create a community of default trust. One out of the 15 stays for the life of the company and beyond, there to fund the founders.