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Why Does Surviving Rejection Mark a Y Combinator Founder?

Garry Tan says 99% of people who apply to Y Combinator end up getting a mortal ego wound by being rejected. The rejections keep him up at night because the wound is not a good thing. Something like a third of the batch, and sometimes half of the batch, will have been rejected before getting in. The number has been going up. People quite commonly apply two to four times before they get in.

Y Combinator is always worried about over-rotating. Being too small can be bad, and being too big can be bad. Garry Tan says there are way more really capable founders being rejected right now. Y Combinator should not ask people to be rejected time after time. A founder who survives the mortal ego wound once, twice, or three times is made to be a founder. A person who cannot be rejected even once, and then hates Y Combinator, should try a different profession. Being a founder requires an absolutely insane amount of resilience, and one rejection comes with a thousand more in every possible way.

A really great founder says they got the decision wrong, then works to prove them right and to prove himself right. Proving them right is what Y Combinator loves. Garry Tan particularly loves funding founders when Y Combinator might have gotten the decision wrong.

Grokipedia·Garry Tan

Transcript

Garry Tan on the Past, Present, and Future of YC ·

The Peel with Turner Novak

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