As the YC deadline is approaching, and we all try to reread and reedit our applications, I have a suggestion for optimizing the process. Why don’t at least some of us swap applications for review? In Catan/monopoly you are always better off if you trade with others – you both gain about equally but that draws you in front of the others. Why don’t we trade some knowledge and points of view?
Partners may not like that because it is essentially hacking the process by managing to present it better than it maybe looks, but a big part of this is to make it more concise, clear, and understandable – and they should love that, given PG’s post.
As a matter of fact, I think this should be a good general practice for every application window – this will raise the level of applications significantly and will make YC’s job easier and more accurate.
Maybe I am missing the drawbacks? I would love to hear about those, especially from partners.
So, if you are feeling a little stuck and you want to get an extra edge, give me a shoutout. I will read your application and give you brutally discouraging feedback based on my years of experience if you do the same for me. I am willing to do 5 at random (random will mitigate chances for exploitation) over the next 2 days for an experiment. Drop your YC username, and I will send you an email and we will kick it off from there. I will update the post when I am done with the 5 but everyone else can keep interacting with each other the same way. As much as they are willing. When you are done, just write DONE next to your post with the username (if we just delete our posts, we won’t see how much of a meaningful concept that is for the future).
GLHF.