I'd be shocked if the emails weren't all identical -- even if it only took five minutes to compose each email, that would be a week of work.
And after all, for 99% of applications there's really no need to say anything different. For the 1% where some extra explanation is useful, they can send separate emails later.
A waitlist would imply that people were basically good enough, whereas pg has always said that if they like a group, they'll take them - it's not as if there is a number of accepted groups that is set in stone.
Wow, fine, whatever. Then use your god damn imagination as to what the strata could be. My point is that they could have prepared more than one type of rejection e-mail.
That's the significant thing I'm adding to the discussion, so please respond to that, rather than trying to disprove some other minor point I'm not even trying to make.
If I sound like I'm pissed, it's because I am. This happens all the fucking time on HN, and the snarky replies are the ones that get upvoted.
Uh..ease up. He's pretty much just repeating their criteria verbatim, which are relevant regardless of what the strata names are. If they're prepared to fund 1,000 companies they think are _really_ likely to make it, I think that implies there's no need for strata. The only way 'close' would make sense is if there were a cap, otherwise I'm sure they'd still accept a not-quite-ready idea they really, really liked.
Thank you for explaining what his post said. And thank you again for then paraphrasing his post. And, a third thanks, for ignoring the main argument in my last post, and continuing to nullify the types of e-mails that I pulled out of my ass, specifically, the "close" e-mail.
And, yet, I'm still at a loss as to why it is unreasonable to think that there could be different generic e-mails sent out to different groups.
>>If they're prepared to fund 1,000 companies they think are _really_ likely to make it, I think that implies there's no need for strata.
Only if every company not accepted was rejected for precisely the same reason, and this reason could not at all be broken down at all. Do you think that is likely?
Perhaps somebody could list out all of the YC philosophies of acceptance, and every type of generic e-mail that wouldn't make sense to send; then we could use deduction to solve this mystery of no stratified rejection e-mails.
All I set out to do was test the hypothesis: Were there different rejection letters sent, because it seems pretty reasonable that there would be. Maybe some letters would contain feedback, albeit generic? After all, they need to make a conscientious decision to accept/deny, why not have a few reasons for denying? I even proposed a method to test out this hypothesis.
Thank you to everyone who did the MD5 to verify that there was only 1 type of e-mail sent. That's what I was looking for.
But when I get in return, and not just on this thread, are people talking about the YC acceptance process as if they are part of YC, or (in this case) paraphrasing the fucking rejection letter or YC application notes, I find that to be really annoying. I can read and understand things myself. It would be a disservice to myself if I didn't express that annoyance.
Thats the MD5 we got as well with the website. Oddly, when I did `echo "We're sorry … Y Combinator Staff" | md5`, I got a different sum (f807496243cc18b53929b313c410f64a).
//edit: The website seems to strip out blank lines, while echoing it doesn't. Solves that (trivially minor) issue I suppose.
Mine started with "We're sorry" and ended with "Y Combinator Staff" and has the following MD5: f459a7d636ac85cdcd680b135bcfc521
Edit: easy multi-line md5 here: http://www.webhost.org/widgets/md5encrypter