One-Shotting YC

I’ve seen many examples online of people getting rejected from YC several times, like 3, 5 and 7 times! How hard can it be?

I think any team that exhibits all the following properties can one-shot YC and have a non-zero chance of building a generational company:

• Killer novel idea
  • I partly disagree with the dogma of “ideas are easy and execution is everything.” If ideas are so easy, where the hell are the good ideas?
  • So long as the ROI of building the 22nd vibe coding product beats an entry level job Google we should expect to see the pool of average ideas increase over time. I’m unsure what market forces could be used a counter-force to this. I’m not saying competition is bad but consumer fatigue is… fatiguing. We need less options, but with better quality. It’s basic economics: avoid diminishing marginal utility and choice overload.
  • A common sight at YC is talented engineers executing well on an average idea. If you track them closely enough, most never make any serious revenue without pivoting majorly into a very novel idea.
• Masterful execution
  • The founding team needs to be able to build a sufficiently powerful technology that it feels slightly scary; otherwise it’s likely not consequential. I’m not saying there’s no value in another SaaS dashboard. Look at Sphere and Atlassian. They don’t however, feel very consequential in the grand scheme of things. What would feel consequential is an OS or web browser that can render exactly what you want on demand without being built by a team of devs. An infinite GUI of sorts. It doesn’t feel like we’re very far from this.
  • What is the point of building something average? Something incrementally better than its predecessor? This just sounds like a waste of time considering the enormous amounts of dedication that goes into building a useful product and organizing capital and labor into the form of company. One could probably make more meaningful contributions to society working at a well capitalized large org rather than eviscerating LP money.
• Evidence of exceptional achievements
  • If you’re young (which most of the time nowadays everyone is, including myself) at least one or two examples of exceptional behavior. This should be obvious. Otherwise you’re essentially unemployed looking for a job.
• Clout
  • This is last for reason. Its lame but we live in a busy world where distribution is the difference between a perfect product no ones about and an average product everyone knows about. The answer here is obviously a perfect product AND everyone knows about it.

What more do you need?