"we got a record number, up 40% from the same cycle a year before."
I agreed with much of this article, but not that line. A lot more people have heard of YCombinator since a year ago, so all else equal, you'd expect applications to rise over that period. So comparing the number of apps with the corresponding value from a year ago isn't a fair comparison.
Indeed, looking at http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ycombinator.com/?metric=uv we see that the number of unique visitors to ycombinator.com is up 3x from a year ago. But applications are only up 40%. To be fair, we probably can't expect applications to grow 3x since many of those visitors are international, or otherwise unlikely to apply to YC. But to make the statement pg wants to make, I think we need a better metric than raw growth in applications.
Perhaps I should have added that 40% was more than applications usually go up year to year.
I'm pretty sure, based on conversations with founders, that this spike in applications wasn't due to people learning of our existence for the first time. Most people we interviewed seemed to have known about us for a while.
I don't think application numbers are much correlated with News.YC traffic either. I think most people who come here are just looking for what people found at Reddit 3 years ago.
Wasn't it also the first cycle where "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" came into play? That seems like a giant roadmap for anyone who may have heard about YC and never seriously considered it before.
I guess the test is: Were the pitches clustering more around those ideas?
I realized that might be a difficult question to answer.
One more test I can think of: If, as expected, the recession is still bottoming at the Spring deadline then the numbers (gross or percent change) should be comparable if that craziness is driving folks, in swarms it seems, to the founder path. However, if it was "Startup Ideas...", then, as a singular event, the growth should be closer to a normal rate if not an overall decline in gross from the Winter.
"I'm pretty sure ... that this spike in applications wasn't due to people learning of our existence for the first time."
Maybe the spike wasn't, but my application was. I never heard of YC until three days before the deadline. It's a coincidence that I was already working on a new app so I had a reason to apply.
While mid-October was well after the "crash" there would have been no impact on founder's and their dreams. The types of founders that YC encourages are recent college grads who have not learned anything about economic cycles. They do not look at what is happening to housing, the stock market, the bond market, and decide to hunker down and get a job or go on to grad school.
Drawing conclusions from a single data point, proposals received in October, is as faulty as deciding the world is careening into climatic disaster based on drops in temperature measured in fractions of a degree C over the last few years.
"Maybe things will be different a year from now, if the economy continues to get worse, but so far there is zero slackening of interest among potential founders."
The interviewees might be a biased sample of applicants, though. I guess you could get some insight into that by looking at data on the age distribution of the the accounts that applied, and comparing that to previous cycles. But I suppose you have better things to do :)
I agreed with much of this article, but not that line. A lot more people have heard of YCombinator since a year ago, so all else equal, you'd expect applications to rise over that period. So comparing the number of apps with the corresponding value from a year ago isn't a fair comparison.
Indeed, looking at http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ycombinator.com/?metric=uv we see that the number of unique visitors to ycombinator.com is up 3x from a year ago. But applications are only up 40%. To be fair, we probably can't expect applications to grow 3x since many of those visitors are international, or otherwise unlikely to apply to YC. But to make the statement pg wants to make, I think we need a better metric than raw growth in applications.