> If not, YCombinator picks the winners pretty well.
Impossible to say without knowing what the selectees would've done on their own. A lot of the winners might have opted to stay in college, for example, if they hadn't been picked. Simply being selected is automatically going to influence the result -- having all that support behind you makes it more likely that you'll succeed.
There's a certain amount of being made, not born, so to speak; you might think of it as being a bit like the Spice Girls.
My idea for YC was a very large project... one of the many reasons we were rejected was that I didn't agree with PG during the interview as far as making a smaller subset of the idea. I of course recognize his point as valid but we really didn't have time to talk about it.
We didn't get in, everyone stayed in college, and no one devoted themselves to the project in the way that YC hackers do.
Impossible to say without knowing what the selectees would've done on their own. A lot of the winners might have opted to stay in college, for example, if they hadn't been picked. Simply being selected is automatically going to influence the result -- having all that support behind you makes it more likely that you'll succeed.
There's a certain amount of being made, not born, so to speak; you might think of it as being a bit like the Spice Girls.