How to get into Y Combinator

Do you have a system that would allow you to detect and prevent patterns analogous to "justice is what the judge ate for breakfast" (more formally known as "legal realism")?

See for example:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/1...

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889

I like the analogy that Paul used re a grad math class. In our masters program, In some ways, a start-up is remarkably more difficult than any structured class. It is not a co-incidence that many of the most successful start-ups ( i.e. Google / Facebook et.al. ) started as projects.

Investors like to think about markets and path to revenue. But to build stuff , you'd need to love the problem itself and care deeply about what you're building. Because at many points in the ride, the financial or commercial end will not be in sight.

Another correct question perhaps is " How to pick an addictive problem ? "

A group that some of us love :

http://groups.google.com/group/gremlin-users

One of the stacks Gremlin works atop is neo4j which raised an excess of 10M recently.. again I would have to warrant that the game is to pick a difficult problem , preferably few years ahead before it becomes " hot ".

Here's a powerful section from a beautiful film:

" He does, an assignment to refurbish the Sistine Chapel for him. But after an attempt at some saints, he leaves Rome, and flees to his beloved Carrara. There, surrounded by mountains, he has a vision at sunset and suddenly knows what he must do. Obtaining Julius's reluctant permission, he sets to work covering that modest ceiling with tremendous figures, a bearded Jehovah, a recumbent Adam touched to life by a divine spark, the world's most famous fresco painted from a homemade scaffolding; in spite of illness, missed meals, filth, deprivation, cold, an injury that nearly costs him his eye and more, including the Pope's indifference to his intense passion for his art, Michelangelo endures. "When will you make an end?" Julius cries. "When I have done," the artist insists. "[1]

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058886/reviews

That's actually a great question. I've thought of YC as more of the Ivy League experience. Exclusive. Great brand. (No disrespect intended). And, I think that (unintentionally?) pg and the YC partners have modeled a lot of YC around an Ivy League model.

The question that I'm interested in with Hackers & Founders, is how do we teach thousands of engineers how to build great products, and once doing that, how to you help them build great startups, and then how to you help those founders turn around and be serial entrepreneurs.

Tons of VC's that I talk to tend to turn up their nose at our community, and proceed to tell me, "Send me your Rock Stars".

My question to them, is... "Where do rock star entrepreneurs come from? Do they descend from heaven on a cloud like Mark Zuckerberg? Or, do they try a bunch of things, fail a lot, and then slowly become rock stars?"

I've had beer with 5 out of BusinessWeek's "Top 20 entrepreneurs under 30" two or three years ago. Did I know they were rock stars then? Nope. No clue.

I'm really interested in having H&F, and all the grass roots startup communities that we partner with around the globe be a support system to failing entrepreneurs. If entrepreneurs fail enough for long enough, they generally improve their entrepreneurial skills with each startup they create. Eventually, they become rock stars. YMMV

Do you mean, would it ever be an advantage to? I can't think of a case where it would.