Anti-Application video for YC120

If YC's goal here is to try and bring together great (or potentially great) individuals, that's fine, but perhaps there are better approaches.[0] Perhaps it's a bad approach having the second and third questions as they are when they're going to filter out great people like Bryan. The second question's qualifier for "life circumstances" is such a cop-out too... Yes it's "great" if you came up from nothing and somehow managed to go to college and get a nice well-paying stable job, surpassing the achievements of at least your ancestors in living memory, but that isn't actually greatness.

On the other hand maybe the two bad questions are by design, Google interview style, trying to weed out false positives for whatever their goal is no matter the (potentially counterfactual) false negatives. It trivially filters me out correctly; I have no potential for greatness, and in the best case I don't plan on dying so there'd be no obituary.

[0] Might I suggest a method that would probably be more effective, at least for collecting potentially great scientists, Asimov's Sword. (http://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/1963-asimov) Target 10-to-15-year-olds already reading good sci-fi.

Edit: a reply highlighted some ambiguity in my usage of "like Bryan" but they deleted it before I replied back.. here's clearing it up anyway.

YC120's phrasing is a problem in filtering out literally Bryan from the 20 if they had plans to ask him, but I was more aiming to describe filtering out people like Bryan from the 100 based on having similar responses.

I knew a guy in high school with a good supply of "intelligence, drive and vision" who had started working with a local university team around something to do with MEMS fabrication. Let's assume YC120 if it was around then would have been interested to have him as part of the 100, and that it'd be useful to him to expand his network beyond that university or academia in general for the grand possibility of getting a group together in the future to do for MEMS what Fairchild Semiconductor did for semiconductors. That sort of vision is all pointless if he were to have a similar reaction to Bryan's or other commenters here, either due to the second question giving off vibes of joining a group of narcissists or the example interests on the page (gene editing, solving physics, etc.) pointing exclusively at a particular subset of SV's fashions. Either he'd filter himself or maybe the reactions are on to something and an earnest application would be filtered by YC for insufficient alignment on greatness potential or SV-compatible interests.

Definitely, and it should, otherwise it won't outlast the next (looming) market correction. And I don't mind YC trying a new tack; I mind that they still don't get it. Bryan is right. True innovators care only about the problem and their ideas. Few who are concerned about what their obit will say will ever do anything great.

You can fund innovation or you can make money off of previous innovation. Silicon Valley has been doing the latter for so long that it has forgotten that the former is even possible.

I mean, if you want to invent a flying car, if successful you'll be the inventor of the flying car, and your obituary will say so.

The question just seems like a roundabout way of asking "Tell us how your startup idea is going get huge and stay huge for ages"