Timipre Maxwell

I've read maybe ~10,000 YC applications. 8000 for YC admissions/PG quite a few years ago and anther 2000 informally as an alum. There's a new and growing mistake and I want to share why it's more important than you think. By the way - I try not to ever say YC admissions works this way or that way. That's YC's job and they're always changing things and making up their own minds. But I will share my impression and you can see what you think - YC partners, please chime in as well if you like. The YC application is fundamentally an evaluation of a founder's potential. And much less an evaluation of a specific business. (Airbedbreakfast transitioning into Airbnb because Brian, Nate, Joe never give up and never stop listening to their customers) So, in your writing of the application, YOU need to shine through. This batch, I read ~200 applications. I'm guessing over half were significantly written, edited, or polished with AI. That half was easily in the bottom half of my informal rankings, almost every time. To be clear, most were NOT AI slop. I often couldn't tell at first they had used AI. Founders were pouring their heart and soul into their app - so I what I received was high quality. But I think the AI really hurt them. Here's why: Once polished by AI, I as reader lost insight into the personality of the writer. I love the YC application because the questions are the same questions I would ask in office hours or casually to a friend that wanted help with their startup. It pushes the founder out of their pitchdeck/VC talk style into simple worded questions that can be answered simply as well. And great founders shine through when they just write like they talk. The LLM writing made answers feel more like a corporate cover letter, with the personality drained out. The AI-assisted drafts also gave me a sense of mid work. The writing itself seemed like zero standard deviations from the mean. The LLMs had lopped off the outlier portions of sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts. Given the YC App is an outlier detector, a writing tool that lops off outlier writing is the opposite of what you want. And the AI writing was needlessly verbose. Which hurts when a reliable predictor of great founders is that they're deep thinkers and deep thinking shines through in the density of their writing. So... I did an experiment. I asked a bunch of these seemingly AI-assisted app writers to talk with me live. I just asked them the same YC app questions and recorded their answers. I then gave them back the transcripts. Unedited and unpolished. And... OMG! A good number turned from easy no to actual good applications. Magic! Remove AI >> Improve application. This happened BOTH with native English speakers and founders abroad. So this is my recommendation to all of you. Don't let AI touch your application, even for a second. And maybe try the dictation approach with a friend. My apologies to the YC admissions team if you already knew AI-written applications were crap and you were using this insight to help you easily move applications to the No pile. YC's Winter Batch Application deadline is Nov 2nd.