By most standards, getting into YC represents a success: the admission rate is less than 1%, it invests a significant amount of capital often pre-revenue, and you become a member of an exclusive group that includes the founders of Airbnb, Dropbox, and DoorDash. For the analysis, I used an LLM to embed the companies' value propositions in a vector space, ran a clustering algorithm on top of the embeddings, manually analyzed the results, and used ChatGPT to edit the draft. The conclusions are surp...