I enjoy watching other people's startups, but have never applied at YC, because I assume I am outside of their accepted demographic. I'm in my early thirties. I'm a solo-entrepreneur (I would love to have a partner, but I don't know a single person with the interest and ambition to be part of anything - they just want to work until 5pm to pay the mortgage and then go home) and, mostly, because none of my ideas have ever demanded enormous quantities of funding to get off the ground. Spending $10k or $20k on an unsure thing would ding me, but I'm fortunate enough that I'm in a career where I could cut a check for that amount if I had enough faith in my own project and enough necessity for the funding.

Also, I appreciate what YC does and offers, but my personal philosophy is that a lot of ideas which seek out funding don't need it.

I started a transaction (user to user) based service in 1998 and my only expense was $10/mo for hosting. When I needed more resources, I moved it to a community shared server at a colo for $20/mo. And by its fourth year, I was paying $100/mo for a 1U rack rental at May West in SF with a dedicated pipe. The cost never went higher than that. The only additional expense was around that same time when I custom-built a 1U heavy duty server (running primarily qmail, apache, postgres) with hot-swapping and redundant PSUs and storage. That was a one-time $5,000 expense that lasted the rest of the project's life.

With no more cash investment than the above, I grew it over twelve years to more than 100,000 members and millions of transactions. It even had its own annual (or so) user-arranged gathering. People formed their own businesses through the service. I learned of many life-long friendships people made on it. I've even received thanks from people who were able to support themselves through tough times and -- some -- even put themselves through school.

And it was all funded out of my pocket. The real investment was my time (as the sole designer, developer, customer service person, marketer, etc -- I did everything from write the underlying engine to designing the interface, to mediating customer problems). So much so that, eventually, I had to quit last year, so I could have free time again to keep up with my actual career. And try to maybe have a life. And focus on my health, which deteriorated over a dozen years of 60-80hr work weeks plus 40-60hr weeks on this service.

I learned a lot from the experience. Mostly, I learned what not to do. Things I would advise others to be aware of. One of the primary things I learned, however, was that you can do a lot more with a lot less than people might think. That doesn't apply to everyone who might apply here, of course. But it applies to anything I have ever bounced around in my head. And I'm kind of stuck with this "if I can't do it on my own and make it support itself, then it's probably not worth my doing" mentality. I suppose that if I didn't have the technical knowledge, I'd have a different view since even the basic work would necessitate involving paying someone just to get things off the ground.

By the way, if I were to start this project in 2011, instead of 1998? It would probably cost far less and I would have had far fewer scalability problems (I never did any advertising, but as soon as people started hearing about the service, it quickly exploded and fell over a few times while I tried to keep up). Specifically, I would forgo the expensive hardware investment four years into the project and I would forgo the monthly shared servers and other standard hosting. I would go straight to a scalable cloud service (Amazon, Rackspace, etc).

Anyway, that's my far-too-long version of why I've never submitted anything to Y and why I probably won't at any time in the future -- but I'll always dig watching them help other guys with great ideas pursue things. With great envy at their successes, of course! :)

Edit: I completely spaced on the whole "value of advice/community/exerience" aspect of what YC offers, which of course is of great value itself. My comments above are related to the financing only.