Sharing my personal experience here, as I found this thread interesting. To be clear: this anecdote isn't intended to argue with the statistics mentioned in sibling comments, or that YC doesn't fund outsiders, nor do I claim to be 'an outsider' in the first place. In any case I believe YC should fund or not fund whomever they want. But I hope it shows how some of these feelings can arise.

For context: white man from Brazil, top Brazilian uni but no brand-name US MBA or MS, Bain + Private Equity, first applied to YC with a startup in my late 20s when I left PE in late 2015. Since then have applied perhaps half a dozen times, sometimes with something that was still on paper, sometimes with things I was working on with a team and were already advanced. Some theses more enterprise-y (e.g. corporate education benefit platform), some pure consumer fun (e.g. stickers), some 'you must be joking' (e.g. let's redesign the web). My cofounders are brilliant in their domains but often don't speak great English, and they have small shares in the company as they need to take salaries, while I don't and I do the initial funding, so either I show up as a sole founder, or I have them on the video subtitled which ends up a bit weird.

About 2 years ago, our startup (which we had applied with to YC a couple of times before) reached US$6M ARR. Until then we had bootstrapped it, but decided it now made sense to go for VC. At that size we spoke directly to VC firms, of course, but given that we were all the way over here in Brazil, and Brazilian VCs by and large focus on local theses (at least in the early stage) rather than global ones, I also thought that it would make sense to talk to YC, as even though the dilution would be painful, that would multiply our global VC network in one go and thereby perhaps pay for itself. One catalyst for that was when a VC from a top-10 US firm reached out to us, but ultimately said "Look, if you were in the US, we'd be able to fund you Series A no sweat, but in Latam we only go in once things are at Series C". So I led our presentation video for YC with "Hi! We're X. We have US$6M ARR" making a 6 with my fingers. I realize of course that that per se doesn't make a company attractive, but I thought that at least it would buy us an interview. Nope.

Although it may come across as arrogant to do so, I do think that was a clear-cut investing mistake of omission, simply because our actual ex-post performance would have compensated YC very well had they invested, even without factoring in any value-add.

I later found out YC in that batch backed a tiny startup in the same field which (to the best of my knowledge) had struggled in consumer (competing directly against us), had little-to-no-revenue and was now trying to go for a B2B approach (which we had analyzed but dismissed as unattractive). Really made me rethink whether it was a good idea to put lots of our sexy stats in the application; not that I am saying YC used them - but it drove home how they could have.

We applied with a new unrelated thing once after that, even though we didn't need the money, mostly because we think it would be an interesting personal experience, and a good investment for the long-term to build that network. But frankly the program now being remote also puts a bit of a question mark there - it's a mixed blessing.

Anyway, we've done well enough, and one thing I'm considering is setting up a small angel fund just focused on founders in emerging markets (esp. Latam, esp. Brazil) whose products are global from the start, like ours, as I do feel that still falls in-between the cracks. But I'm busy with our company so don't have much time for that yet.

I hope this was helpful without coming across as too whiny or salty!

I realize that these funnel processes with vast amounts of applications are needle-in-the-haystack hell. I experience it when we open up a job post and get just 200 applications 180 of which aren't a great fit, let alone the thousands YC gets. Perhaps with some of these demographics, YC faces, to a small degree, a problem analogous to iBuying (e.g. as discussed by Rich Barton when Zillow quit that market), where the selectiveness by definition means that the majority of applications are rejected, thus contradicting the 'fast & easy' value-proposition and thereby generating negative sentiment among those rejected, no matter how generous the offer to those accepted or how representative the sample of those accepted.