Dang is basically saying what we all know: it is very difficult to predict future performance of people, and YC deliberately tries to avoid common traps like “where did you go to school?” I mean, they still ask, so they aren’t exactly all-in on avoiding noisy heuristics, but they have a history of finding founders who can perform at a level most would-be founders can’t.

Like the blub paradox, only past high performers can recognize future high performers. YC uses the “are you one of us?” heuristic, which isn’t perfect since many “high performers” are accidents of fortune, but it is (as of now) still the best way to identify high-impact people — be one yourself and talk to people.

It’s the same story with hiring, especially in sports drafting. Even with million-dollar budgets and years of game-film and intensive pre-draft workouts, sports teams are effectively guessing when they draft someone. Analytically, it would be better to trade down for more picks. Dang’s post is analogous to trading down, in the sense of letting people know that the net is wider than most of us think, precisely because high-performing founders don’t fit the same mold as high-performing non-founders.

Having said all that, I’d be very surprised if the people reading all the applications and conducting all the interviews were all true high-performers. Surely some proportion, if not a majority, would merely be excellent human beings that were fortunate enough to find success. In fact, perseverance and grit may not be as important to founders as we think. It may be that the trait of never giving up is just very effective at leveraging fortune — given enough time, something good is bound to happen. This feels like an algorithm-smell. What we really want are founders who don’t need fortune, not those who optimize for fortune.

PG is a good example. I only know what he’s told us, but it seems to me that his defining trait is not grit. After one obvious pivot, he worked hard, provided value to users, and exited. Now, anyone who works 18 hr days for years has grit. You can’t succeed at something without persevering at it. But that’s not what stands out about PG. Neither does his intellect. There’s plenty of brilliant people in the world. What stands out about him is his genius — a unique mental perspective that sees straight lines where others see jagged lines. He and his partners basically invented the web-app. Where others saw a broken road going nowhere, they saw a highway to immense value.

The problem with genius is that it is really hard to distinguish from delusion. Someone tells you the road is straight but you see nothing but curves — what is one to think? When the person telling you this obvious untruth is also brilliant, it makes it that much harder to discern genius from delusion. PG writes about this when talking about “black swans” — the best ideas are the ideas that seem wrong but are actually right.

To return to YC and applying, I think it is likely that the brilliant geniuses (like PG) have largely moved on to other things that seem of far more interest to them. Raising children, speaking from experience, definitely fits that bill. If true, then what remains of YC would be brilliant, persevering, but not necessarily genius. That still makes for a world-class accelerator, but one that would struggle at identifying the best founders.

I would propose a new heuristic: has the applicant ever accidentally discovered the truth of something already known to be true, but which the applicant was unaware of. Did they make a straight line out of a broken one, without knowing it had already been straightened by others.

Call this the “unknowingly reinventing the wheel” heuristic. When did the applicant accidentally reinvent the wheel? As stupidly black-swan as it sounds, I want founders who are not merely brilliant and persevering, but also genius enough to invent something as profoundly valuable as the wheel.

I bet there are plenty of people in this thread who have unknowingly reinvented the wheel, and would love to hear the stories!