Rtm and Trevor and I each read them online independently and vote on them. Then they're ranked in order of their total score (normalized because Rtm always gives low grades). Then we meet to argue about borderline cases. At the end of that meeting we have a clearly defined set of 50-60 groups we want to interview.
I went back and looked at the applications for the current cycle, and roughly half the groups we invited to interviews tied for the highest grade from Rtm. Which was a B+.
Do you think you could make this data public, maybe starting off with startups that didn't make it, including YC's comments when they were evaluated during the interview?
I am sure there is a lot of great info in there that would help other startups. It would be like using etherpad for writing essays :-), we could peek into YC's thought process.
