Who got rejected in earlier cycles of YC application and made it anyway?
pg: We've definitely missed good startups.  But one advantage of having so many competitors is that we're much more likely now to learn when we screw up.  When a startup from one of the other YC-like organizations does well, I often check their YC application to see how we missed them.  Usually it's because they were good guys but working on a terrible idea, which they later changed.  So in response to that we now make a conscious effort to pay less attention to the idea and more to the people when we read applications.