I have to partly disagree with him there.My schools included MIT and Brown. And I generally really liked the students at both. And I would hire many of them.But I&#x27;ve also hung out in other circles that attract smart people, where I&#x27;d selectively hire first, before prioritizing random people from the fancy-pants schools.And I&#x27;ve worked too many places where some of the smartest and most accomplished people came from BFE schools.Also, note that undergrad programs have gotten insane with the gaming and the hoop-jumping. Even worse than when it was helicopter parents merely sending kids to prep schools, SAT prep, and the checkoff extracurriculars (e.g., &quot;volunteering&quot;). And that insanity can select for what you don&#x27;t want to hire, to do actual work.If you want &quot;How to Start Google [where everyone focuses on the entrance exam, and then on gaming their promotions]&quot; then you absolutely should hire Stanford students, who had to exercise very similar thinking to get into Stanford at this point.Or, if you want to run a startup investment scam, where you need to apply some similar thinking of the appearance of accomplishments, and knocking down ducks lined up for you.But if you want to solve problems, or build something that&#x27;s not just headed for a financial exit, then Stanford-track kind of thinking seems probably counterproductive.Imagine getting a new hire at an early startup, and they innately think that their job is to knock off sprint tasks, and have other appearances of performance.And when you try to explain thinking about the organization&#x27;s goals, and that their job is to help the team collectively achieve that... they think you&#x27;re just spewing empty platitudes, like they were taught to spew for college application personal statements and job interviews.You would&#x27;ve been so much better off hiring the scrappy person from the community college who hasn&#x27;t had Stanford-track BS baked into them since grade school.

A recent PG essay[0] was revealing about why colleges are so prominent on those profiles and more generally about YC&#x27;s thinking:&gt; At this point I&#x27;m going to tell you something you might not want to hear. It really matters to do well in your classes, even the ones that are just memorization or blathering about literature, because you need to do well in your classes to get into a good university. And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that&#x27;s where the best cofounders are. It&#x27;s also where the best employees are.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;google.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;google.html</a>

Why is Birthdate a required field on the User Profile required for YC founder-matching?(Gender is optional.)Also, once you get past that User Profile, to the founder-matching Profile, the very top of the first form says &quot;Your profile will get much more attention if you add a picture.&quot; Why implicitly endorse that, which has undesirable historic baggage of prejudice and unfairness?In hindsight, I realize that the prominence of schools on the profiles (and the text field using the example of Stanford) didn&#x27;t jump out at me, maybe because it&#x27;s common on a US resume (unlike gender, birthdate, or photo).Maybe other people will have additional &quot;what?&quot; reactions to other things in the forms.Edit: On the matching profile form, it won&#x27;t let you submit the form and proceed until you add a photo. (&quot;Please fix the errors below before continuing.&quot;) I was able to get past that by uploading a blank image, but I&#x27;m not going to proceed further if it seems like current YC thinking isn&#x27;t a match for me.

How do you know ChatGPT explained it to you correctly? How do you know it didn&#x27;t give you a wrong explanation that sounds plausible to a lay person?

I recently received a 2 page written report of an MRI. I couldn’t understand a single word of it. While waiting a few weeks for my appointment at the next specialist I used ChatGPT to explain it and I found it to be very helpful in understanding what was going on. I felt it did a better job in explaining in lay terms than the specialist doctors did (radiologists, orthopedic surgeons, rheumatologists).

The difficulty partially lies in that there are numerous different &quot;flavors&quot; of medicine in any given specialty. Coupled with the vast amount of medical knowledge that is known in part or simply hypothesized given current evidence, you are going to run up against doctors disagreeing on how the summary selects what information can be typically left out.Even for myself, there is individual variation case to case what I would want to see. Sometimes it depends on things that aren&#x27;t measurable. If my brain is exhausted after a long week, or if I couldn&#x27;t sleep on Wednesday, I may conduct rounds a bit differently than if I am fresh. An LLM that isn&#x27;t responsive in the same way can be problematic.

Something to keep in mind with every AI startup is that they’re trying to skate to where the puck will be in a year or two. You could still be right, but it’s worth considering what happens to any particular use case if the model gets 2 or 3x smarter.

Yup I actually worked on this problem and we abandoned it because the downside of missing important patient information was too risky

&gt;Given my experience with LLMs I am skeptical that enough prompt engineering and tuning can adequately summarize patient records.What sort of experience do you have though? I&#x27;d say anyone familiar with the use of AI specifically as it related to medical records would probably disagree with you.

I’ve likewise investigated this space, or an adjacent problem. TLDR: you can get good results with very high probability.However, medicine and law are not areas where “probably” even at a 95% level is going to cut it. You need 100%.(Sure a person makes mistakes as well, but we understand that and have systems in place to catch and correct. Whereas people are just tossing out LLM chatbots that are basically black box).It’s very similar to self driving cars, getting to 95% isn’t too hard now, but that last 5% to not accidentally kill a few people here and there is WAY WAY WAY harder.

Given my experience with LLMs I am skeptical that enough prompt engineering and tuning can adequately summarize patient records. I don&#x27;t expect an LLM to adequately interpret data in a way that is useful to me. While much is missed on skimming records, an AI summary sounds like a false sense of security.

Hey this worked for me this month actually.I looked through about 800 profiles and did end up finding a co-founder after a couple of months.800 profiles, 10 matches, 5 zoom calls, 1 accept.I created a compelling and clear profile and my approach was to be as open an honest as possible about what I&#x27;m looking for. As the technical founder I offered 50&#x2F;50 split as advised by YC.I stand by my choice and I know that I trust my co-founder 100% and I&#x27;m looking forward to the earth shattering product we will launch together in August.

This actually does shift my view on founder-matching a little, in the positive direction.I wonder if it&#x27;s best to march into it like someone in a new city starting to date. I would guess that it&#x27;s mostly a numbers game: apply to a lot of people you&#x27;d be compatible with, wait for their responses to winnow it down, then get serious about the handful that are left.

to be fair, they consider traction over all other credentials

&gt; Your idea doesn’t matter at all, it’s just personality and some credentials.One of YC&#x27;s overriding beliefs is that yes, your idea doesn&#x27;t matter at all.

So far about 30 startups were founded over the matching service out of how many who got into a batch over the years? We’re talking probably about less than one percent. The service puts also a prominent emphasis on formal credentials like which university you graduated from. Your idea doesn’t matter at all, it’s just personality and some credentials.

I find the cofounder matching to be.... fine, but as noted elsewhere in these comments don&#x27;t like the focus on age, photo, etc.

&gt; When I tried it last it was like flipping through the crazies.In what way?

That&#x27;s great they found their match. When I tried it last it was like flipping through the crazies.

YC’s founder-matching service helped medical records AI startup Hona