Question for Paul: if you believe that more people will startup in the future, but success requires lots of hands-on help, coaching, etc, surely you need a way to scale YCombinator, right? How?
We often think about that. We could hire assistants, so we didn't have to do everything ourselves. Or we could make YC work more peer-to-peer. Or we could build a robot that would walk around telling everyone "don't make users register," "delete half the text on your frontpage," "face the audience when you're presenting," etc, and I could just hang out in the next room with a book and a cup of tea.
However, I noticed that YC did not ask for my email address, so it was not a painful way of registering. Also, you can read the news without an account.
I think a sat program would be great. You could have local incubators that take proposals, pick the teams, and fund them but that also 'plug into' yCombinator for connections and such. That would allow the system to scale and allow people who can't move right away the chance to get started and make the right connections.
It's exactly the "connections" part that doesn't scale. Paul can mention 4 startups on his page, and hint two other apps he uses, but if he would list 20, probably no-one would check them.
