Welcome to YC Arena. Contrary to what the name might suggest, this isn’t a clandestine fight club for Y Combinator founders, but rather a collection of games designed to give you a glimpse into the experience of being a YC partner.
Developed by a student based in Berlin, the YC Partner Simulator in YC Arena presents you with a publicly available pitch video from a startup that once applied to YC, along with the year they applied. You choose to “accept” or “reject,” and then discover whether your decision matches YC’s actual choice.
Image Credits:YCArena
It’s much trickier than it appears. YC reportedly admits only about 1% of applicants, and sometimes, a bit of luck is needed to catch a partner’s attention — maybe your pitch is the first one they see after a refreshing coffee break, or perhaps it’s the last video of the day when everyone’s feeling fatigued.
A message at the beginning of the game states, “Many founders who were turned down later built hugely successful companies. Rejection doesn’t mean much — even the most accomplished founders have faced multiple rejections.”
YC Arena also features games where you match companies to their logos or guess the year a startup joined YC based on its description (spoiler: recent years feature a lot more AI). Still, the YC Partner Simulator stands out because it forces us to examine our own decision-making habits.
As someone who covers technology, I assumed I’d excel at the YC Partner Simulator. While I’m not an investor, I do know what it’s like to sort through countless startup pitches and decide which ones catch my interest — I’ve roamed the Startup Battlefield 200 Expo at TechCrunch Disrupt, tasked with picking companies to interview and write about. But this game is tough. The criteria are different, since a company’s newsworthiness doesn’t always align with its potential profitability.
(For instance: As I type this, there’s an AI-powered pet on my lap that I plan to review. Would I bet that Casio will profit from investing in a $430 high-tech Furby? Probably not. But do I think readers will enjoy an article about my experience with an AI pet? Absolutely.)
If anything, the game highlights just how subjective these evaluations can be. However, after reading YC co-founder Paul Graham’s application advice, my accuracy improved.
“You need to be extremely clear and to the point,” Graham advised. “Whatever you want to communicate, say it immediately in the simplest way possible.” (Incidentally, this is also great advice for pitching journalists.)
When I played again, I focused less on the specifics of the pitch and more on how quickly the founders could explain what their company does. Of course, I wouldn’t suggest using this approach to judge startups in real life (hot take: what a company does actually matters!), but for the game, it helped me make more accurate calls.
This likely isn’t just luck. When Sam Altman, now CEO of OpenAI, was YC’s president, he mentioned in an interview that the accelerator typically spent only 10 minutes reviewing each application before making a decision.
“In just 10 minutes, if the only thing you’re trying to figure out is, ‘Could this person be the next Mark Zuckerberg?’… you can make that call in 10 minutes,” Altman said in 2016. “Of course, it’s not 100 percent accurate, but it’s reliable enough for our business model.”

