Well, our group received a rejection from Paul Graham's Summer Founders Program today. For those of you who don't know, his new company is offering to host 6-10 startups in Cambridge this summer, take care of all the paperwork, and pay each member $6,000–$10,000 for the summer. The reply is reminiscent of your standard college rejection letter (albeit more humble):

We're sorry to say that we can't accept your proposal for the Summer Founders Program. We were surprised by the high quality of the applications, and wanted to accept more. But since this is the first year, we decided we'd better force ourselves to keep the program small enough to manage.

A lot of the proposals we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants. For example, we were very reluctant to accept any proposals with only one founder, or only one who could come to Cambridge, because we think starting a startup is too much work for one person. We also rejected a lot of proposals simply because we didn't understand the problem domain well enough to judge them, or because the project seemed too big to start on only three months of funding.

It's quite likely, in fact, practically certain, that groups we rejected will go on to create successful startups. If you do, we'd appreciate it if you'd send us an email making fun of us; we want to learn from our mistakes.

If this summer works out, we're probably going to fund more startups. (Check our site for announcements.) If we do, we encourage you to re-apply in the future.

Thanks

Y Combinator

The reply came about a week earlier than expected — I wonder if that means we were ruled out early, or if they're just fast?

Anyway, this means I'll be spending another summer in Cleveland, which is good news to Patty, but I was kinda disappointed. Despite all of our team members being younger than what Mr. Graham considers ideal, our application was packed with cool project experience. I'll talk more about that in future posts, in my crusade to make our Computer Science department less homework- and exam-based and more project-oriented — just wait till you see how my would-be startup members from another school stack up against our equivalent Case CS major, especially keeping in mind that we are essentially competing against one another in the job market.

As for what I'll be doing for cash in the approaching months instead of this or my normal routine, that's for another post.

Edit: As if my day weren't ruined already, they gave me barbecue sauce for my chicken nuggets at Wendy's instead of sweet & sour! I hate barbecue sauce!