My guess is the companies that have been through other accelerators have improved polish that makes it harder for YC to pick the truely better companies.
The more cynical view would be founders going through multiple accelerators are more focused on appearance and "playing the startup game" than actually building a real business.
Cargo culting seems very prevalent in the current startup culture -- especially in those that are "playing startup".
These founders see all of these external things that startups do and assume they must be necessary for success -- or that they will at least will help cover up any problems they have.
Unfortunately this is just like carving wood into the shape of a radio and expecting it to work. It might look the same but it has none of the things that make it a radio. You can even attach a real antenna to it, but it is still just a block of wood.
Actually I think cargo cult thinking is more of a problem at the accelerator/angel/VC level than at the startup level. We have all these funders copying the YC model and relatively few trying to do things differently. We need much more diversity in funding and acceleration models. All roads might lead to rome, but we don’t all need to travel there on the same bus.
> The more cynical view would be founders going through multiple accelerators are more focused on appearance and "playing the startup game" than actually building a real business.
Yes, these people could exist, and there are legitimate reasons for doing multiple accelerators as well.
The end goal for a very early stage startup accelerator or incubator can be a lot different than a later stage accelerator.
Different accelerators for different specific purposes at different stages in the lifecycle of the company.
The more cynical view would be founders going through multiple accelerators are more focused on appearance and "playing the startup game" than actually building a real business.