[Eiriksmal]

Even if you can't have personal connections with the founders of 80 companies in a batch, having hundreds of companies in each batch--twice a year!--is seriously diluting my own worked-for-a-YC-startup brand equity. "Oh, yeah, I met Jeremy at $EVENT" becomes a thing of the past when there are thousands of founders with tens of thousands of early-stage employees.

[_sentient]

I could see it going both ways. You're not going to know all YC founders by default, but you will know more founders than if the batches were small.

The individual network is larger, but comprises a smaller % of the total network as the program scales.