My understanding of YC is that applying with more than an idea was pretty much necessary to actually validate the idea. Having an actual live product, with some semblance of customers and/or revenue, made for a much stronger application and a much stronger pitch in general. I imagined that a lot of startups that were accepted into YC effectively got feedback along the lines of, "this is a cute app with some impressive technology and it seems like some people like it, so why don't you pivot to this concept that has a much stronger change of scaling," or something along those lines.

So if these applicants don't have an idea, then are they expected to not have any sort of work on a product? And if so, doesn't that make it a lot harder to evaluate their body of work and quality of their team?