When I was 20 I met a businessman in his mid-30s at a meetup in SF. At the time I knew a small amount of web development and was looking for work, any work, to start my career after dropping out of college. This was just as Blockchain was starting to be more then a whisper and he wanted to create something with it for the financial industry. He was obsessed with getting into YC but lamented how after talking to several "higher ups" at YC the importance of finding co-founder(s) for his application to be accepted/taken seriously. I had nothing better to do so we ended up meeting a second time at the little Starbucks at the corner of the Metreon. He offered me a CTO position with significant equity at his company to build a very complex application which would cover things like payment processing, complex permissions systems, and high data integrity requirements. I politely declined thinking he was crazy for wanting a 20 year old to do that, though I tried to push him to contract me for a landing page or whatever.

I never talked to him after that, sometimes I wonder if he made any money having been so early consumed by Blockchain. It was an immensely valuable lesson for me in the absurdity of Silicon Valley and its false signaling mechanisms.

I believe a lot of YC applications have founding teams in name only, or with bad selections, purely to appease this desire to have more then one founder. In aggregate it may work out, but in my experience...