Y Combinator will limit the number of early stage startups in its Winter 2013 class.
In its last batch, the accelerator produced more than 80 companies.
YC founder Paul Graham writes on the accelerator's blog that in Summer 2012, YC simply grew too fast and "more things than usual broke" when it increased the number of startups from 66 to 84.
When selecting YC's upcoming Winter batch, Graham says they were much more selective and paid closer attention to what some of the predictors to failure are.
This news comes just a few days after Y Combinator founder Paul Graham announced that the accelerator would cut down investments in each company by half. Under the new fund, YC VC, YC will only invest $80,000 in each startup instead of $150,000.
"We're decreasing the amount invested because experience showed $150k was too much," Graham wrote last week.
"It's good for startups to get some amount of investment automatically; it lets them continue working on ideas that still look like ugly ducklings on Demo Day. But $150k was more than the successful startups needed, and it sometimes caused messy disputes in the unsuccessful ones."
Many people in the tech industry have blamed the "Series A" crunch on YC for producing too many startups with too high of valuations.
