I think the great thing about this is that it's scalable. It's purely a community driven effort - you host dinners at your own location, collaborate with other teams, get mentors. The benefit of nReduce isn't it's selection, like YC, it's the community. So, if this grew to thousands, that would be great, making everyone better off and more successful.
I'd like to think that local communities will have at least somewhat of a filter for ignoring people who don't consistently make progress from week to week.
Unfortunately it's kind of hard to kick someone out of a meeting when everyone is just a member and on equal footing.
I've been in so many meetup groups which started off with really smart hard working people that have been slowly run down by tire kickers and dreamers coming along each week but never actually making any progress on their company.
EDIT: Ah just noticed in the FAQ that they kick teams out who don't ship, awesome, good to see them keeping the quality high.
I get your point and you're so right a larger community could only benefit N-Reduce.
In my opinion if a few gems make it large from the program then the crowds will flock to be part of the program, misinterpreting it as a get rich scheme.
However, I'm sure this could be easily solved and is a scaling issue N-Reduce will be happy to have. :)
