I think a 10 to 20 year timeframe is even more interesting to think about.
Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#12Would YC ever go the Techstars route and make it a city by city 'franchise'?
Seems unlikely. They sold their Boston office location and if you were maintaining a geographically distinct second location, Boston would be where to do it.
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#13I'm thinking the single biggest change is that YC is going to land a Zynga or Groupon: a company whose meteoric rise to hundreds of millions in revenue and profit makes headlines, shakes industries, and will include "funded by YC" in every one of the numerous news pieces about it.
Who knows, it might have already happened, and we just don't know about it because they're still on the flat part of the hockey stick.
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#14Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#15I think the new funding deal by Milner and SV Angel may snowball into more angels and VCs offering blanket investments to all YC acceptees on easy terms as soon as they're accepted, which will compound the rising applicant pool and place more burden on the initial review and acceptance process.
At a deeper level, I think YC is at the forefront of motivating lots of people to consider founding or working at a startup as an alternative to a traditional job at an established company, and to develop the skills to be able to do so.
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#16Considering Y Combinator is already 5 years old and hasn't changed drastically, I think we can expect the same in another 3-5 years. Iteratively improving their process, using their data and experience to make better decisions, and ultimately improving their success rate.
I expect to see some Heroku sized exits for YC companies as well. Maybe in 5 years there will finally be a YC company which goes public. In either case, I don't see YC drastically changing.
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#17I'm thinking the single biggest change is that YC is going to land a Zynga or Groupon: a company whose meteoric rise to hundreds of millions in revenue and profit makes headlines, shakes industries, and will include "funded by YC" in every one of the numerous news pieces about it. Who knows, it might have already happened, and we just don't know about it because they're still on the flat part of the hockey stick.
Heroku's acquisition almost seemed like it approached that magnitude, from a valuation perspective.
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#18I'm thinking the single biggest change is that YC is going to land a Zynga or Groupon: a company whose meteoric rise to hundreds of millions in revenue and profit makes headlines, shakes industries, and will include "funded by YC" in every one of the numerous news pieces about it. Who knows, it might have already happened, and we just don't know about it because they're still on the flat part of the hockey stick.
Heroku's acquisition almost seemed like it approached that magnitude, from a valuation perspective.
Heroku is a much, much bigger company than anything I have ever done or aspire to do, and everybody even remotely connected to it should be justifiably proud, but it is not within an order of magnitude of either Zynga or Groupon. Either could have done that acquisition out of their free cash flow, and it would probably have been less than they spent on advertising in the next N months.
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#19I don't think that it's silly to ask whether the law of diminishing returns has to kick in at some point. Not for the investors, but the founders. PG and co cannot be cloned or replicated. PG can pick winners but he cannot create more time. If you consider the primary value of YC to be PG, and accept that a YC startup founder will get a progressively smaller slice of the pie that is PG's time... then you have a function for decreasing founder value for the equity they give up for YC.
Now, given that the recent $150k situation is in effect, it means that in three years the typical YC startup will have more money and less individual attention from PG. He can continue to hire amazing folks like Harj and Paul to spread the love, but at some point there has to be a point on the graph where time and value peak.
I speculate that the peak will occur in 2011. I am hugely grateful to Paul for his contributions to my world, so I will only say that I sincerely hope he and Jessica take a really awesome vacation at some point in the near future. I'd chip in $100 for that, because I've received more value from his essays and HN than any other single source of information and networking.
Re: Ask HN: What will Y Combinator look like in 3 years?
#20I'm thinking the single biggest change is that YC is going to land a Zynga or Groupon: a company whose meteoric rise to hundreds of millions in revenue and profit makes headlines, shakes industries, and will include "funded by YC" in every one of the numerous news pieces about it. Who knows, it might have already happened, and we just don't know about it because they're still on the flat part of the hockey stick.
great thought here, they have definitely made some good bets and Heroku was probably just the tip of the iceberg, IMHO Dropbox is the one to watch of the older companies right now, I think there are several others that have large exit potential, Indinero, Carwoo, notifo, hipmunk and so on and so forth.
There are a few glimpses of what the future holds for YC but I think most of us can agree, it's pretty damn bright