YC Annual Letter 2017 • Hacker News Board

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#61

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:41 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have powerful advantages that are still not fully understood by most founders and investors....This trend is unlikely to reverse without antitrust action, and I suggest people carefully consider its implications for startups. I think the "startup community" needs to have a serious conversation about this [2]. If we agree that machine learning is going to b…

I'm definitely glad to see someone realizing these giant vertical tech companies pretty much will only be solved by antitrust action.

Our antitrust laws have been focused primarily about the anticompetitive aspects of owning a whole market, but has missed the boat so far on the anticompetitive aspects of vertical integration. Google simply doesn't have to compete in many cases because it's stronger products promote and protect it's weaker products.

Users tend to either be Google people or Apple people or Amazon people, and that trend is only getting larger.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#62

Post by optimusclimb » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission?

> Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large.

I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e. improve on an existing product.

Uber's "mission" was to get privileged people with smart phones and disposable income a sexy/cool ride home from the bar.

Facebook was a social networking site targeted at college students...what was it's mission? To allow people to see what that cute person in their Psych class was up to this weekend?

Snapchat...the clear and important mission to allow for safely sending risqué pictures?

While I believe Sam's belief that they WANT to work with companies with clear important missions, that doesn't seem to be a/the deciding factor in becoming "very large", or attracting great people. If anything, it seems like the "spaghetti at the wall" approach is what happens - some startups gain momentum, and then it's the high growth trajectory that attracts a ton of talent.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#63

Post by purple-again » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:43 PM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #22

ridruejo wrote: post #2

"Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone." I know many people will read that and roll their eyes back and believe it is just a marketing gimmick for the gullible and like most investors YC just cares about the money. The thing is that they do deeply care about founders and making things better in the world, as naive as that may sound to o…

It's funny you say this—the first thing I did, even before reading the article, was search for "Thiel." It's going to be hard for me to take this sort of thing seriously, this telegraphing of benevolence which is so central to YC's branding, until they address the fact that one of their "partners" is such an obviously destructive force within society. They don't even have to do anything but say goodbye, and they won'…

While I disagree with many of Trumps beliefs and by proxy probably many of Thiels as well the fact that they refused to further the division of our country by excommunicating him for his beliefs is a huge pro in my book.

The founder of Rails saying he would fire any of his employees that supported Trump was sickening and that kind of attitude will never allow us to move from bloodshed and war to one people.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#64

Post by dragonwriter » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:48 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #61

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #14

Companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have powerful advantages that are still not fully understood by most founders and investors....This trend is unlikely to reverse without antitrust action, and I suggest people carefully consider its implications for startups. I think the "startup community" needs to have a serious conversation about this [2]. If we agree that machine learning is going to b…

I'm definitely glad to see someone realizing these giant vertical tech companies pretty much will only be solved by antitrust action. Our antitrust laws have been focused primarily about the anticompetitive aspects of owning a whole market, but has missed the boat so far on the anticompetitive aspects of vertical integration. Google simply doesn't have to compete in many cases because it's stronger products promote a…

> Our antitrust laws have been focused primarily about the anticompetitive aspects of owning a whole market, but has missed the boat so far on the anticompetitive aspects of vertical integration.

This is simply historically false; vertical integration has been a central focus of antitrust law from day one (it was a key consideration in the drafting of the 1890 Sherman Act and the 1914 Clayton Act.)

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#65

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:48 PM UTC

yawgmoth wrote: post #34

On the HN front - I would like to see a discussion and then the implementation of measures to encourage meaningful discussion, discourage low-effort comments, but also to discourage "negative lurking". Like other users noticed, there are a lot of lurkers -- some of which downvote and move along. Because frequently I do not understand why a post has been downvoted (my own or otherwise), I am discouraged from contribut…

[deleted]

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#66

Post by isseu » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:50 PM UTC

tradersam wrote: post #43

icpmacdo wrote: post #4

"Hacker News has 3.4 million users per month and 350,000 users per day, with 4 million pageviews a day. There are just under 1 million registered accounts, with several hundred added each day. Users post around 1,000 articles and 6,000 comments to the site per day." First time I have seen those numbers, very impressive. I thought there were a lot less users.

Pretty impressive that HN has mostly maintained the level of quality it set out to, especially with 350,000 users per day. I'm always relieved that there is a place on the Internet I can go where 90% of the comments on the page aren't "me too thanks".

me too thanks

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#67

Post by bartmancuso » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:51 PM UTC

Re YC Research, please consider a project looking at the challenges surrounding climate change communications. To state the obvious, the science on climate change is settled, but many people are still skeptical/resistant or in outright denial. Heated arguments and throwing around citations to journal articles really doesn't change anyone's mind. There is a deeper, nuanced communications challenge at play, and it's the exact type of thing that YC would be great at addressing. There are some very interesting ways that technology (and the creativity of the YC community) could be used to tackle this issue.

Climate change may be the defining issue of the next century, and it would be a shame to be stymied by the communications challenges. I hope you'll consider it.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#68

Post by purple-again » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:58 PM UTC

jtmarmon wrote: post #13

"The percentage of women who apply to YC is roughly the same as the percentage of women who get funded. The same is true for Black and Latino founders." I'm guessing what he means to say here is that if x% of the applicant pool is woman/black/latino, then x% of the accepted pool is woman/black/latino, right? The way it's phrased it sounds like every woman/black/latino who applies is accepted

I'm curious if that's by design or coicidence. Generally when taking s small sample size (funded) you expect the majority to be over represented and any minorities to be under represented until the sample grows to a large enough size to eliminate the variance.

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#69

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 7:59 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #64

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm definitely glad to see someone realizing these giant vertical tech companies pretty much will only be solved by antitrust action. Our antitrust laws have been focused primarily about the anticompetitive aspects of owning a whole market, but has missed the boat so far on the anticompetitive aspects of vertical integration. Google simply doesn't have to compete in many cases because it's stronger products promote a…

> Our antitrust laws have been focused primarily about the anticompetitive aspects of owning a whole market, but has missed the boat so far on the anticompetitive aspects of vertical integration. This is simply historically false; vertical integration has been a central focus of antitrust law from day one (it was a key consideration in the drafting of the 1890 Sherman Act and the 1914 Clayton Act.)

I guess my question then would be, if vertical integration is adequately addressed by antitrust laws, how does a company which is the dominant power in search, mobile, and email manage to exist, while continuing to buy companies that bring it into dozens of other business markets, while proudly proclaiming that integration as a primary feature?

Re: YC Annual Letter 2017

#70

Post by dharmon » Thu, Feb 16, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

optimusclimb wrote: post #62

> 4) Does this company have a clear and important mission? > Without this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large. I find this one interesting. When Google started, there were many incumbent search engines. Their mission was to provide better results than what existed, i.e.…

In fairness, he does state that this is just about his boredom. At the end of the day, its up to him and the YC stakeholders to decide how much his personal boredom is worth in terms of returns and missing The Next Big Thing.

The danger is in forgetting that all the big companies with lofty mission statements ("Make the world more open and connected", "Organize the world's data") did not start out that way at all. They didn't develop them until well after the point that some place like YC would be investing.

In fact, there might be an inverse correlation: companies that start out with huge, inspirational missions before they even have a user / customer are more likely to end up failures. I could think of many reasons why.