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Y Combinator When No One Cared

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Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#71

Post by nickpsecurity »

Sounds like YC was just another startup in the beginning. Doing a pitch for something that would change a bit later as often with creating new markets or segments. Started with small number of customers (founders). After some experimenting, you seemed to have scaled up.

Not much different than how I see startup process described here. Difference is yours creates other startups and will likely last a while. I've always thought of it as a combo of a fraternity style, boot camp, and mass production ideas all rolled into one thing. Also, you select for founders much like the fraternities at Yale, Harvard, etc select for and create business or political elites. Similar methods but opposite effect in innovation.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#72

Post by cookiecaper »

mseebach wrote: post #42
angersock wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is abandoning your business! Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their ideas in "flyover country".

"People" may pay lip service to remote work, but YC as far as I can tell were never ambiguous in their belief that being physically in SV is important for success.

YC has YC Fellowship, which doesn't require startups to be located in SV. YC also used to maintain an official program in Cambridge, but they shut it down after a few years IIRC.

Everything YC does should be viewed through the reality that YC is an investor. Their interests are not necessarily aligned with the interests of founders, and as the party with the leverage, they can mandate that people move to SV solely based on their personal convenience.

I personally see starting in SV as more of a detriment than a benefit, but then, I'm not trying to start a company that depends on venture capital. In non-SV locations where I know some startup people, VC-backed startups would routinely fly out to SV for pitches and the like, and many had an easy time finding investors after being roundly rejected by the VCs in their particular area.

Investors really don't seem to realize the treasure trove that could be available to them if they broadened their horizons a little bit, but maybe that's because there's really no incentive for them to disrupt what they have going on now. Everything is quite convenient for them with SV as the nexus.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#73

Post by psyc »

ploggingdev wrote: post #22
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but... I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of good. I don't know. Sometimes it just fe…

> But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here. Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN, but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react…

I've been here since ~2009, under my real name account that I don't use at all anymore. At this point, I find it nearly impossible to interact with this forum in any positive or useful way. IMO the quality went WAY down. Gradually at first, starting around 2011. Worse each year.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#74

Post by dwaltrip »

shubhamjain wrote: post #9
dmix wrote: post #8

Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post. Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd probably cringe too hard. My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Old com…

> Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back. Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little reminders of how I thought…

I deleted all my reddit comments at one point, but not before saving an offline copy for myself!

The main difference with a personal diary and online comments is that the former is something only you and your closest companions have access too, versus the whole world for online comments in a public forum

No one knows all of the countless purposes those comments could be used for in future decades. The extent to which such mundane daily interactions are now preserved is a totally new dynamic in human society, and I don't think a bit of caution is unreasonable

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#75

Post by nickpsecurity »

jpk wrote: post #57
trjordan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem isn't "Minnesota", it's "back to Minnesota". Back to the place where things were before they started the startup. Where they had other projects going on. Where they don't focus as singularly on their company. Moving to Minnesota is fine. By if you moved to SV to start a company, what changed that made you realize SV wasn't a good idea? The declaration has "but" in the middle; what are you running…

> what are you running away from? Rent maybe? There are lots of good reasons to run a startup in SV, NYC, etc. Direct access to capital, certain types of talent, and so on. There are also reasons to not run a startup in places like that. Cost of living as it relates to runway length being the biggest one. Some startups simply need a place to sit and a reliable internet connection. If you've come to the realization th…

"Rent maybe? There are lots of good reasons to run a startup in SV, NYC, etc. "

Early on, I thought about doing one fairly close to MIT to get talent from over there. Many businesses come outbof that school. So, I figured a bunch of other people are doing it already.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#76

Post by cookiecaper »

aswanson wrote: post #47
mseebach wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People" may pay lip service to remote work, but YC as far as I can tell were never ambiguous in their belief that being physically in SV is important for success.

I used to be skeptical of that idea, but the data seems incontrovertible, at least in terms of web startups.

I would suggest, just based on my intuition and no data (if you want to provide the data you're referencing, that'd be great), that this may be conflating correlation with causation.

Successful web startups are based in SV because to be a successful web startup, you need LOTS of money to burn on marketing and promotion. To get lots of money to burn, you must get investors with the appetite for watching their money burn up. Those investors have built out SV as their nexus not due to any magical qualities of the place, but primarily for personal convenience (traveling sucks, etc.).

The VCs in not-SV do not allow startups to run anywhere near the same way as the SV guys do, despite their attempts to imitate the YC model (most of which are, IMO, outright fleeces on naive locals). Non-SV VCs are just used to doing much more traditional deals, not seed-stage tech financing.

The people who want to start VC-backed companies thus have to trek out to SV, and then once they're established, they stick around because that's convenient for them too.

If you can decouple from the VC ecosystem, or if you can find good local VCs that know the field (and you probably can't), there is every reason to NOT start in SV.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#77

Post by nickpsecurity »

freehunter wrote: post #48
rexreed wrote: post #11

What's also telling is that the program started in Boston and moved to Silicon Valley pretty quickly. In my own experience, it seems that the Boston startup scene is dying. Unless you're in life sciences. The ecosystem there seems to have given up on supporting early stage non-life sciences companies.

>the startup scene I feel like this is one of those SV bubble things, that a place has to have a "scene" in order to have startups (and only SV has a "scene"). There are thousands of successful businesses everywhere, even ones that would be considered "startups". The only difference between SV and any other city is people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a profit which isn't really a…

I'd like to see a listing of all the billion dollar IPO's or acquisitions in past decade with location on it. Both where it started and where it spent most of its time. That mighy help settle the question.

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#79

Post by pouta »

bmccormack wrote: post #31

Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman). https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946

Thanks for the share!

Re: Y Combinator When No One Cared

#80

Post by tedsanders »

vonnik wrote: post #58

It's useful to think about Jessica's comment under the original message, that YC is "mass production of startups." What it really means, I think, is that YC is comfortable with more failure than other investors. They are spreading their bets wide by making many small investments, and as they have said many times, only a small percentage of those bets need to be right. That's quite different from how most VCs invest a…

I don't see the subtext that connects mass production and comfort with failure. In fact, I see mass production as a way to reduce failure rates. The idea behind mass production is to take a process that's done in a low-volume, idiosyncratic way and replace it with a process that can be reliably repeated at scale. With Y Combinator, that means replacing the rocky solo founder journey with a community full of of advisors and partners who can advise on topics like incorporation, financial planning, customer testing, investor relations, hiring, etc. There's no reason for a new founder to re-invent the wheel when the Y Combinator collective has already manufactured 1,000 wheels and gotten it down to a science. Founders should focus on their customers and their product - everything else should be 'mass produced' to the extent possible.

(An example of this sort of mass production is pg's advice to incorporate as a Delaware C corp. Advice like this can save your fledgling startup from a week of legal research. Having 'mass-produced' shortcuts to these sorts of managerial microdecisions can make or break a startup.)

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