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Y Combinator's Message to Founders

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Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#111

Post by ditonal »

thecleaner wrote: post #107
ditonal wrote: post #102

This “default alive” advice is repeatedly shared. One thing it obviously does not address is the human element of who you cut and whether they will be “default alive” unemployed in a recession. A huge amount of YC advice in general positions founders as protagonists and employees as NPCs then are shocked people pick Google over their startup offer. Funny thing is I’ve seen this exact advice destroy a company. In Marc…

That's just bad software engineering. In general, I would expect software to scale well as far as traffic is concerned esp in today's environment where scaling infra is not really a big deal. Coping with feature requests on a shoestring staff is a different story.

Maybe it’s bad software engineering but it’s a reality that most companies have “bad engineering”, there’s always piles of tech debt and even stuff out of your control.

For example, one outage related to Google Ads API changing their parameters. This led to ads not being run which directly cost revenue since those ads were profitable. The outage went on for much longer than it needed to since people with expertise on the marketing pipelines were gone.

Id say the “bad engineering” here is mostly Google ads who should version their API changes. But if Google can’t do good engineering, I’m not counting on too many other companies to do so. This idea that infra is a “set and forget” operation because autoscaling exists is a fantasy for conference talks, not reality.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#112

Post by barkingcat »

aresant wrote: post #18

Dagnabit. Here we go again - this is a fantastic, pragmatic amendment to those notes -> https://dalton.substack.com/p/letter-to-myself-in-late-2008?... For a taste: "Doing multiple small layoffs is a form of cascading failure. Do one layoff, but much much deeper than seems correct. Do it decisively. Do it so that you get profitable. In your case that is something like a 70% cut, not a 5-10% cut. Yes you read that rig…

what if they try repeated 70% cuts?

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#113

Post by thecleaner »

Is it possible to raise a series A before reaching product market fit ? I thought it's more like you raise a Series A to scale up ? Why would someone give you 20M dollars to just do research ? Never did this myself btw do maybe all these questions are tosh.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#115

Post by lvl102 »

There were so many unicorns that were pulled forward to go public that I don’t even think there’s this gigantic fluff remaining (a la dotcom). They already busted and it doesn’t even feel like we crashed.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#116

Post by vmception »

ditonal wrote: post #102

This “default alive” advice is repeatedly shared. One thing it obviously does not address is the human element of who you cut and whether they will be “default alive” unemployed in a recession. A huge amount of YC advice in general positions founders as protagonists and employees as NPCs then are shocked people pick Google over their startup offer. Funny thing is I’ve seen this exact advice destroy a company. In Marc…

> One thing it obviously does not address is the human element of who you cut and whether they will be “default alive” unemployed in a recession.

An individual's personal financial circumstance is not a factor though. There are many people that have fixed their personal finance issue adequately. And for those who really don't have easy choice of employers or personal runway, then they're fucked. Did that really need to be said? That's what is going to happen.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#117

Post by liuliu »

ordu wrote: post #106
liuliu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why it is extremely frustrating to watch this unfold. The easiest way to kill inflation is to kill growth. But that won't help people in need anyway. An empty shelf of baby formulas are not a sign of "economy is too hot". It is a sign of supply issue.

> An empty shelf of baby formulas Can I ask you why you've chosen this particular example? It is not about I agree with you, or I'm going to contradict in a some way, it is completely unrelated question. A complete off-topic.

The cause of this round is not some sudden bubble burst. Fed raise rates because they want to signal that they are serious about taming the inflation. That caused sharp sentiment change in capital market.

The cause of this round of inflation can be many things, we've been in low-interest environment for 10+ years with occasional QEs. It hasn't inflated the economy as much as we hoped for that 10+ years. It is lazy thinking to attribute back to QE for this round of inflation.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#118

Post by mason55 »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #93
aresant wrote: post #18

Dagnabit. Here we go again - this is a fantastic, pragmatic amendment to those notes -> https://dalton.substack.com/p/letter-to-myself-in-late-2008?... For a taste: "Doing multiple small layoffs is a form of cascading failure. Do one layoff, but much much deeper than seems correct. Do it decisively. Do it so that you get profitable. In your case that is something like a 70% cut, not a 5-10% cut. Yes you read that rig…

I cannot imagine a way I would interpret a 70% layoff as anything other than the CEO/management team being incompetent. I mean, if you can actually execute with 70% less, why did they hire in the first place? The only way this might work is if a company was expanding into a completely new market and pivots away from that (ie, software startup gets a hardware division going, etc)

> I mean, if you can actually execute with 70% less, why did they hire in the first place?

Hiring and onboarding takes awhile. VC-funded companies are intended to grow quickly. Those two things put together means you need to hire for where you want to be in a year or two and not where you are right now.

The actual goals & constraints have changed.

When you hired those people your goal was scaling up as quickly as possible and your constraint was having enough people (in this scenario, money is not one of your constraints).

In the new world, the goal is "stay alive" and the gating constraint is runway.

So, no, the fact that you can survive after large staff cuts doesn't mean the CEO was incompetent. It might, but it might also just be a function of the goals/constraints/execution strategy/environment having all changed.

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