171–179 of 179 posts
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McDonald's stock (MCD) pays a 2.39% dividend yield based on people buying hamburgers. That's hard cash paid out every year. Bitcoin doesn't pay any dividends.
Not all companies pay dividends and people don't think their stock is as worthless as bitcoin.
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Scamming their users makes YC look bad. Seems like a good reason to boot them.
""No one could have predicted that risk free 20% apy project would be a scam""
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
“Croupier: Your winnings, sir.”
“Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.”
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Y-Combinator exists to make Paul Graham and it's investors money. Morality is not money. Y-Combinator doesn't exist to make morality for its investors.
Maybe it'd be better if our society reprioritized so "these organizations are all amoral actors who exist for no other purpose except to fatten the wallets of their owners" isn't the assumed norm.
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Definitely looks pretty bad - but on the other hand, an accelerator not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator. You need to make bets everywhere and hopefully some stick. The other side of that is some don’t stick, and some go proper pear shaped. Make enough bets, it has to happen. I’ve got no idea what their original pitch is, I certainly wouldn’t back a crypto startup that ostensibly aims to do som…
> Definitely looks pretty bad - but on the other hand, an accelerator not making any bets in crypto is not a sensible accelerator. That's why we have the concept of "due diligence". YC is absolutely allowed to make bets in the crypto world; but they have a brand name and a reputation of serious investors. I know that when I see the YC logo on a new product I discover, it serves as a signal. And having a fraud company…
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Maybe it'd be better if our society reprioritized so "these organizations are all amoral actors who exist for no other purpose except to fatten the wallets of their owners" isn't the assumed norm.
Perhaps the sarcasm here was not understood? Corporations should exist to serve people, broadly. Not the other way around. People over profit. We should all strive to be kinder as well where possible.
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If you are in the business of promoting your brand to young entrepreneurs, so that they include you in funding rounds, then yes, it makes sense to have exposure to anything that young entrepreneurs are working on. If you are in the business of owning a piece of any company that may go public via IPO or SPAC one day, then yes, might as well give money to anyone who seems like they may be able to get to that finish lin…
That 99% number you're quoting is made up. It's a value call. I think it's a reasonable position to give crypto a small chance of becoming something really big. If you're in the business of making long bets on the future, you want a piece of everything that fits that description. Including crypto. You don't know which bets will pay off, and it's nearly impossible to make an educated guess. It's simpler to just invest…
If a group of people created a perpetual motion machine community, would they deserver some funding? How can you prove that they are not going to discover new physics that allow energy generation from nothing?
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> If you’re financially backing and providing direct hands on strategic guidance to an active and blatant scheme to commit securities fraud then you are doing something you should not be doing. As you wrote it as a generic hypothetical, no, it’s not really controversial to me. If however you are meaning to say it as a passive aggressive way to accuse YC, yeah, it very much is controversial. To not be controversial (f…
By definition, a “YC Company” is given hundreds of thousands of dollars and direct hands on strategic advice on how to run the company. That’s the meaning of the concept. The company in question has blatant securities fraud as their core business model. QED Here’s a logical construct in return. When people you like do unethical things they are still unethical.
First and foremost, did YC approve of this “core business model”? Sure, the founders got into YC, but did they pivot during the program (frequently happens)? And while YC may be on the board, they don’t have controlling interest either.
So yeah, there’s a lot of scenarios where people “you know” and/or “partner with” do unethical things, but that fact alone doesn’t mean you are unethical. You very well could be, but guilt by association isn’t enough proof here imho.
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Hmm. Both those cases seem to be more along the lines of "said/posted things that made YC look bad" rather than "kicked out for ghosting their mentor" or "kicked out for scamming their users"
Scamming their users makes YC look bad. Seems like a good reason to boot them.
Scamming their users mostly makes the Founders look bad.
NOT kicking them out is what would make YC look bad. I wouldn't expect it to happen immediately, though, if YC does an internal investigation to see whether any principals, mentors, or advisors are implicated in the unethical behavior as well, whether by commission (giving unethical advice) or omissions (such as failing to raise red flags).
YCs public track record in terms of self-reflection on possible errors in judgement isn't particularly encouraging though. From the outside the org seems to focus on evolutionary changes though certainly at a fairly rapid clip (which means that cultural norms are hard to establish and maintain, giving the "carriers" of non-normative behavior opportunities to wriggle around avoiding scrutiny. For new extensions of the program YC favors rapid experimentation and iteration, which may fail to establish compatible norms depending on who is leading the effort.
It is worth contrasting one of the more stable outposts for YC culture, this very Hacker News site. YC has a very strong policy regarding not just avoiding a conflict of interest when it comes to moderation of posts critical of YC, but moderators have been instructed to moderate those posts and discussions considerably less than would otherwise be indicated, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest or self-dealing. That's a pretty strong commitment, and one that can be difficult to live up to (avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest is a standard that judges are supposed to be held to, but not lawyers, for example). YC may or may not have always lived up to the spirit of that commitment (only insiders can know for sure), but it is reasonably plain that an ongoing effort is being made to live up to the letter of that commitment. Kudos to pg for establishing it early, and to dang for keeping it going.
The point I'm arriving at is that establishing and maintaining a cultural reference point like that is very difficult in an organization that is growing, changing, and sending out strange offshoots without a lot of explicit (even occasionally public) communication about similar bright lines and thou-shalt-nots, and outside of the HN context, we really haven't seen evidence for that.
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That 99% number you're quoting is made up. It's a value call. I think it's a reasonable position to give crypto a small chance of becoming something really big. If you're in the business of making long bets on the future, you want a piece of everything that fits that description. Including crypto. You don't know which bets will pay off, and it's nearly impossible to make an educated guess. It's simpler to just invest…
So where would you draw the line? If a group of people created a perpetual motion machine community, would they deserver some funding? How can you prove that they are not going to discover new physics that allow energy generation from nothing?