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Why YC went to DC

ycombinator.com

61–70 of 407 posts

Re: Why YC went to DC

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like VR in 2018. I'd love to see a Silicon Valley season for the current tech environment.

Season 9 Erlich: "Oh my god. It's an AI play. That's the frothiest space in the Valley right now. Nobody understands it but everyone wants in. Any idiot could walk into a fucking room, utter the letters A and I, and VCs would hurl bricks of cash at them.”.

That was well done

Re: Why YC went to DC

#62
post #37

It's well and good to advocate for change within the industry (large and small) but realistically, all of this is missing the forest for trees, or equating symptom with the cause. The only way out of this long term, is to take money out of politics, repeal citizens united, revolving doors and other methods of lining politicians' pockets.

>repeal citizens united

So you think it should be illegal to make documentaries critical of Hillary Clinton? Because that's what Citizens United was about, but most people who are against Citizens United don't seem to understand what the case was actually about.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Automate government-driven compliance standards - enable small businesses to sell into large companies/government entities, automatic certification when using pre-approved cloud solutions. I don't see how this will end well. I appreciate the reasoning behind it, but this is not a good solution. I'd prefer to see more "startup friendly" compliance frameworks that don't require tens to hundreds of thousands of doll…

I'd also prefer to see these standards go away. I haven't seen any proof they are providing meaningful security at any company I've been at and several of them have had massive hacks despite being SOC2 on paper. They also eat up InfoSec time instead of being productive on meaningful stuff like "Hey, are patching everything?" Most of these compliance just seem like barber licenses. A way for existing entities entrench…

Vanta/Drata and other are starting to build solutions that are somewhere in-between checkbox compliance and real security. To the extent they integrate with your cloud providers and security tools, they can validate you have secure settings, active monitoring, and have remediated the things that have been flagged in a timely manner. Doesn't mean you are secure, but does ensure some baseline tablestakes.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#64
> We need decisive action to compel more interoperability by the largest firms and curb self-preferencing so we restore competition and innovation, similar to measures called for in the American Innovation and Choice Online Act that Big Tech lobbying killed at the eleventh hour in 2021. At the end of the day, we need an open and neutral app ecosystem where consumers and developers can maintain a direct relationship.

Cure this, and the rest will follow. Two companies gating access to the app market is what is destroying competition at its core.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with this assessment but it’s also a narrow view[0] that allows the problem to persist in the first place. Rather, I’d like to see what positive oversight would look like, but that has not been put forth by any of these organizations thus far. It all comes down to “trust us” which is also hard to stomach [0]: most often but not exclusively held by Americans (of which i am one). We collectively fail t…

This is a relatively new and carefully cultivated state of things. I mean, the early phases of this era are a half-century old at this point, but it’s not like it’s a law of nature that at least half the population of the US and about half the politicians must regard government as rarely-useful. It didn’t used to be that way. It’s not an American trait in some holistic historical sense.

perhaps our government has become less competent? Having worked in the federal government briefly (and growing up in a place with lots of feds), it makes perfect sense that our government is generally incompetent/low-capacity.

In the wake of the civil rights movement, lots of government civil service exams became presumptively illegal. The pay bands are also pretty trash.

If we wanted a competent government, we should have far fewer people paid a lot more and hired in a more aggressively merit-based process. Our current government is from an era without computerization where you needed lots of grunts to process things like SS claims, etc. That is simply not this era.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#66
post #14

"This year, we’ll fund more than 500 companies out of 50,000 applications, and almost all of them are related to AI in some way." So, what this means: that in 2024, if you want to get VC capital, your startup must be related to AI.

It's like VR in 2018. I'd love to see a Silicon Valley season for the current tech environment.

VR won’t touch every aspect of society and government and corporate operations in five years.

AI will.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#67

Apologies for the negative tone: > First, let’s prioritize open source models and more tailored AI applications to shape the competitive landscape and create real opportunities for startups. How does YC square this statement with the fact that their ex-president closed their models with the explicit intention of slowing down competitors [1]? Or is the argument "we want politicians to discourage people like us from do…

YC isn’t one person and organizations don’t have to be monolithic or consistent.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#68
post #37

It's well and good to advocate for change within the industry (large and small) but realistically, all of this is missing the forest for trees, or equating symptom with the cause. The only way out of this long term, is to take money out of politics, repeal citizens united, revolving doors and other methods of lining politicians' pockets.

It is frankly challenging to reconcile 1st amendment protections and a CU repeal. I'm not sure what the solution is, but think recent events should show that govt can abuse campaign finance law to pick winners and losers in the town square.

Re: Why YC went to DC

#69
post #16

I was hopeful YC coming to DC would've meant YC would've been tapping into DC's startup scene. Wishful thinking. Linked is the more common reason (lobbying), but I'm looking forward to more institutions recognizing the talent we have in the DC region.

I grew up in DC. Are we pretending like its a tech hotspot now? I missed the memo

Re: Why YC went to DC

#70
post #14

"This year, we’ll fund more than 500 companies out of 50,000 applications, and almost all of them are related to AI in some way." So, what this means: that in 2024, if you want to get VC capital, your startup must be related to AI.

What’s ironic is that Michael Seibel has discussed many times on the YC podcast that you should avoid building whatever’s hot for VCs because their attention tends to change every year but you’ll be stuck building for a decade.

2020 was remote work, 2021 was web3, now we have the big LLM boom.

Honestly it seems there’s a lot of advantages to “riding a wave” and a lot of advantages to being contrarian. But if raising money is your priority I do think you should ride the wave. Being contrarian sounds romantic, but don’t expect funding from people who disagree with you.

The most charitable thing I’d say about YCs AI focus is it’s hard to think of a startup idea that couldn’t benefit from AI in some way.

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