Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

Since a lot of you hate the site, I'll summarise briefly: one of the founders did a thread starting with the following post:

"

I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang

We're building PearAI, an open source AI code editor. Think a better Copilot, or open source Cursor. But you've heard this spiel already...

"

One thing not conveyed here is the first line is in unicode bold and the end is littered with emoji spam. Essentially, the post ticked a few rage inducing boxes for a certain kind of tech twitter user. It was rather cringe, reading like a thread from get-rich-quick influencer types while also likely imbueing some readers and quote tweets with a little jealousy they wouldn't openly admit. This was probably the impetus that pushed one or two angry people to poke around their product and find out about the open source code cloning and the fact the founders were overselling (which founder doesn't, I guess...) which lead to a rout of publicly mocking them and YC in general, resulting in blog posts like the OP, I guess.

I personally don't really think one company amongst the whole batch is enough to judge the start of a trend for YC "trading prestige for growth" or whatever. I think the discussion of prestige is in general is an interesting one, I just don't think PearAI is indicative of it more than they themselves just being hucksters which happens in tech in general.

YC is not the stamp of quality it once was, to be sure, though it still works as social proof, because investors (especially VCs) want to invest in companies other investors like (or failing that, companies they imagine other investors would like). YC would say that they aren't trying to be a stamp of quality or social proof, they are just trying to help start-ups.

If I had to take a stab at articulating how YC has changed, it's that it's become a VC, picking ideas to generate returns.

This rejection email from 2022 that someone posted online cements the idea for me (excerpted):

"Unfortunately, we've decided not to fund {Company} this batch. We enjoyed our conversation today and were impressed by you as founders building something they are passionate about bringing into being. However we weren't convinced that this product strategy is going to yield a big company in its current form. ...

Of course, things are very early and you are still figuring out the right way to build and structure your business. If you're able to make significant progress with it, we'd be very interested in hearing about it for a future batch."

Original YC would not reject founders over their current product strategy and because they haven't figured out the right way to structure their business--haven't put together the "proof" that they could be on track to be a unicorn, etc. That's a VC rejection. Of course, YC gets many thousands of applications and has to reject most of them. You could say they shouldn't be criticized for trying to give a little feedback.

It's just hard to convey the sense from the early days of YC that they really didn't care about the return, or the progress so far, or VCs, or fads, or anything. That said, I really was at the right place at the right time and got very lucky.

Finally, I want to call out the phenomenon in the world of VC where the ability to generate hype alone is enough to make you and your investors a lot of money, even if there isn't a lot of substance in your company (and even if things are morally or ethically questionable), through the mechanism of greater fools. Cryptocurrency is a whole exploration of this effect, turning hype into money by building a streamlined mechanism for bringing in greater fools, but we can also look at examples like Theranos. (There's actually a ton of money at the top of society looking for somewhere to go, which ideally would be routed to more worthy ventures than it is, but that's a whole topic in itself.) The point is, the greater fool "strat" works. In a moral vacuum, if you are trying to maximize returns, you lean into it.

If I were running a fund like YC with basically unlimited money at my disposal, balancing the goals (strategies?) of 1) make money for money's sake, 2) advance technology for technology's sake (let's go to Mars, etc), and 3) make the world a better place, I would focus on (3). Like can we at least try to build a unicorn that feeds people, and maybe fail, rather than trying to build FooBarBazCoin that eats the word, and failing? We mostly see a mix of (1) and (2).

You have 10 mins to pitch your idea, so they went in and said ”look, we work for coinbase, we're competent. Look, we have 300k subs on YouTube, we know how to sell shit and get attention. Look we have , we got it all" and that's all it takes. The problem is, they want to sell dev tools and those tend to be more grounded in reality than where their attitude and skills might be a better fit. Lots of devs like calling out bullshit as a hobby and making fun of shoddily built stuff, so it's a tough audience.

YC doesn't do "due diligence" and never has, not worth it for the $125k they put in. The real danger is they become known as the place for bullshit peddlers, influencers, etc.

Edit: 344k subs: https://youtube.com/@fryingpan?si=QIPTDvJATXFNYBPM