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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

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Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#211

Post by closeparen »

paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

YC pretty openly and deliberately tries to convince prospective and actual Big Tech employees who are curious or on the fence to quit and do a startup already. There's a great Startup School video about this [0]. I think the critics are right about "doing a startup" and chasing an exit having become an equally normal, precedented, socially-supported path as joining a big company and chasing promotions. But I'd be surprised if YC itself would characterize that as failure.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM2reZib2RY

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#212

Post by thornewolf »

a1371 wrote: post #108
paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

For the uninitiated like myself, PearAi just took the source code of continue.dev (not fork, they copy pasted) and did some clunky work on it. That was their entry to YC.

for additional uninitiatedness: one of the founders is "Frying Pan", a popular youtuber. There has been previous discussion on the fact that the cost to build software is approaching 0. If that is given, maybe "taste" is all that matters. Funding a ~productless popular youtuber is a great way to test if "taste" and "brand" is better to invest in than tech in the years to come.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#213

Post by closeparen »

amirhirsch wrote: post #42
paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

YC benefits strongly from network effects; the value for each founder grows superlinearly with more founders. Grow faster!

A very straightforward way that this manifests: when a VC funds a developer tooling company, all their other portfolio companies are strongly encouraged to use it. Built in customers! The test is how much revenue you can actually bring in from outside the VC bubble.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#214

Post by jmward01 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #93
jmward01 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion. Agreed. Making this level clam requires a lot more evidence. It would have been better if the author presented this idea as something like 'YC better watch out, quality does matter' or something like that. Even then they would need to bring in more evidence and outside examples of industries where this trend took hold.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697929 Only punishment and court judgement requires that level of evidence. Corruption often never gets exposed at all and at best is only revealed through weaker anecdotal evidence or even rumors. A blurry picture is often better than no picture at all. Form your own opinion about my link above. If it’s actually true, then that post I made is likely the only thing you’ll ever r…

To make my comment clearer, the article made many statements like:

> If the main appeal of joining YC isn’t the mentorship but the prestige of being able to write "YC W22" in your Twitter bio and on your company’s landing page

and

> Take Harvard, for instance: the reason they don’t accept a higher percentage of applicants isn’t because they can’t scale—they have the resources to build more facilities or could even switch to remote like YC—but because they choose not to.

These statements are made with no backing evidence for them. They could be right, but without any evidence that they are I just have to take it on faith that they are, which I won't. At least link to another article making the case for these statements.

This is just bad writing and it is a problem with modern journalism and blogging. The author may, or may not, have a great point, but they did nothing to actually argue their point except point out one tweet at the end. Even that was predicated on the many statements before being true. Take away all the unsubstantiated claims in this article and you are left with, at best, a re-tweet and an argument that Dorai is being a little overly defensive and that may indicate something worth looking into.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#215

Post by w10-1 »

dgreensp wrote: post #106

Full disclosure, I'm a YC alum whose last start-up was acquired by Google, who applied to this batch and didn't get an interview. 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 b…

---

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

---

Forget "ideally": the experience and world-view of the collective deciders for that money is financial. Other factors are filtered out. Vanity investments - for the glory of the human race or technological progress - only reflect inefficiency and excess discretion that are squeezed out with a few selection iterations or process controls. (This is setting aside the large cohort of big-money behind overt/covert national funds, with major non-financial strategic objectives.)

That finance focus won't change with YC's focus or with more morality or regulation. The only path I see is innovation not in finance or technology but in law: to somehow create and sell a stake in the future, to avoid future environment and peoples being now basically a huge externality sink.

"YC's reputation" matters mainly insofar as it provides access and credibility for individual YC startup's, based on their collective promise. If governance access and credibility were conditioned on long history/holding period of protections for future, then both selection and resources would flow in favor, and we'd have a race to the top instead of the bottom.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#216

Post by shekispeaks »

paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

We can keep going down here, the problem with society can also be that prestige in itself is valuable.

Instead of say prestige being the side effect of being good at something useful for the society.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#217

Post by ahstilde »

joeybloey wrote: post #48
supafastcoder wrote: post #36

YC went downhill during Sam Altman and then Garry Tan pushed it off a cliff. There’s no point in joining YC anymore.

What's the most successful yc company started in the last 5 years ?

Zepto, W21, raised last month at $5B valuation. So, in 4 years.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#218

Post by Apocryphon »

closeparen wrote: post #211
paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

YC pretty openly and deliberately tries to convince prospective and actual Big Tech employees who are curious or on the fence to quit and do a startup already. There's a great Startup School video about this [0]. I think the critics are right about "doing a startup" and chasing an exit having become an equally normal, precedented, socially-supported path as joining a big company and chasing promotions. But I'd be sur…

HN is a lot more jaded towards startups and founders’ games these days. Back in late 2019 there was this thread about a pre-YC Garry Tan video where the tone of the discussion was fiercely against working for startups, saying it was better to join FAANG or start your own company instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865065

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#220

Post by skeeter2020 »

jhanschoo wrote: post #143
dgreensp wrote: post #106

Full disclosure, I'm a YC alum whose last start-up was acquired by Google, who applied to this batch and didn't get an interview. 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 b…

> 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. It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did. Web apps and mobile fundamentally transformed everyday life and communication in very…

There were a lot of preferable options for connected, generally non-technical people after the dot-com implosion, for the first ~15 years of the 2000's. I joined a comp sci grad and his engineer brother in a software startup because we couldn't get jobs with an established company, big corp, investment bank or other much more likley "sure thing". The equation has completely changed, and the startup landscape with it.
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