Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
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Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#2[deleted]
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#3In executing on an idea, the end result is often very different from where you started. They might look similar now, but in 5 years one went enterprise on feature set and the other consumer etc etc.
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#4reinforcement learning done right, amirite?
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#5Seems like a great idea!
Stirs up competition within a cohort and there’s bound to be idea sharing between teams. YC claims to bet on people not ideas, so as another commenter pointed out, if a team pivots there’s no longer a competition.
My guess is YC also believes in simultaneous invention: the same idea coming from multiple places at once implies said idea’s time has come, while any team wanting to work on it must have already done the work to hit that forefront, making them great people to bet on.
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#6It makes sense as an investor, doesn't it, you identify markets you see an opening, you check which companies are in that domain, pick the ones where they can execute and have good people on their team.
It would worry me as a startup company, who knows where the information I share with them will end up...
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#7I think there's something missing from this analysis - YC companies might duplicate one another's products but that doesn't say anything at all about their target markets, route to market, product focus, etc.
As an example, my first startup was a requirements management app that, on paper at least, was a copy of IBM DOORS. Except DOORS is a massive enterprise app targeted at companies who are building a new airplane that has 250,000 technical requirements that need fully traceability, and my app was aimed at small businesses doing software projects with 1000 requirements. I was not competing with IBM; I was trying to apply the value of that app to much smaller projects (the end goal might have been to become a competitor one day but we failed long before then.)
You can't just say "These two products do the same thing so the companies are dupes." It's far more complicated than that.
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#8Investing in a market opportunity rather than a company or person.
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#9It makes sense as an investor, doesn't it, you identify markets you see an opening, you check which companies are in that domain, pick the ones where they can execute and have good people on their team. It would worry me as a startup company, who knows where the information I share with them will end up...
A more interesting question is, do you as a startup company have any information worth sharing? Ideas are dime a dozen and like you just said, the differentiator is the capabilities of those people. And that is not something that can be shared, and no other startup can benefit of it.
Re: Y Combinator often backs startups that duplicate other YC companies, data shows
#10One of the reasons that YC is so great is that they back founders, not ideas. YC has never backed the same founder twice in a batch to my knowledge, and doing so is antithetical to its values.