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Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

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Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#71

Post by layer8 »

fallingknife wrote: post #30
kevingadd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you know the people from your industry well enough to hate their guts? :)

It doesn't matter who I like. I am not in any type of personal relationship with these people, so it makes no sense to "like" or "hate" them anyway. It matters whose incentives are aligned with mine. It's also not smart to assume you would like someone else better just because you don't know them.

People can easily disagree even when their incentives align. Hopefully we aren’t beings who have to blindly submit to whatever incentives are out there, or assume the same of other people.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#72

Post by aguaviva »

ec109685 wrote: post #3

The way YC closed ranks was my favorite anecdote from Chaos Monkey’s. I always find it interesting though YC leaders are extremely against cancel culture, but when it comes to business, its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands.

Its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands.

Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that?

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#73

Post by tomhoward »

adastra22 wrote: post #15
jf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any more than you need to in any public forum

Not the point. One should be allowed to be critical of the institutions of the valley without getting their name written down in a secret blacklist.

YC will fund anyone who is building a company that looks like it could be highly successful.

There's one case I'm thinking of now where someone was as critical of YC (both the org and individual leaders) as anyone could possibly be, in a highly public and sustained way, and their startup later got funded by YC.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#74

Post by miltava »

thierrydamiba wrote: post #51
worksonmymach wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to know who "wins" in a scaled YC vs. the oceanic tide that is the SP500 and it's capital sucking and brain sucking ways. A Google can stop 10000 potential startups simply with RSUs and cap another 10000 by buying them out (which is kinda good for YC but not really... they'd rather own a chunk of a Google).

I think you’re vastly underestimating how hard it is to pick winners and stifle competition. Using your logic, if it was so easy why didn’t Google stop OpenAI? Meta? Perplexity?

I think that maybe we underestimate how hard it is to choose the right companies to “kill” when you’re a competitor. The default mode is to say that they won’t go anywhere because of many factors (they don’t have the resources, the access, the capability, etc). But sometimes they do. And in restrospect it’s obvious, but it’s not by the time you had the chance to stop it. And I think it’s probably good.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#75

Post by acdha »

adastra22 wrote: post #15
jf wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not any more than you need to in any public forum

Not the point. One should be allowed to be critical of the institutions of the valley without getting their name written down in a secret blacklist.

That’s an ideal but how would that work short of stringent government regulation? It’s never been easier to mine text and since YC is giving people large sums of money they have both a valid reason and broad deference to their assessment of applicants. VC isn’t like a car or home loan so I don’t think there’s anyway you could cut out bias less blatant than circulating a list of racial slurs or explicit threats of retaliation for funding people: since they’re basically making a large unsecured loan there’s simply too much justifiable discretion to exclude something like reviewing posting history.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#77

Post by throwaway984393 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13
neilv wrote: post #5

> > Y Combinator was the sort of unforgiving power player that remembered the names of investors who had crossed portfolio companies in the past, or who had disseminated unflattering portraits of YC, and blacklisted them from any YC dealings, or from the minds of YC founders. Do we have to be careful what we say on HN?

Not because of YC. I think that what people say here, is only a fairly small data point, for them. But I would encourage folks to consider their approach, in general, whenever we are in a professional context (and, despite the casual nature of HN, this is very much a “professional context”). I think that some few people here, are able to post in a truly anonymous fashion, but most folks could be doxxed fairly easily,…

[dead]

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#78

Post by ta67961138 »

aguaviva wrote: post #72
ec109685 wrote: post #3

The way YC closed ranks was my favorite anecdote from Chaos Monkey’s. I always find it interesting though YC leaders are extremely against cancel culture, but when it comes to business, its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands.

Its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that?

> Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that?

That would probably result in *never working in the valley again...*, so I wouldn't be surprised if GP would skip citing.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#79

Post by allenjhyang »

miltava wrote: post #74
thierrydamiba wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re vastly underestimating how hard it is to pick winners and stifle competition. Using your logic, if it was so easy why didn’t Google stop OpenAI? Meta? Perplexity?

I think that maybe we underestimate how hard it is to choose the right companies to “kill” when you’re a competitor. The default mode is to say that they won’t go anywhere because of many factors (they don’t have the resources, the access, the capability, etc). But sometimes they do. And in restrospect it’s obvious, but it’s not by the time you had the chance to stop it. And I think it’s probably good.

Also hard to marshal the resources you need internally to "kill" a competitor. Sometimes the way to handicap a startup rival is to build the feature / product yourself, but then the bigtech firm runs into the challenges of moving a large org quickly.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#80

Post by [deleted] »

kmmlng wrote: post #27
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not because of YC. I think that what people say here, is only a fairly small data point, for them. But I would encourage folks to consider their approach, in general, whenever we are in a professional context (and, despite the casual nature of HN, this is very much a “professional context”). I think that some few people here, are able to post in a truly anonymous fashion, but most folks could be doxxed fairly easily,…

I think it's important to distinguish between two directions here: 1) can someone figure out who I am based on my profile and 2) can someone find my profile if they know who I am. I care much more about the second, because the odds of someone attempting the second are much higher.

[deleted]
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