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Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

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Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#91

Post by jonstewart »

rsp1984 wrote: post #60

> Adchemy named each of AdGrok’s co-founders personally in the suit, meaning that if they lost, the founders would be personally liable. The amounts involved in the suit effectively meant that all three co-founders would have been financially ruined. I've been there too. Named personally. I think most people don't realize how stressful and damaging this is. In most cases it's because there's some kind of well-intenti…

Early in my career I was named personally in a lawsuit against my employer (filed by a customer who’d been promised features that hadn’t been delivered) and it was a powerful lesson to me to be circumspect in my email and careful of my reputation. Fortunately the lawsuit went away and didn’t cause me much stress after that initial shock.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#92

Post by jonstewart »

pjmorris wrote: post #55

I recently read 'The Power Broker', Robert Caro, which describes how Robert Moses came to acquire power over park, road, bridge, and tunnel construction in New York City and State for over 40 years. There are strong parallels with the story here.

The Power Broker is supposed to be a story of moral failure and how power corrupts, and it is, but it’s also the absolute best how-to guide.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#93

Post by sebastiennight »

naming_the_user wrote: post #34
geysersam wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the horse race has 10 contestants why would the odds be 1000:1?

Not everyone is competing. In the economy as a whole how many people are even business owners? Most people go to work and price take at their job without negotiating, without even moving area, without even studying, etc. You also have multi-company-monopoly effects for lack of a better term, e.g. if there are 10 competitors that make semiconductors - _everyone_ needs semiconductors, then if you pick the appropriate b…

Is "oligopoly" the word you were looking for?

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#94

Post by adastra22 »

acdha wrote: post #75
adastra22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ret…

This is the traditional role of regulation, yes. Note that if what they were filter out for were things like union sympathies, it would be illegal.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#95

Post by adastra22 »

tomhoward wrote: post #73
adastra22 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well that is contrary to what is stated in the article/book.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#96

Post by jmknoll »

ethbr1 wrote: post #82
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?

> why didn’t Google Because hubris. One glaring flaw of well-capitalized large tech (perhaps the only one) is thinking they can build something better internally, when they have enough cash to simply buy best of breed off the market. At times Google understood this: Android 2005, YouTube 2006, Writely/GoogleDocs 2006, DoubleClick 2007, Motorola Mobility 2012, Waze 2013, DeepMind 2014

Either thinking they can build something better internally, thinking the new thing doesn't matter, or realizing that it does matter but not having the ability to move fast and commercialize it.

e.g. Microsoft circa 2000 didn't think they could build a better internet. They just thought that the internet didn't really matter that much. Google in 2022 knew that LLMs mattered, and had spent a ton of money, but OpenAI just got a better product to market faster.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#97

Post by uoaei »

rqtwteye wrote: post #89
cj wrote: post #6

If you’re wondering what to take away from this article: the simple take away is that YC has the power to get what it wants, for the companies it wants. If you happen to be in YC’s good graces, they will reward you in ways described in the article. If you’re not, they won’t take the time. I was in YC in 2012 (2 yrs after the founder writing this article, and one of the last years PG was directly involved). By that ti…

Why does everything need to scale? Why couldn't they stick to taking a few high quality companies every year? There was enough money to be made that way. Seems the belief is that everything needs to scale until it doesn't work anymore.

So you're saying the "Peter principle" extends beyond tech employee performance and to tech company funding.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#98

Post by throw4847285 »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #62
shafyy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. If you believe for one second that money and power hungry people have any kind of principles, you have not been paying attention. Cancel culture, woke, left, right, center, free speech – they will say whatever to get what they want on these topics, and change their opinion the next day without any real consequences. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.

I think it depends on the person. Elon Musk changes his mind a lot, but PG generally seems pretty consistent. It's not necessarily a bad thing to change your mind, either. My guess is that if you carefully read PG's criticisms of woke culture, they are narrow enough that they wouldn't apply to what YC does against misbehaving VCs. For example, if you read between the lines, this essay does a good job of explaining so…

My takeaway that I'll bluntly admit is based on being another one of those people who won't shut up about Robert Caro's book The Power Broker is this: the mark of true political genius is the ability to constantly take in new information that challenges your existing viewpoints, while also having the force of will to try and make your values manifest despite knowing that your views on the best way to do that will change over time. Robert Moses (the subject of the book) was an unparalleled genius when it came to enacting his will, but he was a complete idiot when it came to actually observing the world to see what the impact of his will would be. I think democracy at its best should prevent those kind of people from gaining power (but of course it doesn't).

Elon Musk can be easily dismissed as someone who seems to be constantly changing his mind, but is actually deeply unwell, addicted to drugs, and surrounded by sycophants. His mind is about as interesting as his friends Kanye West and Donald Trump: he was very good at one thing, it made him extremely successful, it entirely broke his brain. Graham and his cadre of Silicon Valley pseudo-philosophers are more like Moses: I don't trust them to have enough contact with life outside a rarified bubble to be able to speak to issues that concern normal people.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#99

Post by acdha »

adastra22 wrote: post #94
acdha wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ret…

This is the traditional role of regulation, yes. Note that if what they were filter out for were things like union sympathies, it would be illegal.

Yes, but how would you tell? Unless they straight up tell you why you were turned down it’s really hard to know what someone was thinking when they say “I just didn’t think they had the right idea”.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#100

Post by throw4847285 »

pjmorris wrote: post #55

I recently read 'The Power Broker', Robert Caro, which describes how Robert Moses came to acquire power over park, road, bridge, and tunnel construction in New York City and State for over 40 years. There are strong parallels with the story here.

Oh man, glad I'm not the only person who won't shut up about the Power Broker. I think the best takeaway is that a bubble forms around the powerful where they cease to have to engage with the world as it is.
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