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Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

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Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#151

Post by fragmede »

LittleTimothy wrote: post #33
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standing against cancel culture is not the same as standing against social sanctions in any way, shape, or form. The problem with cancel culture is not that it's a social sanction. The problem is it's a particularly dysfunctional sort. "They're against cancel culture... so why didn't they invite me to their house party? What hypocrites!"

I think the difference between cancel culture and just freedom of association is the difference between "I don't want to work with you because of X" and "I'm going to influence others not to work with you because of X". Whether that be anons on twitter calling up your employer to get you fired, or PG having a quiet work with his friends over at some VC firm, they're both the same strain of toxic.

> "I'm going to influence others not to work with you because of X"

What X is, is material though. So as much as we want to be able to simplify and not get lost in the weeds of interpersonal drama, we can't just say any behavior in that vague direction is toxic. If X is "he is a bad person and is going to make false claims and lie and cheat and steal from you, has repeatedly done this, and there is legally admissible evidence of this", that's a totally different thing from X is "he looked at me funny and, I dunno, I just feel a bad energy coming from him" amplified by the social media megaphone.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#152

Post by kmeisthax »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #57
LittleTimothy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference between cancel culture and just freedom of association is the difference between "I don't want to work with you because of X" and "I'm going to influence others not to work with you because of X". Whether that be anons on twitter calling up your employer to get you fired, or PG having a quiet work with his friends over at some VC firm, they're both the same strain of toxic.

I think there may be a few other differences. For example, are people ever given the opportunity to change their behavior before the sanction gets applied? Does the punishment fit the crime? Is there public shaming involved? Do we default to public shaming anyone who says a word in defense of the person who is being sanctioned? (I would say that's the single most pathological feature of cancel culture, actually.) Are…

> Do we default to public shaming anyone who says a word in defense of the person who is being sanctioned? (I would say that's the single most pathological feature of cancel culture, actually.)

From the article:

> PG shared his anti-Adchemy game plan. In a nutshell: YC would anathematize Adchemy’s VCs, and declare that they’d never do business with YC again unless they straightened this out. Knowing PG, not only would they be disinvited from Demo Day, but PG would probably also steer companies to take money from other funds instead. Given that many if not most YC funding rounds were oversubscribed with investors, an excommunicated investor could be excluded without damaging the fund-raising company at all.

In other words, yes, YC was engaging in what the US Government would call "secondary sanctions": actions taken to cut the sanctioned individual or group off from support.

This and the other things you mentioned have both happened and not happened in various instances of cancellation. I think you might have some motivated reasoning going on here. It sounds like you are trying to make a distinction between sanctions imposed by people you agree with and people you don't. This is a distinction without a difference. Secondary sanctions are the most effective form of sanctions[0]. Everyone imposes secondary sanctions if they feel they can get away with it, because sanctions without secondary sanctions have no teeth.

[0] Why? Simple: they force everyone in the room to not only make a choice between the intolerant and the sanctioned, but if they choose the intolerant, to also enforce that same decision upon others. In other words, they're "GPL viral".

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#153

Post by tfehring »

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.

It wouldn’t have to scale, but I’m glad that it did. It’s likely that there’s been somewhat more innovation and economic growth in the world over the last ~decade than there would have been if YC stayed smaller.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#154

Post by llamaimperative »

fragmede wrote: post #147
llamaimperative wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those lead to a need to scale. Those are enabling factors, at best.

There needs to be an ROI, YC isn't funding companies out of the goodness of their hearts. So the additional size means they have to bet on Uber and Lyft and Flywheel and every other competitor in that space in order to guarantee a return, because they only win if they bet on every horse. You can't do that if you keep small since the number of entrants got bigger. Hence scaling is necessary for them.

Sure, but that's not the argument that was being made. This is just generically: VC works by power laws so larger portfolios are generally preferable to smaller ones.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#155

Post by kmeisthax »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #63
wslh wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Welcome to late-stage capitalism. Good reads/resources about this? I started reading "What's Our Problem" [1] but find it difficult to find "non-partisan" resources nowadays. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...

I don't think there is any scholarly basis for the term "late-stage capitalism". It's just a meme that kids started using. Power-hungry, unprincipled people will exist regardless of a country's economic system. But people are very imaginative in attributing various social ills to capitalism in particular.

"Late-stage capitalism" is just "reimposing feudalism[0]" - i.e. going back to an economic system in which the vast majority of an economy's wealth is rents charged on the use of valuable property. "Capitalism" as is propagandized in capitalist societies is an economy in which the majority of wealth is profits earned as the return on a risk-bearing investment. Being beholden to a free market economy means you have limits to your power - not great limits, but limits none-the-less.

In other words, capitalism is a necessary transition between feudalism and feudalism.

[0] Insamuch as the term even has meaning. Medievalists and historical researchers will correctly call this out as an overloaded term.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#156

Post by eitally »

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

I'd add HTC's mobile phone unit to the list of strategically important Google acquisitions (and prehaps Dropcam, too). Without either of those -- even with all the fits & starts, they'd never have gotten to where they are today, building pretty great hardware with pretty good support and a decent supply chain, and largely with "good" software on top.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#157

Post by eitally »

throwup238 wrote: post #4

> This changed in the early 2010s, in part due to the emergence of the tech bubble of that decade (propped up, no doubt, by low interest rates). But it was also changed by the emergence of a new generation of rich ex-founders and early-employees — the result of the Google IPO, and also a smattering of startup acquisitions over the course of the late 1990s and 2000s. These newly rich individuals became investors, and…

I agree with this. And once that kinda tailed off a bit, it was time for the cloud firms (plus Nvidia, and for a time, Zoom, Tesla & Netflix) to create renewed demand.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#158

Post by fallingknife »

7e wrote: post #81

This kind of extra-judicial tampering cuts short the process, which exists for a reason. There are two sides to every story--I have every reason to expect there was a valid reason for a lawsuit here. Such mafia-like behavior is unsettling.

An ex employer suing employees who left to found a startup and you actually think it's a legit suit? I have every reason to expect it's nothing but bullying / a tactic to scare other employees who have the same idea. I see no evidence that it was legit.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#159

Post by kmeisthax »

sofixa wrote: post #29
nabla9 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always find it interesting That's not interesting. That's not understanding capitalism. It's all about Incentives. The idea that business leaders can be ever considered genuine political or cultural voice or actor is the problem. Silicon Valley and hacker culture has created an atmosphere of business politicians and for some reason hackers take them seriously and don't laugh at their faces. The talk is just empty…

> The idea that business leaders can be ever considered genuine political or cultural voice or actor is the problem. Silicon Valley and hacker culture has created an atmosphere of business politicians and for some reason hackers take them seriously and don't laugh at their faces. > Traditionally business people don't get into discussions of culture or politics directly. They might work in the background, but never di…

> "War is a Racket" by a Marine general who took part in the banana wars describes this nicely

Smedley D. Butler, who a year prior was paid off by J. P. Morgan to coup the US government and immediately went to Congress to blow the lid on the plot.

The Wikipedia article lists a lot of people who think the plot was more of a joke than a reality, but I suspect had it been kept secret it would have eventually been executed.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#160

Post by will-burner »

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.

Capitalism baby, you always need to grow to increase share holder value.
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