Happy birthday YC!
Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
71–80 of 317 posts
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#72On Twitter, with all that's going on?
What’s going on?
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#73It seems the first few batches of YC were VERY successful. But, the number of successful YC companies I can think of from the last 10 years of batches is very minimal despite them investing in thousands of companies. Makes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype wise). Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
A) Very true! B) peaked* :) C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place." EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & A…
> tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?
Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak, Marshmallow.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#74Hacker News is just 19 years old? I remember my professor at university mentioning it when I told him I am using .net for my project. According to him I should use OS language like Java and recommended me to HN. I thought it is much older. Time flies.
I wonder if he is raeading HN still...
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#75I thank dang for putting up with me.
... with all of us.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe median time to unicorn status is now about 7 years, so this is not as uncertain as you think. In other words, 50% of YC's 7-year old unicorns have already showed up. The number is higher for older companies.
Dropbox and Airbnb were superhot companies within 2 or 3 years after YC. My first Airbnb booking was in 2013, and that I felt like a late adopter.
Yes, but average time to unicorn status has been increasing since the time of Dropbox and Airbnb. I assume you can draw more inferences from companies that are earlier-stage, too.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#77YC changed my life, and I'll be forever grateful to PG, Jessica, and the team for taking a chance on a homeschooled, GED-wielding solo founder.
It's really good to read those stories.
I applied twice (once alone, once with a really amazing co-founder) and it felt like applying to a large faceless corporation, both times.
Automatic rejection after 30 days with zero feedback.
Kind of sucky, to be honest.
I'd just love to hear that the idea was shit, the application was shit, that my face was ugly, or anything, really.
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do think YC has become chasers of the latest trend rather than creating the trend. That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet. Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing. Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care. I think now I see…
> That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet. Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums. All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They…
and before that, there were literal community message boards. corkboard at the grocery store. people gossiped before there was Facebook. the only real innovation was going from verbal communication to the written word, but now with TikTok, we're back at verbal communication, just with a lot of extra steps. there's no other innovation that's happened in the world since writing, isn't there?
Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#79https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 is always fun to look at, 18.5 years ago.
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Re: Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a cofounder it forces you to get in the habit of delegating really early on. Prolific solo founders like pieter levels just do everything themselves, which is great for their ego but not enough to build a venture scale business.
Solo founders can have employees.
They have a disproven ability to find people and rally them around a common cause though. Whether it's due to their personality or the idea or some other thing like timing, the inability to find a co-founder could be considered signal, for some.