Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students • Hacker News Board

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#61

Post by mikert89 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 1:38 AM UTC

sobellian wrote: post #53

mikert89 wrote: post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

Having done this, and acknowledging the fuzzy definition of "rich" etc - going through YC after graduating is a great career move. You have to do everything yourself so you learn a lot. About business, about a specific industry, about programming, whatever. You make connections. But unless you walk an absolute golden path (hey it happens), > 90% chance you don't get rich. > 99.9% chance you won't get rich by 30.

Not denying you can fail, but one year spent on YC and failing puts you in a position to start another business

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#62

Post by appleaday1 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

or you buy bitcoin

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#63

Post by bangaladore » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #27

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on public exit and liquidity event information, startups still remain a lottery ticket for most. 90% of startups fail entirely, for example (CB Insights). YC startups have more longevity, and more get to a Series A then non YC startups, but the best batches based on performance have been between 2009 and 2013. 10% achieve an exit, 4.5% became unicorns. Only 17 companies backed by YC (out of almost 5k) have gone…

10% chance at millions fresh out school sounds great!

10% of 0.01% of people is probably closer. 0.01% is probably way to high even.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#64

Post by thebigman433 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

This really is not true, basically every engineering job in the Bay Area will set you up with enough money to live extremely well.

YC startups are a bit above average, but still most startups fail.

If you care about building wealth, taking a stable engineering position straight out of college and working hard is a great path

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#65

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 1:47 AM UTC

mikert89 wrote: post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

[deleted]

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#66

Post by raspasov » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 1:52 AM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16

mikert89 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alot of them do, not only that, they build skills that help them start their next company. Many of which are bootstrapped and profitable. This whole idea that startups are a complete lottery ticket is not only false, its increasingly less false, more money is being made now in startups than ever

Based on public exit and liquidity event information, startups still remain a lottery ticket for most. 90% of startups fail entirely, for example (CB Insights). YC startups have more longevity, and more get to a Series A then non YC startups, but the best batches based on performance have been between 2009 and 2013. 10% achieve an exit, 4.5% became unicorns. Only 17 companies backed by YC (out of almost 5k) have gone…

I have a problem with the analogy “lottery ticket”. I think analogies are helpful as long as we are talking perhaps a singe order of magnitude difference between the two things.

The chance of winning most popular US lotteries is approximately 1 in 300,000,000. In comparison, the chance of IPO-ing a YC company is approximately 1 in 300. You can count how many orders of magnitude of difference that is.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#67

Post by charlie0 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 2:01 AM UTC

htrp wrote: post #41

mikert89 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in NYC, I have met alot of very rich startup founders. But not only that, lots of people making 50k a month from a startup they built post YC, raised no VC, and have no boss. Its an outdated take to think people arent doing this

You live in NYC.... there are a lot of "startup founders" who already come from generational family wealth

Are you trying to tell me those who take the most risk already have a safety net?!

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#68

Post by fullofideas » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 2:01 AM UTC

thebigman433 wrote: post #64

mikert89 wrote: post #6

This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

This really is not true, basically every engineering job in the Bay Area will set you up with enough money to live extremely well. YC startups are a bit above average, but still most startups fail. If you care about building wealth, taking a stable engineering position straight out of college and working hard is a great path

This. There is a huge opportunity cost, even more so for the “best and brightest” (by whatever definition). The odds of striking it rich are really not in your favor. You may be better off working at big tech for a few years, save up, let the money work for you while you explore your entrepreneurial urge. You have a cushion and maybe that will let you take on bigger and bolder bets than what you could when you come out of college, and you maybe forced to take a “relatively safer” bet because you also have to make money soonish

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#69

Post by toomuchtodo » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 2:02 AM UTC

raspasov wrote: post #66

toomuchtodo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on public exit and liquidity event information, startups still remain a lottery ticket for most. 90% of startups fail entirely, for example (CB Insights). YC startups have more longevity, and more get to a Series A then non YC startups, but the best batches based on performance have been between 2009 and 2013. 10% achieve an exit, 4.5% became unicorns. Only 17 companies backed by YC (out of almost 5k) have gone…

I have a problem with the analogy “lottery ticket”. I think analogies are helpful as long as we are talking perhaps a singe order of magnitude difference between the two things. The chance of winning most popular US lotteries is approximately 1 in 300,000,000. In comparison, the chance of IPO-ing a YC company is approximately 1 in 300. You can count how many orders of magnitude of difference that is.

I buy a lottery ticket for $1, in a moment, with no further effort. A YC startup founder grinds for years, if not a decade, to reach IPO with unknown opportunity costs. They are not the same. How many lottery tickets over how many lottery draws to equalize the odds is a fun thought experiment to quantify a dollar value for the option premium.

17 YC IPOs over how many total YC founder years (Lifetime YC companies * # of founders * years YC company active, roughly)?

(I’ve put a lot of thought into being a founder, from an aggressively data driven perspective about how to spend time, which is non renewable)

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#70

Post by cde-v » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 2:02 AM UTC

htrp wrote: post #42

cde-v wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% at this point. The industry's leading AI for start-up ideas has run out of AI for _____ suggestions. It was pretty obvious they were scraping the bottom of the barrel a month ago when I made this list from their current batch: Acrely — AI for HVAC administration Aden — AI for ERP operations AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation Agentin AI — AI for enterprise agents AgentMail — AI for agent email infr…

Please tell me your AI tool did that for you and you didn't do it manually

I'm actually the CEO of a startup that created the very first AI for AI for _____ list generation service. Already in our 347,985th round of funding, currently valued at $382,457,203.