Would Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator?

Both Apple and Microsoft started at a time when personal computers barely existed and thus a couple of guys with very little capital could build a computer kit or code a blackjack game in a day.

One key difference its revenue: Allen often mentions how any piece of code brought money to the company, simple apps that are 100% free today would have been sold for tens of millions back then. Same with hardware, which is why Apple could get roughly 1 million (in today's dollars) to leave the garage.

Basically both companies were in the right place at the right time: right before the PC revolution began. A YC-equivalent at that time would've appeared around 1982, after IBM launched the "official" PC with DOS and the ball was already rolling.

That was the time when a lot of other startups appeared, like Amiga, Adobe, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, etc...

Note that none of those companies were as successful as Apple and Microsoft were, in fact some went chapter 11 and disappeared.

> both companies were in the right place at the right time

When looking back on a very successful company, it seems they were all in the right place at the right time. Adding to Microsoft and Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter

I admit that I'm not intimately familiar with YC's and pg's preaching but my impression of what I've read and seen from pg is that he is very insistent on startups having a solid business model and on them focusing on customer acquisition. And I don't remember having ever heard pg advocate quick exits. This is at odds with the assumptions you've based your post on. I might be wrong though - happy to get corrected by YC alumni.

As for "changing the world", this is an expression that's as meaningless as it gets. Of course everybody wants to change the world, why wouldn't you? And since everybody lives in their own world anyway, in a way, everybody changes the world. For example, I personally find Facebook to be one of the most useless product I've ever used. I genuinely wouldn't notice if Facebook disappeared tomorrow. On the other side, for my deaf teenage cousin, Facebook literally changed his world. He went from being the weirdo disabled boy in the corner of the room that nobody would talk to to being a perfectly normal teenager communicating on Facebook like any other teenager.

So the YC startups you're talking about might not have changed your world but you can be sure that they've changed quite a few other people's world. Arguably, Steve Jobs, who you cite in example, has hardly changed the world for most people. Had he not be there, computers and smartphone would have been there anyway and would have more or less done what they do today (and I'm saying this as a big admirer of Apple who has discovered computing on a Mac SE and is typing this post on a MacBook Pro).

When it comes to bigger goals like ending wars or poverty, fixing the global warming problem or space exploration, it would be incredibly naive to believe that you can tackle the problem as a nobody (i.e. as a young, first time entrepreneur with no cash and no network).

Elon Musk didn't start with a crazy-big-truly-change-the-world project. He, you know, did Paypal first. Just like what the Stripe guys (a YC startup) are doing. Bill Gates didn't start by tackling the issue of poverty, illnesses and illiteracy in Africa. He started by writing an interpreter. You have to start somewhere and this somewhere is generally relatively small but gives you what yo need (knowledge, experience, network, cash) to follow up with something bigger afterwards. That's my understanding of what YC is all about.

Not that I know of. Although it would only be non-YC companies (no YC company has IPOd yet - Dropbox and Airbnb are the likely candidates but Weebly has also hinted that they might be in a position to consider it soon)

You mean would Steve Wozniak & Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator? (Oh yeah, that other Steve...)

No! They were too busy hacking phones and building things people wanted to waste time to go through the application process of YC. Money was chasing them.

This is true for most runaway successes, they were all true hackers that broke things: Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Not the "hackers" who are asking for $125k salary...

They didn't care about the money, they didn't care about the allure, they didn't care about the status. They just wanted to break things and make them work better, legality aside.

But the landscape has changed, and Steve & Steve are not just starting Apple and YC would not be around if Apple wasn't started when it was, so it's a silly question be it a fun thought experiment.

I think YC supports the companies that shoot for the moon, but people aren't willing to take the risk and say no to acquisitions of $20-$100m because that is the short term business model of today and people just want to take their $5m and show off.

"The approach of remaining independent, and investing profits back into to the company followed by technology zealots such as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs is unattractive to an investor."

They only way to counter this is to build a great product with little to no money and have it grow like a weed, then negotiate like a mob boss to keep the majority of the voting rights of the company.

That's enough for now, time for focus...