I'd prefer the US government revise the operating practices of agencies like the SBIR[1] to work more like the Grameen foundation[2] to help entrepreneurs of all kinds establish or expand businesses (not just the tech/media companies which are YC's focus) and then put a few billion dollars into it. Extending 40 billion dollars of microcredit loans would make a lot of sense to me in any kind of economy.
What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
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Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#12Ha right, how the government allocates money, "Paul Graham" would spend $39,999,999,992.07 on coke and hookers and the founders would split a frappuccino.
Where does a Frappucino costs $7.93 ?
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#13The sudden lack of scarcity would cause the quality of the investments to plummet. YC uses its money carefully because the supply is not unending. When you only have one shot, you aim.
not really applicable, since YC invests in 40-45 companies at a time
edit: I was talking about the "one shot" comment
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#14Does anyone else have a problem with assumption #1?
"First off, let's take out 25% for running Y-Combinator. This leaves $30B of cash to dole out."
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#15I suspect many medium to large tech companies would come grinding to a halt as 1 million engineers left to start their own companies...
But perhaps I overestimate such employees' desire to give up job security for the excitement of a startup.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#16This is just silly. Ignoring the fact that YCombinator probably wouldn't know what to do with $40 billion (a lot of rice and beans?), the jobs created by such an investment would benefit about 1% of the country -- smart, risk-taking, well-educated young men who are willing to live in California. The point of saving GM is only nominally to save GM. The point of saving GM is to save the industrial base of a big chunk o…
Well yeah this idea is silly, but his original point about saving GM (that it's also silly) probably still stands. His figure for GM employees is old (2005). Last I saw, the current unionized hourly workforce is 60k employees (see link below). If you simply gave those employees $125k each, it would only have cost the government $7.5 billion. That kind of money should allow all those employees plenty of time to find o…
The argument about GM is the silliest part. I think it's somewhat plausible that YC could find a way to use $40Bn productively.
Again, the point of this bailout is not just to save 60,000 current GM jobs. The point is to save the GM, the GM supply chain, the local economies of several large industrial states, and the millions of people in an economic ecosystem that has built up around GM. Looking at only the 60,000 jobs at GM is taking an absurdly narrow view of the situation.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#17I think a lot of you are missing the point. I could be wrong but I think the gist of the message is to look at what 40B into ycombinator would mean in terms of value added, employment created, etc. (with the wild assumption that it all scales). His point is to heavily criticize the 40B bailout of GM.
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Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#18The sudden lack of scarcity would cause the quality of the investments to plummet. YC uses its money carefully because the supply is not unending. When you only have one shot, you aim.
not really applicable, since YC invests in 40-45 companies at a time edit: I was talking about the "one shot" comment
for 40B, people will get into starting up for the salary.
don't start a company to make ends meet, start it to execute a haunting vision that you can't get rid of (ever wonder why people quit their jobs, often to their financial detriment, to startup? yeah, it's a curse.)
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#19Ha right, how the government allocates money, "Paul Graham" would spend $39,999,999,992.07 on coke and hookers and the founders would split a frappuccino.
Surely Paul Graham does not need that many hookers.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#20If someone wanted to give us that much money to invest, I'd probably do it, just to see what would happen. We could probably cook up some schemes for scaling. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a lot like scaling software. You run into a lot of unexpected problems, but you also end up finding ways to solve most of them. Plus you get unforeseen effects of scale, some of them good.
Please do not try to "cook up" small start ups. It's better people juice their own ingenuity on their own time, when they have something big at stake.
I grew up in a communist country and I remember how the state gave allowances to housewives in order to invigorate women's businesses. It didn't turn out that well; most women, like most men, are not interested in the ungodly effort and the labor of love that goes into enterprising.
[Edit: specifically, there came up a cottage industry of document fixers who could get you bankruptcy documents so you get to keep the federal investment AND get compensation. People looted the fund.]