Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 127 posts

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#101

Post by corimaith »

seizethecheese wrote: post #37
daedrdev wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this is impossible given how many games flop each year.

VC math follows a power law and expects almost all investments to flop, and the one winner to pay for it all. The question here is not about the flops it’s: are the winners big enough?

Isn't this the exact logic behind the stagnation in media right now? The risk aversion/stakes is so high that real risks aren't taken and we get bland sequel/remake slop.

Ironically when media culture is at is at its healthiest is when winners are diverse and common, and more importantly smaller shows that try out new things can still break even, with periodic flops being generally tolerable. That low risk culture for attempting new ideas is precisely what creates legendary franchises later when a few of these hit everything right.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#102

Post by throw-12-16 »

deadbabe wrote: post #76
spacemarine1 wrote: post #2

Y Combinator forged a long-term, high-trust ecosystem to the benefit of all tech founders. The video games industry needs to do the same.

The game industry needs no such thing. You can make profitable games very cheaply, and business models are simple and well understood. It’s a matter of just making a good game and getting it good exposure to customers.

You should check out BigMode.

Dunkey is building a game incubator of sorts and there are some interesting titles coming out of it.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#103

Post by paganel »

Is YC still an (upwards going) thing? Looks like their best days are behind them, I'd say 2018-2019 was its heyday.

I don't feel bad for Paul Graham and his partners, I'm sure he's got his bag and then some, but from the outside it looks like it (the YC-adjacent thing, that is) lost big(-ish) when it came to riding the AI hype train.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#105

Post by YetAnotherNick »

onion2k wrote: post #92
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They majorly select a kind of founders as a first filter (good engineers from good companies, ivy league, ex founders etc.), and then they look into the ideas as a second filter, and the third and the least important is the process in which they just spend 15 minutes interviewing and maybe another 15 minutes looking into the application.

The zeroth filter is 'people who apply to YC' though, which YC can only really control by managing their brand and marketing and by approaching potential founders directly and suggesting they apply (I assume that happens; I don't know though). That limits who they can invest in far more than any of their own criteria. There's also another way in that circumvents all the other filters - being a founder at an existing…

Yes but the discussion was about it being hard for them to filter. They don't have to filter some startup which doesn't apply.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#106

Post by baxtr »

Grosvenor wrote: post #47
baxtr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good book on that subject by Stephen Bungay called "The Art of Action". He explains the concept of Auftragstaktik . Great book, although a bit hard to read.

There's also Franz Osinga's book Scince, strategy, and war, which covers John Boyd's work in detail.

I think OODA is fundamentally different to Auftragstaktik.

Auftragstaktik describes a clear purpose / intent. Like: capture the bridge (but: we don’t care how you do it since we can’t foresee specific circumstances)

OODA describes a process of decision making.

So, Auftragstaktik answers who decides what and why.

OODA answers how decisions are made and updated over time.

They’re complementary but different.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#108

Post by sillyfluke »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #100
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a huge fan of Mission Command. If you want to read more, I'd recommend the Army's official doc on it: https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34403-ADP_6-... (it's 110 pages but you really only need to read Chapter 1). This was eye-opening. I used to think militaries were completely centralized and top-down, but a friend who was an officer explained this to me and pointed me to the literature. It was fasc…

The YPG, an armed anarchist military group, defeated Islamic State in North East Syria and more or less founded their own country without a traditional military command structure. Instead they had loosely coordinated teams.

And how do you suppose IS gained all its territory in the first place? fyi the current president of Syria is ex-Al-Qaeda/el-Nusra/HTS.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#109

Post by Traster »

alsetmusic wrote: post #91

And yet YC still makes bets on pretty easily detected BS like Pickle VR[0]. That's a startup I sure wouldn't trust. Pickle is one of the most egregious examples, but I've noticed a trend of these fly-by-night operations with YC backing getting found out as frauds over the last handful of years. I don't know if it's happening more or if I just wasn't aware of them or if the rate was the same but people started talking…

It is the nature of YC that you're going to get instances like Pickle. YC invests at a very early stage in lots of companies. 40% are literally just an idea. It isn't a scam that one of the companies pivot, it's expected. They're meant to work on their idea, and if it doesn't work or they have a better idea they pivot.

What Pickle is doing is essentially they're falling on the wrong line of "fake it to you make it", it would be totally fine to do what they're doing (allowing pre-orders with a $200 deposit for a Q4 '26 product) if they just weren't lying about the specs. It's pretty clear they aren't going to deliver anything like what they've promised, but that is just ambition. The whole point of YC is that 1 out of 1000 of these companies are going to deliver something revolutionary and you don't get that without 1000 of them trying to do something revolutionary.

Having said that, you only need to watch the launch video to realise the CEO is total moron ("If everyone wore the same pair of glasses, what would they look like?"). But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do. YC are going to lose their investment on that company.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#110

Post by philipallstar »

csa wrote: post #85
conartist6 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the next 10 years, no, I think the market will course correct within that time frame. AI is the sauce that's being slathered on everything right now and demand for it is driving record valuations, particularly for AI startups and their founders. That demand is all investor-driven though: investors are falling over themselves to make AI investments, while consumers are not actually especially eager to have all hu…

> That demand is all investor-driven though: investors are falling over themselves to make AI investments Largely true. > while consumers are not actually especially eager to have all human contact progressively stripped from their lives Hmm… I agree with this sentiment, but I think it’s mostly a straw man. There are many things that AI can do well that people will end up embracing directly or indirectly. Medical sca…

> Medical scans is one big one, imho.

People have been trying this for a long time, as it's an obvious win, but have struggled so far. Perhaps newer models will help, though.

Post reply on HN