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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

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Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#121

Post by jedberg »

bko wrote: post #103
mattcantstop wrote: post #62

There is a part in the Netflix culture doc where it talks about how sometimes people do bad things, and Netflix tries to not overcorrect by implementing burdensome policies on the company as a knee-jerk reaction to a single bad actor. The conclusion (YC's brand has been tarnished because of the lower quality companies in their larger batches who do bad things) doesn't follow from the evidence of this ONE company doin…

I think the bigger issue is that the main signal to YC (and other elite institutions) is the acceptance rate ( The main criticism I have of YC is their constants chants of "everyone should apply!". Here is what you commonly hear: YC: You should apply to YC! Person: But I don’t have a product YC: You should still apply, we let in a lot of people with just an idea! Person: But I don’t have a co-founder YC: You should s…

The reason they want you to apply is twofold -- the application itself is a good exercise in getting you to think about things you should be thinking about. Honestly even if you have no intention at all of applying to YC you should still fill out the application for yourself, it makes you think about important things.

And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them. If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.

It has nothing to do with "juicing the numbers".

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#122

Post by pj_mukh »

a1371 wrote: post #108
paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

For the uninitiated like myself, PearAi just took the source code of continue.dev (not fork, they copy pasted) and did some clunky work on it. That was their entry to YC.

"did some clunky work on it. That was their entry to YC"

For more context, YC doesn't judge your code, never has. It was never a code quality competition. Orthogonally, they do judge the results (user metrics).

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#123

Post by KerryJones »

dgreensp wrote: post #106

Full disclosure, I'm a YC alum whose last start-up was acquired by Google, who applied to this batch and didn't get an interview. YC is not the stamp of quality it once was, to be sure, though it still works as social proof, because investors (especially VCs) want to invest in companies other investors like (or failing that, companies they imagine other investors would like). YC would say that they aren't trying to b…

This hits pretty dead center from what I've seen.

You really hit home for at #3, that's the type of companies I want to see.

If you start such a fund, I'd really enjoy working on that project.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#124

Post by JohnMakin »

octopod12 wrote: post #113
noobermin wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think something people might be missing is the context around this post, which is that the founders are being dragged on twitter, essentially. Since a lot of you hate the site, I'll summarise briefly: one of the founders did a thread starting with the following post: " I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang We're building PearAI, an open source A…

The founders showed hustle, as every founder must. nothing wrong with that in my book. But they need adult-guidance on communication. You dont go around twitter boasting about your 270K job etc. They need to show grown up hustle (grit, perseverence, etc). Not high-school (mine is bigger than yours) hustle.

The simpler break-down here is that they are crappy con artists and need to be be better at con-artisting. Which is fine, but please let's not pretend it's very different.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#125

Post by pdonis »

jedberg wrote: post #121
bko wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the bigger issue is that the main signal to YC (and other elite institutions) is the acceptance rate ( The main criticism I have of YC is their constants chants of "everyone should apply!". Here is what you commonly hear: YC: You should apply to YC! Person: But I don’t have a product YC: You should still apply, we let in a lot of people with just an idea! Person: But I don’t have a co-founder YC: You should s…

The reason they want you to apply is twofold -- the application itself is a good exercise in getting you to think about things you should be thinking about. Honestly even if you have no intention at all of applying to YC you should still fill out the application for yourself, it makes you think about important things. And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously…

> If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.

Would it? With numbers that large, how could anyone possibly do a meaningful comparison and pick out the twenty or thirty or fifty that would get in?

In other words, if it's obvious to everybody that you are getting too many applications to meaningfully evaluate all of them, they everybody knows that you are not meaningfully evaluating all of them. You're applying some kind of mindless algorithmic filter to narrow down the possibilities. But that's not YC's brand. YC's brand is providing meaningful evaluation of startups. Once that brand is undermined, it's gone.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#126

Post by KerryJones »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #72

It’s true. With 40k applications and roughly only 100s accepted… they likely only chose pearai because of nepotism. It would be self sabotage if they regularly do this so likely only a few companies are selected this way with pearai being one. The above is a very educated guess on pearai, but whether or not YC engages in nepotism or not is unmistakable to me. They do and there is real corruption in the selection proc…

"Yes pg fired Sam Altman from YC."

How can you be so certain?

https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/30/paul-graham-claims-altman-...

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#127

Post by Lionga »

humansareok1 wrote: post #13
stonethrowaway wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll have to expand on this for us plebs. To whom is it a net negative signal?

To anyone with eyes? Job seekers looking for startups to join, investors looking for places to put money, etc. I'm sorry if your company got accepted into YC, better luck next time. At least you can hang out with the founders of... 100 AI-assisted Code Editors, 'The first Travel Credit Card for Gen Z', 'Starbucks memberships for restaurants', 'a video first food delivery app, tiktok meets doordash', and 'the operatin…

I was laughing thinking how you made up a list of the most stupid ideas. Just to be baffled they are really fucking there.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#128

Post by pessimizer »

dotty- wrote: post #20
jmull wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the objection here. Forking is part of how open source is supposed to work.

The beauty of forking/open source is the ability to contribute back to the original project or take over an abandoned project. In this case, the original project Continue.dev isn't abandoned and actually has more traction/commits than the PearAI fork. But what PearAI did not do is a traditional fork. They took the commit history, re-branded everything to PearAI, pushed it up to their own repo, and claimed that the co…

> That's not the spirit of open source.

That's because there's literally no such thing. It's a licensing choice, not a seance. If you don't want people to use your code, license it correctly.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#129

Post by mattcantstop »

foldr wrote: post #105
mattcantstop wrote: post #62

There is a part in the Netflix culture doc where it talks about how sometimes people do bad things, and Netflix tries to not overcorrect by implementing burdensome policies on the company as a knee-jerk reaction to a single bad actor. The conclusion (YC's brand has been tarnished because of the lower quality companies in their larger batches who do bad things) doesn't follow from the evidence of this ONE company doin…

I don't think the main issue here is that a YC company acted with questionable ethics. As you say, people are people and that can happen with even the strictest due diligence. The problem for YC's prestige stems from funding a company with an unoriginal idea and not even the beginnings of a prototype. I'm aware that YC funds founders more than it funds specific ideas or projects. Nonetheless, you'd expect an impressi…

Even the evidence listed (the retweeted tweet in the article) doesn't support the claim of the author to me. If you open source software and give it a license that permits commercial use on top of it, then you are okay with that use. If I was a cohort of a team that built an open sourced AI editor I would think they would WANT me to build on top of it. Otherwise, why permit that use? They may have a bad business model, where their business does not work if they open source their tech and other companies build competitors on top of it. But that's a questions for them and their decision to open source. But it doesn't seem shady to use open source software from another company that permits commercial use.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#130

Post by pj_mukh »

noobermin wrote: post #102
pj_mukh wrote: post #57

"The issue isn't that PearAI did something illegal—it's that they got funded by YC with nothing more than a codebase copied from another YC-backed company. This shows that (1) YC is willing to fund just about anything, (2) they’re not doing any real due diligence, and (3) they don't particularly care about their existing portfolio companies." This shows a fundamental misunderstanding on how YC functions. YCombinator…

I think something people might be missing is the context around this post, which is that the founders are being dragged on twitter, essentially. Since a lot of you hate the site, I'll summarise briefly: one of the founders did a thread starting with the following post: " I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang We're building PearAI, an open source A…

This is an indictment of Twitter tbh. Not YC. A lot (most?) YC founders aren't even on Twitter.
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