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How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

elbowgreasegames.substack.com

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Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#121

Post by chrisweekly »

daedrdev wrote: post #5
psawaya wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a YC founder turned gamedev, I can tell you that failure is the norm in both pursuits. As with YC, the question is: can we create more outsized outcomes when we succeed?

Great point, I think I'm just being overly pessimistic Related, I find it interesting is that gacha games seem to ahve the highest possible returns but almost none are made by western game companies.

FTR, A "gacha" game is a video game that uses randomized rewards and in-game currency to encourage players to spend money or time.

(Sharing to help others bc I had to look it up.)

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#122

Post by duped »

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 video games industry needs to do the same.

Video games are a subset of entertainment which is capped in TAM by the population the game reaches, the amount of money they're willing to spend per hour on average, and average number of hours they can devote to entertainment.

In other words, every dollar you make off a game is a dollar that wasn't spent on another game, or trip to the movies, or vacation. And every hour someone plays your game is an hour they didn't spend working, studying, sleeping, eating, or doing anything else in the attention economy.

What makes this different from other markets is that there is no value creation or new market you can create from the aether to generate 10x/100x/1000x growth. And there's no rising tide to lift your boat and your competitors - if you fall behind, you sink.

The only way to grow entertainment businesses by significant multiples is by increasing discretionary income, decreasing working hours, or growing population with discretionary time and money. But those are societal-level problems that take governments and policy, and certainly not venture capital.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#123

Post by dang »

moomoo11 wrote: post #75
dang wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so easy to post substanceless slurs, but I've been around YC since 2009 and it hasn't changed much from my perspective. The primary difference between pre-2015 and now is that those earlier startups have been around for over a decade longer. Of course the ones who turned out to be successful are better known.

I'm just giving my opinion from what I see. In no way did I "slur" and my point isn't about YC but the founders.. you raise a valid point about survivorship bias I guess, but as of the last few years it seems a lot of rage bait and do anything to get signal instead of the positive optimism that I felt a lot of the companies offered those years ago. i guess what i'm trying to say is that it has become the final versio…

(Edit: factoring this bit into a different post because I want to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 - I hope that's ok!)

What you wrote above is so different than what I thought I was reading above that I had to ask myself why it felt that way in the first place. Probably the "nepo founders" bit was what got me, and "fraud-aligned" didn't help either. Maybe also this is a case of the 'rebound' phenomenon where the reply comment says more clearly what was originally meant; that happens a lot too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#124

Post by moomoo11 »

dang wrote: post #123
moomoo11 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just giving my opinion from what I see. In no way did I "slur" and my point isn't about YC but the founders.. you raise a valid point about survivorship bias I guess, but as of the last few years it seems a lot of rage bait and do anything to get signal instead of the positive optimism that I felt a lot of the companies offered those years ago. i guess what i'm trying to say is that it has become the final versio…

(Edit: factoring this bit into a different post because I want to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 - I hope that's ok!) What you wrote above is so different than what I thought I was reading above that I had to ask myself why it felt that way in the first place. Probably the "nepo founders" bit was what got me, and "fraud-aligned" didn't help eit…

Ok

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#126

Post by ahartmetz »

Hendrikto wrote: post #113
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…

> I used to think militaries were completely centralized and top-down It is my understanding that the Russians do it that way, which does not seem to work out great for them.

Russia seems to start every war with bad commanders in a bad command structure, then slowly fix... nah scratch that - improve it.

Re: How Y Combinator made it smart to trust founders

#127

Post by jacquesm »

daedrdev wrote: post #3
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.

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

No fewer than the number of start-ups that flop each year, so that's not a hindrance as far as I'm concerned.
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