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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
131–140 of 272 posts
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#132Starting a startup is now a prestige game. Its a career path. Spend enough time with ivy league grads and youll realize this is true
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Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
hahahaha, wow! I really thought this was a joke list. That’s stunning.
Yeah not a joke. Straight from the W24 batch page... I'm sure these weren't even the most absurd.
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC was a child of its time though, right? Are you asking what could YC have done differently in the context of its history, or are you asking what a new accelerator started today would look like? I ask because I’m not sure that now is the time for a new startup accelerator to succeed, and we have no way to predict the circumstances that are required for success without couching it in some major changes to externaliti…
Great question; the latter, because as you mention, YC was a product of a moment in time and that moment has passed, but during that time horizon, they were very successful (imho). Edit: YC says "Build something people want." and so I'm going to riff off of that in a bit of a meta way: "Support experiments worth conducting." The accelerator bit comes in once you've reached product market fit and need fuel for the roc…
AFAICT, as much as YC was a child of their time, they (and PG) were also one of the parents of our current time.
I'm guessing it was inevitable that Wall Street would take over the field, and turn it into a machine.
And therefore it was also inevitable that people who, in the past, would've gone to Wall Street, now would flow into the space, and take it over.
But YC did put their own spin on that, in which the traditional affluent-family, prestigious-school kids could also be computer nerds.
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mode…
The point of my comment is that the alleged shadiness is largely irrelevant, so I'm not sure what you response is directed at.
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school Of course YC would want that (in the short- to mid-term). The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an acceler…
> The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an accelerator they are in the best position to do that. That's really short term thinking. It might work for a class or two, but eventually VCs will realize…
A question that has probably been answered, but...
In a hits business, does quality picking matter? You want to avoid adverse selection, but beyond that - isn't it just about scale?
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#137There 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…
i realised this too late. and then noticed -- the type of founder they let me. for us the unwashed masses, who are blue collar coders who went to state school. we're just filling up rejection numbers.
yet the arbiter of what determines who succeeds is not YC but the market.
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#138"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…
Honestly, I hate X/Twitter specifically for this - the click/rage bait cesspool that it has become in the past year after content engagement became monetized.
Every other day, or at least every week, there is a new topic that everyone piles-on rage and hate to - even accounts that have nothing to do with the topic. This is because eyeballs make users money from X - so getting any audience possible, and getting them inflamed enough to engage is the point.
Even worse, the algorithm is gamed such that the latest rage is pushed to every other users eyeballs, resulting in a constant stream of hate in your feed.
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#139"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 the real pain point you're hitting on there is that people feel like they don't get selected when they deserve to be. While there are those who don't deserve it but get selected anyway.
While I often feel this sadness/jealousy myself, and most probably a lot of the rage bait X replies do too (despite not admitting it) - someday they have to wake up and realize that life is/has always been that way.
Despite our collective desire, Tech is not a guaranteed meritocracy either.
Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
#140It's pretty clear that many VCs are starting to play the carry-game, it's much easier to scale up and make money on carry than it is picking winners or even pricing the 'winners' correctly as we saw during ZIRP. Tax advantaged too.