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Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

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Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#141

Post by sangnoir »

antaviana wrote: post #132
foobarian wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the engineers are just middlemen for plumbing that money to property owners, seems like owning property in the Bay Area might be a good idea.

It seems there is the opportunity to disrupt that market, so that tech companies can pay property owners directly, without the middlemen.

That's not nearly disruptive enough. I'm raising seed rounds for HackerRV - a high end, compact RV rentals for knowledge workers that does away with the need for houses. Starlink comes standard, with additional subscriptions available for showers at aelect locations, and mail delivery addresses. Our previous venture (BackyardBnB) was scuttled by literal NIMBYs.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#142

Post by llamaimperative »

antaviana wrote: post #132
foobarian wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the engineers are just middlemen for plumbing that money to property owners, seems like owning property in the Bay Area might be a good idea.

It seems there is the opportunity to disrupt that market, so that tech companies can pay property owners directly, without the middlemen.

Or they can disrupt the actual middleman, which is the property owners. The land is there regardless of who owns it, it turns out.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#143

Post by shkkmo »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #57
LittleTimothy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the difference between cancel culture and just freedom of association is the difference between "I don't want to work with you because of X" and "I'm going to influence others not to work with you because of X". Whether that be anons on twitter calling up your employer to get you fired, or PG having a quiet work with his friends over at some VC firm, they're both the same strain of toxic.

I think there may be a few other differences. For example, are people ever given the opportunity to change their behavior before the sanction gets applied? Does the punishment fit the crime? Is there public shaming involved? Do we default to public shaming anyone who says a word in defense of the person who is being sanctioned? (I would say that's the single most pathological feature of cancel culture, actually.) Are…

> And then you can work to punish malicious actors in Silicon Valley who violate important investing norms.

That's a pretty generous way of framing it. It's not like this was a concerted effort to protect all small start ups or change employment law to protect founders from legal action from former employers. The article pretty clearly posits that it was a retaliatory exercise of power that was executed to serve the interests of YC. I would argue that the kinds of anticompetitive tactics described in this article are not economically healthy and are thus ethically, if not legally wrong.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#144

Post by glaugh »

cj wrote: post #6

If you’re wondering what to take away from this article: the simple take away is that YC has the power to get what it wants, for the companies it wants. If you happen to be in YC’s good graces, they will reward you in ways described in the article. If you’re not, they won’t take the time. I was in YC in 2012 (2 yrs after the founder writing this article, and one of the last years PG was directly involved). By that ti…

I was in the S12 batch. A couple years later we were demonstrably failing. I emailed the general YC advice line or something similar with a question, and pg responded with a thoughtful comment that was genuinely useful

I don’t think there’s any chance he saw any economic value in us, he took that time because he cared about startups and well-meaning failures like us

It’s a small thing, yes, but I’ve always thought it said a lot about him

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#145

Post by paganel »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #135
paganel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a couple of companies asked for my HN handle That's kind of shitty. I'm writing this down as in the last 2-3 years I've started to care less and less about any perceived veil (or hypocrisy, to be more honest) on websites like this one but it's still interesting to see that companies filter out potential employees based on that manifested hypocrisy. That explains a lot of how come SV is in the slump that it is right…

Well, behaving well (even "fake nice") isn't necessarily "hypocrisy." All of us, and I mean ALL OF US have dark fantasy lives. Freud called it our "Id." It's not meant to be worn outside our heads. One of the common refrains that you'll hear from fans of "hatemongers," like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, is "They're just saying what everyone is thinking!". There's a reason that we don't say everything that we think. T…

It is my belief that when it comes to politics, i.e. the life of the polis, it is in the best interest of said polis for its citizens to speak up their mind as closer to (their inner) truth as possible, otherwise it won’t be said citizens conducting the life of their polis.

The Freud/id stuff I can understand (and I agree with), but that’s related to a person’s inner “psychological” life, not to the polis as a whole.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#146

Post by pjmorris »

throw4847285 wrote: post #125
pjmorris wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear, hear. It's interesting to me how Moses, per Caro, moved from being idealistic to being pragmatic in ways that look like corruption to those outside the 'bubble' but look like appropriate means and measures for accomplishing one's goals if you're inside the bubble. He came to be in possession of a great many opportunities to build, and so, to spend money, and he, using these opportunities and the money flow, ove…

One could even argue (and Caro implies this) that it's a worse form of corruption because all the beneficiaries are already powerful wealthy people being further enriched. At least Tammany corruption was democratic: they needed votes, so new Irish immigrants to the Lower East Side would get a turkey, and if they were loyal, they could get a cushy job. It was a subversion of democracy, but one that required spreading…

My 'trick' is to recommend his relatively short 'Working', which was the gateway drug to get me reading his longer works.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#147

Post by fragmede »

llamaimperative wrote: post #140
light_triad wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The need to scale is inevitable if you consider 2 trends: startups have become mainstream and the internet is orders of magnitude bigger. When YC applications consisted mostly of PG essay readers the chance of success per company was higher. Also some niche ideas can now work because of a more developed communications infrastructure, easy payments, better targeting, etc. And knowing which companies are high quality i…

Neither of those lead to a need to scale. Those are enabling factors, at best.

There needs to be an ROI, YC isn't funding companies out of the goodness of their hearts. So the additional size means they have to bet on Uber and Lyft and Flywheel and every other competitor in that space in order to guarantee a return, because they only win if they bet on every horse. You can't do that if you keep small since the number of entrants got bigger. Hence scaling is necessary for them.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#148

Post by fragmede »

maest wrote: post #139
tim333 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to disentangle motivations as treating people well is also usually good business too but in my experience a lot of people are motivated by doing good as well as making an income. If you look at the history of YC, Paul and Jessica started it primarily to help out the young would be founders without much expectation of making money. And in the story here it seems his main motivation was to stop the founders b…

Hagiographies should be viewed with suspicion, particularity those that make claims about people's motivation (which is notoriously difficult to pin down/prove)

Only insofar as having a positive opinion is material. The chances on HN are drastically higher than elsewhere on the Internet, but most here will never have the chance to interact with pg, so having a positive or negative view of his motivations is immaterial. Most opinions are immaterial. Unless we're on a ship in the ocean, and we're using the stars for navigation, and you're the navigator, whether or not you believe the Earth is flat, what you believe doesn't affect me. So then it really comes down to world view - are you an optimists or a pessimist? Is that neat little story about pg a carefully coldly calculated PR piece, or just a neat little story that has no effect on anything other than some people feeling good, like chicken soup for the entrepreneureal spirit. Why not both!

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#149

Post by fsckboy »

uoaei wrote: post #97
rqtwteye wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everything need to scale? Why couldn't they stick to taking a few high quality companies every year? There was enough money to be made that way. Seems the belief is that everything needs to scale until it doesn't work anymore.

So you're saying the "Peter principle" extends beyond tech employee performance and to tech company funding.

no, it's not the Peter Principle.

The Peter Principle is pointing out that if you keep getting promoted by doing an exceptional job, and you stop getting promoted when you stop, that you have ended up leaving a job you were exceptional at, and landing in a job you are not good at. In a certain sense it's saying "you should be demoted back to your last job that you were exceptional at"; it's not suggesting that, it's suggesting a sort of snarky "this whole system is set up to fail" because it's from a "isn't capitalism grubby" perspective.

None of this flavor is in the general YC scaling case, though you may be able to find it in various places within that.

Re: Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley

#150

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

paganel wrote: post #145
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, behaving well (even "fake nice") isn't necessarily "hypocrisy." All of us, and I mean ALL OF US have dark fantasy lives. Freud called it our "Id." It's not meant to be worn outside our heads. One of the common refrains that you'll hear from fans of "hatemongers," like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, is "They're just saying what everyone is thinking!". There's a reason that we don't say everything that we think. T…

It is my belief that when it comes to politics, i.e. the life of the polis , it is in the best interest of said polis for its citizens to speak up their mind as closer to (their inner) truth as possible, otherwise it won’t be said citizens conducting the life of their polis. The Freud/id stuff I can understand (and I agree with), but that’s related to a person’s inner “psychological” life, not to the polis as a whole…

I think when it comes to workplaces, it isn't really the same thing as the political arena (office "politics" aside). Personal restraint is fairly important. I have worked very closely, with people I desperately wanted to strangle, and we did good work.

Also, even in the political arena, there's often a need for personal restraint. My family has been in international diplomacy for decades (I'm the redneck engineer).

My father[0] used to constantly pop my "Simple wrong answer" balloons, on a regular, by explaining that nothing that involves humans, is ever actually simple, and that there are always dozens of competing forces at work; much of it sloppy emotions, pride, poverty, insecurity, tribalism, ignorance, religion, greed, and whatnot.

I have other family that has worked for decades, trying to get different faiths to work together, to address issues like poverty, lack of education, etc.

Talk about "herding cats."

Someone (I think Will Rogers) used to say "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie,' while reaching for a rock."

[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm

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