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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

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Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#221

Post by tim333 »

mlhpdx wrote: post #170
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…

If you ever go after 3) sign me up. The most inexplicable miss by VCs (YC included)is the lack of interest in funding climate change remediation. Billions of people to help and billions of dollars to be made. E.g.: Could funding protection of Tuvalu’s dry land and status as a nation pay dividends through licensing/leasing fishing rights? Such things are an area for innovation, and tech could be a part of it, but isn’…

I'm not sure it's a lack of interest so much as a shortage of good startups.

Here's YC's statement of interest https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech

They say they have funded over 100 of them.

Prometheus seems a good one https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/prometheus https://x.com/paulg/status/1385338452544217095

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#222

Post by kshri24 »

Agree completely. That entire PeerAI BS put a really bad taste in my mouth w.r.t YC. It is fine to fund Companies that might create products with their own sweat/labor which might compete with their existing portfolio companies. That is healthy competition. But what happened here is not that!

If I fork a popular repository on GitHub, say Plausible, change the name of the product and then apply to YC, you are telling me I have a non-zero chance of getting selected if I just come up with a better business plan than the Plausible team? WTAF? That is horrible! Where are the standards here?

And no YC cannot hide behind the "You choose a wrong License" argument. That is legal BS and does not apply to TRUST built between Investors and Founders.

This is serious credibility damage to YC.

Disgusted.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#223

Post by tim333 »

Meh.

>The issue, however, is that they never truly grasped the factors behind their success, which is why YC's peak is already behind them—it’s likely all downhill from here.

I haven't been to YC but I read Paul Graham and get the impression he has a pretty good idea of the factors behind their succcess and this guy who I think hasn't been and does not live in the US does not.

YC wasn't pesitigious at the start but went out of the way to help startups and encourage them to 'build something people want' and I think that goes on.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#224

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

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…

>Original YC would not reject founders over their current product strategy and because they haven't figured out the right way to structure their business--haven't put together the "proof" that they could be on track to be a unicorn, etc. That's a VC rejection. Of course, YC gets many thousands of applications and has to reject most of them. You could say they shouldn't be criticized for trying to give a little feedback.

My controversial opinion is that they should stop giving feedback. "Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

My startup got rejected because "valuation is unlikely to cross 100 million". Everyone is entitled to their opinion but we are already at 10m valuation and AI in ecommerce doesn't really have 100m cap.

Most of the founders on reddit and discord take the YC feedback as gospel and give up/pivot when its absolutely the last thing they should be doing. Unfortunately we will always have this power imbalance between VC and startups

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#225

Post by ganeshkrishnan »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12
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…

What would YC 2.0 look like? How would you build it?

completely data driven and pseudonymous. Everyone enters what they are building, traction, progress so far, team etc and internal team votes based on the data progress without looking at founder profile.

make it fair instead of funding the same golden-spoon cliquey gang over and over again.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#226

Post by nsokolsky »

EarthBlues wrote: post #51

I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion. There’s a tendency in contemporary online culture to want to condemn the whole person. It’s not enough, it seems, to condemn Altman’s self-serving decisions with OpenAI. We also have to pretend he’s a bungling businessman, whose self-inflicted downfall is imminent. The same pattern can be observed with other public figures. It just d…

Yep, ideally OP should formalize their theory into a bet and accept people to bet against them. Say, $5k on OpenAI in 10 years. Money could be kept in escrow with a trusted third party.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#227

Post by candiddevmike »

tim333 wrote: post #221
mlhpdx wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever go after 3) sign me up. The most inexplicable miss by VCs (YC included)is the lack of interest in funding climate change remediation. Billions of people to help and billions of dollars to be made. E.g.: Could funding protection of Tuvalu’s dry land and status as a nation pay dividends through licensing/leasing fishing rights? Such things are an area for innovation, and tech could be a part of it, but isn’…

I'm not sure it's a lack of interest so much as a shortage of good startups. Here's YC's statement of interest https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech They say they have funded over 100 of them. Prometheus seems a good one https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/prometheus https://x.com/paulg/status/1385338452544217095

Prometheus has all the hallmarks of vaporware, over promised (self proclaimed "first electrofuel unicorn" lol) and under delivered. They've been at it for over 5 years and 120M dollars later they have nothing to really show.

120M could have bought a lot of rainforest or planted a lot of trees.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#228

Post by mike_hearn »

mlhpdx wrote: post #170
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…

If you ever go after 3) sign me up. The most inexplicable miss by VCs (YC included)is the lack of interest in funding climate change remediation. Billions of people to help and billions of dollars to be made. E.g.: Could funding protection of Tuvalu’s dry land and status as a nation pay dividends through licensing/leasing fishing rights? Such things are an area for innovation, and tech could be a part of it, but isn’…

That's not inexplicable. There's not much interest in it because a lot of things founders believe about climate are false and believing false things is a quick way to lose money. Tuvalu is a good example of this phenomenon. If you'd invested in a startup planning to make money by protecting Tuvalu from global warming, you would have lost all your money because Tuvalu is growing, not shrinking.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5 ha (2.9%), despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls. Island change has lacked uniformity with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size. Results challenge perceptions of island loss, showing islands are dynamic features that will persist as sites for habitation over the next century

You didn't get unlucky with your choice of Tuvalu, a lot of common beliefs about the impact of climate change are like that. There's little discussion of this phenomenon, because it's taboo to criticize climate related narratives. Only argumentative gits like me are willing to do it. But the smart money knows this and quietly stays away.

BTW this isn't specific to climate. I've known and talked to a few VCs over the years, and what I learned is that if there's an important and valuable area they're all collectively ignoring it's usually because they know things that other people don't. For instance, you may have noticed that Silicon Valley VCs usually avoid biotech startups, despite biotech being seen at one time as a high tech industry with potential similar to computing. That's because such startups often come out of academia, and VCs were aware of the replication crisis/fraud problems in biology earlier than most.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#229

Post by pyb »

yayitswei wrote: post #53

YC did not have prestige in their early years (Jessica mentions they had to beg their friends to come to demo days). Yet people were dropping out of Harvard to join. So it seems prestige is not necessary for success and in fact may be a negative signal.

It was very prestigious by ~2007, but only within a much smaller niche of programmers nerds.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#230

Post by stackskipton »

cherryteastain wrote: post #185
jhanschoo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's just hard to convey the sense from the early days of YC that they really didn't care about the return, or the progress so far, or VCs, or fads, or anything. That said, I really was at the right place at the right time and got very lucky. It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did. Web apps and mobile fundamentally transformed everyday life and communication in very…

> It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did. Definitely, it's called ZIRP and QE.

I think so many questions about “Why did business X operate like this in 10s?” Is answered with that statement.

So much was funded on economic smack high. A few sobered up and a ton bottomed out bad.

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