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Y Combinator's Message to Founders

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Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#231

Post by Gunnerhead »

sbierwagen wrote: post #128
irthomasthomas wrote: post #123

Bleak. "No one cannot predict how bad the economy will get, but things don't look good." Clif notes: - Plan for the worst ... cut costs within 30 days... get to Default Alive[0] - Get money if you need it, and if you can - With or without money you must survive 24 months - VCs are people too, and subject to the same downturn. Adjust your fund raising expectations in the same direction. Expect lower valuations, lower…

>- If you get a meeting, don't take that as a good sign, we still take a lot of meetings. They don't explicitly spell this out, but this is because being a VC is still a job. Even if they're not actually making any deals, management doesn't want to see everyone sitting at a desk scrolling twitter for 8 hours, so instead they do pointless meetings. Matt Levine had a fun Great Recession story which I cannot find right…

I would love to read that article if you end up finding it.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#233

Post by puranjay »

liuliu wrote: post #96
wolverine876 wrote: post #82

Like inflation, it's self-fulfilling. Perception is reality. Some people who strongly influence public perception - to whom we seem to have ceded our power to think critically and independently - who look for social disruption, want it. If businesses pull in their horns, stop supporting innovation, the economic result is easy to predict.

That's why it is extremely frustrating to watch this unfold. The easiest way to kill inflation is to kill growth. But that won't help people in need anyway. An empty shelf of baby formulas are not a sign of "economy is too hot". It is a sign of supply issue.

They need to kill this “growth” because they’ve essentially priced out half the population out of ever owning a home

+20% increase in home prices is not “growth”. Its sheer injustice

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#234

Post by mrlatinos »

thecleaner wrote: post #110

Honestly I would just go work for FB/Google/MS/Apple and maybe Amazon. I'll only consider a startup if I can grow with the company and corresponding opportunities don't exist in the big ones. If the YC theory is basically that employees are a toxic asset, they are bound to get people who turn out that way since the more performant and responsible folk will opt for bigger and more stable companies. Edit: I don't reall…

FB and MS are freezing hiring. Apple slowing.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#235

Post by qqqwerty »

rkk3 wrote: post #187
ditonal wrote: post #102

This “default alive” advice is repeatedly shared. One thing it obviously does not address is the human element of who you cut and whether they will be “default alive” unemployed in a recession. A huge amount of YC advice in general positions founders as protagonists and employees as NPCs then are shocked people pick Google over their startup offer. Funny thing is I’ve seen this exact advice destroy a company. In Marc…

> Funny thing is I’ve seen this exact advice destroy a company. In March 2020 they did deep layoffs and cited the need to be “default alive.” Then their main market surprisingly quickly grew in the rest of 2020 , they wanted to capitalize on that, but they had laid off too many engineers who knew their infra and had enough outages and slow product development that they lost to their competitors and are now way underw…

The hiring market for software engineers went absolutely bonkers during COVID. Salaries shot up. Nearly everyone was hiring.

This "70%" advice was getting thrown around by every two-bit "thought leader" back at the start of COVID. I could totally see how following that advice would result in your competitors scooping up all of your former employees. And then you would be stuck in long and expensive rebuilding process just to get back to where you were, but now you would be stuck with more junior employees making higher salaries to boot. Oh and let's not forget that the 30% of the employees that you so graciously let stick around all probably dusted off their resumes, resulting at least a handful of defections. Accounting for those circumstances, I could absolutely see how a deep layoff in early 2020 would sink a company. COVID was a once in a generation opportunity for certain businesses as the entire world moved from IRL to online. Even some of the biggest tech companies struggled to keep up with the sudden demand.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#236

Post by jossclimb »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #53
koolba wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the time for you to take the maximum possible risks. Usually as you get older your appetite for risk decreases. Taking risks for the sake of increasing risk is a combination of naive and stupid. Increased risk taking must come with an increasing reward. In an economic collapse and likely recession, having a stable job at a large established company would give you stability and, soon enough, capital for buyi…

> Working at a startup does not magically make you a better programmer any more than working at a large company automatically turns you into a cog churning out Java beans. Working at a startup has a far better learning curve and better feedback about your rate of learning compared to a large company. Buying up capital for home and basement prices is not a part of my equation at all.

I would say it's not as clear cut at that. I started out at one of the big old dinosaurs and found myself with a good amount of free time (even being on site). This meant I had a stable income and lots of time to really learn new technologies from various courses / YT content and hacking away on personal projects (while being payed on the job). I was still performing well for my main role in comparison to others at the company who you had to wonder 'what does this person even do'.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#237

Post by lordnacho »

vmception wrote: post #210
missedthecue wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stock market is not the economy but GDP in the US printed negative the other week. If it does the same next quarter, we're in a recession.

Think of it like a bad metric thats better than other metrics

But it's a self reinforcing story. The two quarters idea is strong, if it happens all the papers will declare a recession and everyone who doesn't normally keep an eye on the economy will think it's a recession. Some of those will be managers who will decide to cut spending.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#238

Post by hef19898 »

BryanBeshore wrote: post #144
hef19898 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which raises the question of when to jump ship, doesn't it? If your current employer is looking like lay offs and bad times are a head, and the market is really good, do you stay and wait or do you start looking now ? You defenitley shouldn't wait to be last one to tirn of the lights, because at the very least your gonna compete with your former co-workers.

If you plan to move in the next 6-12 months, you are probably better off moving now.

I'm looking at a non zero propability of having to do that in the next 12-18 months. Not disclose too much, let's say it is funding related and has nothing to do with me.

Now my problem is that I have to move to something, and not away from something. If the company and job aren't intriguing I have a tendency to perform not as good. And I still like my employer and manager, the latter more than the former. Plus, I need to be able to show something before switching jobs.

Something to think about on the next weeks and months, especially with a family and commitments. As I said, the market is good. I wouldn't have much trouble finding something if I really wanted to. On the other hand, having a stable income after a failed attempt on a start-up is quite nice, and I'm out of the probation period.

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#239

Post by username_my1 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #82

Like inflation, it's self-fulfilling. Perception is reality. Some people who strongly influence public perception - to whom we seem to have ceded our power to think critically and independently - who look for social disruption, want it. If businesses pull in their horns, stop supporting innovation, the economic result is easy to predict.

“Stop supporting innovation”

Are we talking about groceries delivery in under 15 minutes or crypto bla bla bla

Most recent VC backed starups are a big Bonze scheme that lead to poor economical output

Just look at the last spacs how poorly they performed

Hard tech is rare, and it’s not even interesting for vc

So innovation and vc startups really don’t have anything to do with each other

Re: Y Combinator's Message to Founders

#240

Post by lelanthran »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #155
axlee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As businesses cut costs, those are opportunities for products and services which enable efficiency. This is key. Innovation aside, if you can simply provide comparable services at a lower price point, the downturn just increased your customer base tenfolds: nobody is looking too much at cutting costs when things are looking up. Find niches that got too greedy over the past few years, and undercut them.

That's happening to me, I'm peddling the exact same thing at half the cost, and it's verifiable. You can just check that it's correct in a second with a laptop, after computing it for several hours on thousands of machines. https://www.fgemm.com , coming soon.

> You can just check that it's correct in a second with a laptop, after computing it for several hours on thousands of machines.

Sounds like some blockhain thing - easy to verify, hard to compute.

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