lol come on guys let kids live a little
Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
231–240 of 290 posts
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#232I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students: -graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates. -join other people's startups where they work crazy hours -work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation…
speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.
The thing is those kids still have massive cognitive gifts - I’m not going to use a loaded word like talented or whatever - and have worked very hard in the past. It’s just that the journey to the thing they want to do no longer rewards hours.
Paul Graham is like the Mr. Beast of seed investing. He wants to make the best SEED STAGE INVESTMENTS in the world, to mock a Mr. Beast PowerPoint. He doesn’t want to get the kids with the highest potential, or the kids who work the hardest. They are very sincere and supportive - I mean, who the hell in your life is willing to risk $525,000 on an idea with no traction?? - but they are not out to anoint a category of kids as the “ambitious” ones versus the unambitious ones. You can be ambitious about being a writer and find success and wind up writing very little!
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#233I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students: -graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates. -join other people's startups where they work crazy hours -work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation…
speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to liv…
> speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.
But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path.
There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true.
But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a few things: Wanting to finish school is a negative signal. Also > Also we know that many students spend a lot of time in Fall or during their final year applying for jobs or internships. Early Decision gives students another option: apply to YC and bet on yourself. So now YC is an alternative to searching and apply for jobs? I think if you're marginal on trying to find a corporate job or starting something,…
honest question: do you think that in a job market where it seems to be ridiculously hard to land that junior corporate job maybe starting your own thing is a increasingly valid alternative? I'm not sure this is aligned with the properties that YC is necessarily shopping for (they seem to compete with companies eager to hire the same people) but maybe if you're a newish grad from a lesser-known school? My sample size…
VC investment has rebounded but it's also been extremely concentrated in AI in the last couple of years.
"Starting your own thing" in a vc-backed way (need a big exit, or bust) as a fresh college grad who now has to come up with a thing and sell it to a lot of customers within a couple of years sounds incredibly hard.
Especially when framed as "you won't have to look for a job" - not having the hustle skills to be at the top of the pack in the job-hunt vs your classmates doesn't really give a good signal for your hustle-and-build-and-sell-a-VC-startup alternative.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#235My advice to 20 year olds, don't go to startups, go to big tech while it still pays good salary, build up your wealth, network and how things work at such corporations. Then at mid 30s get hired as Dir/VP of engineering in smaller Series A startup. You will have higher chance to retire early and/or afford yourself to work on things you like later on.
Relevant blog post: https://www.gayle.com/blog/2011/10/29/why-coders-shouldnt-jo...
Something ironic I found when I was on my last job search (and applying to some YC startups) was that, despite startups often being critical of big tech, when describing their past experience, the founders (and their teams) never failed to ‘name drop’ the brand-name companies they’ve worked for.
Additionally, I think the reason a lot of founders threw my resume in the trash was because they couldn’t recognize the no-name startups I’ve worked at… Luckily I’m at a household name company now and even non-tech people recognize the company I work at.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. Google "selection bias". You aren't meeting the 10,000 who failed. I also live in NYC. I lived in SF, during possibly the all-time greatest period of wealth creation in the last 50 years. I knew billionaires when they couldn't afford bar tabs. I ate leftover boxes of Obama-Os (again, Google it) that nobody wanted. I'm still telling you the truth. Every one of those people who succeeded went through hell and bac…
Wait, are you saying the Obama O’s story - that the 500 boxes sold out, saving AirBnb - is not totally true?
Well, they definitely had a lot of Cap’n McCains left over, and we also had more than a few boxes of Obama O’s inside JTV. We would eat them as office snacks.
I was told that we were given them, but maybe they were surplus? Either way, real boxes.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#237Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once. Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!
I've had to explain this to several people: YC goals are not our goals. For YC, it would be great for lots of people to burn down their lives for even the slimmest chance at success.
Venture capital would love it if everyone worked overtime with no weekends to build “the next big thing.”
Your hobbies and interests should actually just be work and producing profit. Don’t spend the weekend taking a hike with your friends, you gotta get building.
The people doing that work are a probabilistic financial instrument to the VC system. The founders who fall for this trap instead of living a balanced life are just lowering the cost basis for the VC investors by giving away free labor.
In reality, you can build a startup while maintaining a work-life balance, but if everyone did that then VC firms would have to delay the purchase of their owners’ fifth yacht by a couple of months.
The only people who have the time and energy for the toxic startup founder lifestyle of thing are students and young people who haven’t yet established families and their optimism and interest is being exploited.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#238I don't know why there's so much negativity. I see this as a big win for students interested in it.
1. it's a short commitment - only 3 months. more time-bound opportunities should be available to kids coming out of school. too many people go straight to big finance/law/tech/etc and get stuck because they don't want to give up the salary or safety.
2. get access to a network that is very difficult to get access to otherwis
3. better status boost than most other things you could be doing. There are likely better status signals about someone's abilities/intellect than YC, but i'm guessing they are few for people in the valley.
4. Get to work on something you are interested in
5. learn a lot very quickly.
6. gives you a lot of optionality
yes, YC is trying to make money but they do seem intent on developing talent and this is a good avenue for that.
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#239[flagged]
uhhh, it's their website. they can promote as much as they want
Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
As startup valuations have gone up quickly and the YC offer largely remains the same, YC has naturally moved downmarket. They have gone from being an exclusive, premium product aimed at people who have a serious chance of building a unicorn to a finishing school for venture-backed entrepreneurs. In my opinion, this is a great thing for YC because it's a more natural fit for their main value proposition, but it also m…
I don't think this is a valuations vs. stagnant offer scenario. I think it has more to do with YC scaling up from dozens to hundreds and thousands of investments in a very competitive landscape. From a few early successes when no one was doing what they did, to having way more money to invest than there are good ideas and now it's spray & pray; trade on the YC name and with some luck hope there's a pay-off. If we sta…
This was absolutely Paul's strategy -- read his essay reflecting on returns from their early portfolio (AirBnB and Dropbox). His take -- "we should have done another 1000 investments to get a third hit" (coinbase, it turns out. And he was correct).
The math for YC's seed stage returns is overall inexorably towards more checks being written - the checks are incredibly cheap. YC's IRR is currently roughly 176%, yielding an 81,000x return since 2005 -- another way to say it: a single $25k investment from 2005 could be deployed into 81,000 $25k investments in 2026. Or another way to say it, for every check they wrote, they're able to write another check off that investment every 8 months, compounding all the way back.
YC's main problem is that there aren't 81,000 even slightly viable startups in the world. It's true they've lost their "exclusive" vibe, but to be honest, when they started it was more "small and quirky" which briefly became "gold standard exclusive." It was never their original brand, and I don't think it was ever really part of the strategy.