Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 436 posts

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#281

Post by czbond »

bananaface wrote: post #251
czbond wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not YC’s job to support the company. That is the founders job. I’d suggest money supporting the company at seed diverts from a focus on monetary fit asap. $25k is enough to scrap by for enough months which should be the initial goal

It's not about "who's job it is", it's about supply and demand. The founder could probably get a 300k salary at Google or a six-figure stipend with another investor. If Y-Combinator wants to compete they have to provide something that outweighs that.

Why would Y comb need to compete with someone who is considering an offer to G? In that case, the founder would leave for the better deal anyways - so it's best to leave before it gets REALLY hard.

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#282

Post by shadowmore »

jmwilson wrote: post #262
seizethecheese wrote: post #244

Recent YC founder here. I disagree with the premise that boring ideas are inherently bad. Stripe is a B2B company that adds an API on top of existing infrastructure. Airbnb is a basic CRUD app. I also disagree that YC is not funding interesting ideas. Our batch had quite a few. Someone was making a rapid cargo ship. Someone else was making a fully distributed cell network. The only real copycat ideas were the ones du…

The author didn't say anything about "interesting" vs. "boring" companies or ideas. He said YC should curtail funding of dev tools/SaaS startups, because the traction they appear to have is misleading. They're selling to each other, revenue moving in a circle, without demonstrating value creation outside of the sphere of similarly-situated startups. Not explicitly stated, but he's also implying it's a portfolio risk…

This is a point Peter Thiel brings up regularly on a larger scale, i.e. the circular, narrow nature of modern innovation, where instead of improving the physical world around us, we're way too heavily invested in this self-perpetuating "world of bits" that increasingly reduces total innovation in the world.

Incidentally, a great talk that includes that point here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO_00POR-Po

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#284

Post by dumbfoundded »

mumbisChungo wrote: post #249
devalgo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but that's not addressing his point which is most of the ideas being funded are uninteresting and aren't really moving the ball forward. Instead they're doing some kind of rent seeking.

I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized. There is plenty of opportunity in doing so to democratize access to services that are currently inaccessible to most, which is more or less the opposite of rent seeking. You can also ju…

Netflix was started in 1997. This conversation is about companies started a decade ago versus now. The rise post 2010 startups seems much more focused on creative interpretations of laws instead of actual innovation. The whole gig economy is a way to circumvent employment laws.

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#285

Post by evan_ »

chrisco255 wrote: post #235
evan_ wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't really do that if your parents share an 800 square foot public housing apartment with your sister and her kids. or if they're in prison, or dead, or abusive, or they threw you out for not conforming to their religious choices, or disowned you for not being cisgender and heterosexual, or or or

Of course not, and that might be the case for 10-20% of the population. But you don't have to be some privileged trust fund kid for your parents to give you a place to stay in the event of financial hardship. That's not rare and let's hope that never becomes rare because I'd shudder a world where parents by and large would not do this for their kids.

Here's the reason I think it would be a problem for an imaginary, abstract incubator (because I don't think YCombinator actually does have this) to have a rule "To apply here you need to have alive parents, who like you, with a spare bedroom".

I think that the 10-20% group you are talking about is likely to have more than its share of not-white people. Maybe it's a small divergence, if we imagine the population of the US to be 50% white and 50% not white, maybe the group of people who can't go back and crash with their parents is 49% white and 51% not white.

OK, so imagine there's a different imaginary incubator with a rule that every applicant has to roll a 100 sided die. If they're white they have to roll a 50 or higher to get in, and if they're not white they have to roll a 51 or higher.

I wouldn't like the "roll a die" rule, I think a lot of people probably wouldn't, but it's ultimately not a heck of a lot different than the "crash with your parents" rule. You are still more likely to fall afoul of both rules if you are not white- or (if you change the dice game) gay, or poor, or marginalized in other ways.

(yes the probabilities are different, not the point)

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#286

Post by adventured »

sangnoir wrote: post #211
awillen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great point. People think a willingness to take extreme financial risks is somehow a useful personality trait when it comes to entrepreneurship because of selection bias. People who take that risk and make it tell that story. People who take that risk and don't make it aren't heard from. People who don't take that risk also aren't heard from. There are lots of people with great ideas and the ability to execute on the…

And often, getting credit card debt is not a material risk, but a minor embarrassment when they ask their family to bail them out and/or move in the guest house for a few months, rent-free. When poorer folk take the "same" risk, they can be ruined for decades.

> When poorer folk take the "same" risk, they can be ruined for decades.

In the vast majority of circumstances that's an extreme exaggeration.

Speaking from past personal experience with poverty (ie being "poorer folk"), you can default on every possible type of debt - wait about seven years (can vary slightly by state, but it's typically around that), and you're free from it. My credit rating went from 800, to 480, back to 760 in that process over eight years, without requiring any special effort. I defaulted on numerous credit cards, I defaulted on medical debt; it all vanished, one after another as time ticked by, and my credit rating jumped as each item fell off. Every negative mark falls off your credit report after N years.

It's very unpleasant to have your credit rating wrecked for years. To say that it will ruin you for decades, that's reaching into the land of absurdity. I'm sure it happens, some people get stuck in a vicious cycle for ... decades, however it's not rocket science to properly utilize the negative mark credit cycling to your advantage and reboot. It doesn't take more than an hour or two of reading to self-educate at zero cost about how the system works.

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#287

Post by bananaface »

cameronbrown wrote: post #277
bananaface wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about "who's job it is", it's about supply and demand. The founder could probably get a 300k salary at Google or a six-figure stipend with another investor. If Y-Combinator wants to compete they have to provide something that outweighs that.

How is it YC's problem? The founder is choosing to start a company and asking YC for money. Clearly they're not short of startups on the supply side of their equation.

You're not thinking about it the right way. It doesn't matter if they have "enough" applicants. They're trying to fill the positions with the best candidates out there - who they will just have to compete for. The more barriers they put up, the shittier the candidates they will get.

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#288

Post by dang »

AdenRyan2323 wrote: post #279
dang wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite wrong. pg always said that YC should operate like a startup and his primary definition of startups is growth. The original spirit behind YC was let's-hack-the-economy with an experiment in the mass production of startups. That's encoded in the name itself. In other words, much larger batch sizes were guaranteed as YC grew. How pg and the original founding team might have gone about it, compared to others…

But do you disagree with the statement that "now YC is an endless low effort 90s-era "groupware for groupware nerds" fund"" though?

Statements of feeling don't admit of agreement or disagreement.

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#289

Post by bananaface »

czbond wrote: post #281
bananaface wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about "who's job it is", it's about supply and demand. The founder could probably get a 300k salary at Google or a six-figure stipend with another investor. If Y-Combinator wants to compete they have to provide something that outweighs that.

Why would Y comb need to compete with someone who is considering an offer to G? In that case, the founder would leave for the better deal anyways - so it's best to leave before it gets REALLY hard.

Ok, but now you're filtering out a good chunk of people smart enough to work for G - so your applicant pool just got dumber.

Re: Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective

#290

Post by dang »

opportune wrote: post #232
TACIXAT wrote: post #215

Is anyone else unimpressed with the ideas being funded? I look at Work at a Startup and it is just new web frontends on existing industries. I'm sure that makes money but holy hell is it boring. Some are working on cool things, but the founder who has a PhD in that topic will be doing the interesting work and they are hiring for infra or interface. One company was a great match for my skill set but the equity was so…

I just looked at the winter class and I agree a lot of them look like duds. It definitely dilutes the brand if your startup is one of ~150 and almost all the others are just X for Y From your description, wanting to be the SME, early engineer, substantial equity - maybe you would be better off as a founder?

You guys need to understand that people have been saying things like "a lot of them look like duds" and "almost all the others are just X for Y" literally, and continuously, since YC got started.
Post reply on HN