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

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

#291

Post by mumbisChungo »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #284
mumbisChungo wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am responding to the comment about

>just new web frontends on existing industries

The gig economy is just some subset of that.

In reality, 'just new web frontends on existing industries' describes the majority of the demand for software development right now. It's not good or bad, though some of the actors and some of the businesses will be good or bad. It's not boring or interesting, though some of the applications and implementations will be boring or interesting. It just is.

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

#292

Post by 11thEarlOfMar »

Ultimately, YC exists for the benefit of the investors. It's symbiotic with startups, of course, but the measure of success is ultimately the return YC achieves for itself. It seems unlikely that anyone but the inner circle has that data, but given the type of people that run YC, I'd expect they experiment and then observe results, refactor, experiment again, ultimately heading in the direction of what improves their return. I'd be surprised if they haven't debated class and check sizes at great length since the beginning, and then settled those debates by observing the results of the changes over time.

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

#293

Post by dang »

lisper wrote: post #82

I find it disturbing that this is getting so much attention. The argument (such as it is) is utterly without merit, unsupported by anything other than the tweeter's personal opinion. It is, quite simply, a troll. And it seems to be working. In fact, the whole cultural phenomenon of paying attention to what people tweet is deeply disturbing. Twitter is not designed to support rational argument supported by data, it's…

Normally we'd downweight a submission this lame, but we can't do that because https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... We turned off the flamewar detector for the same reason.

It's nice that the commenters have pointed out most of the wrongness though.

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

#295

Post by tick_tock_tick »

sir_kin wrote: post #144
Jommi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know think this is as clear. Can you link me to some researcher where a stronger social net leads to better entrepreneur outcomes? Because looking at country level data, USA, with it's terribly scary and risky path of entrepreneurship completely outperforms welfare state countries like the Nordics. You could say the difference is from capital markets, but still even the difference in startups that are not suc…

> Can you link me to some researcher where a stronger social net leads to better entrepreneur outcomes? is Harvard good enough? https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/07/public-progra... https://www.nber.org/papers/w18441.pdf > looking at country level data, USA, with it's terribly scary and risky path of entrepreneurship completely outperforms welfare state countries like the Nordics. False. >> The U.S. likes t…

They clearly means successful businesses.

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

#296

Post by whymauri »

s_dev wrote: post #83
solumos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be willing to bet that a clear majority of the most successful startups from the past 20 years were founded by people who were otherwise independently financially stable. It's very hard to focus on building a successful business when the cost of failure is potentially life-ruining.

Then don't start one if you can't consume the risk. I'm not sure what your point is -- that people who have kids should be given special exemption where they make more money from sales and inventment oportunties to compensate for choices they made?

>Then don't start one if you can't consume the risk.

Absolutely mind-boggling when YC literally exists to support and incubate startups so founders don't have to take on life-ruining risks.

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

#297

Post by whymauri »

FalconSensei wrote: post #74
eloff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what stage of life you're in. Ramen profitable works for a 20-something just out of college. It does not work for a married middle-aged person potentially with kids. It's a lot harder to start a startup once you get to that stage of life because of this and other reasons.

Or anyone that has to buy insulin...

No, you need to be ready to die for your YC-backed startup according to some fascinating takes in this thread.

Funny this gets flagged but not the comments insinuating that life-ruining risk should be acceptable* for founders who aren't wealthy.

* Not just acceptable, preferred! Amazing!

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

#298

Post by treis »

yters wrote: post #76
awillen wrote: post #9

The idea that check sizes should be small so people should be forced into dire financial situations is a terrible one, and one that would absolutely hurt diversity. You're going to end up with a bunch of rich white dudes as founders (because very, very obviously the other way that people can afford to take smaller checks is if they have a lot of money in the bank). The smaller class size issue is probably fair, but r…

Maybe the point of economic filtering is to only accept single young men, who can devote every waking moment to their startup without any concern for dependents and such. You can get great velocity from such a pool. Myself, with family, mortgage, etc. I would never be able to achieve that kind of velocity if I were accepted to YC. So, even if I had incredible ideas, as people around here keep saying, and PG makes cle…

>Maybe the point of economic filtering is to only accept single young men, who can devote every waking moment to their startup without any concern for dependents and such.

Maybe I am missing something here, but why can't women do that too?

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

#299

Post by dang »

reedwolf wrote: post #88

An article [0] that takes a critical stance on Paul Graham/Y Combinator, specifically Graham's advice that you should stop focussing on passing tests, despite Y Combinator being entirely built around passing tests. [0] http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertise...

The 'tests' YC is focused around are getting users and customers. Startups are strongly discouraged from working on anything else, including fundraising before Demo Day.

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

#300

Post by softawre »

eloff wrote: post #61
s_dev wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with the OP of the twitter thread. pg once coined the phrase .. ramen profitable. I deeply agree with that concept. Cover bills but all those frills and cushy "living wage" nonense needs to go while the startup is finding its feet.

Depends on what stage of life you're in. Ramen profitable works for a 20-something just out of college. It does not work for a married middle-aged person potentially with kids. It's a lot harder to start a startup once you get to that stage of life because of this and other reasons.

Is making it easier for a middle-aged person to start a startup something that YC has to care about? There could be a separate organization that focused on that.
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