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New YC homepage

ycombinator.com

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Re: New YC homepage

#32

Post by dang »

throwaway89201 wrote: post #23
ls-a wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YC often also mentors founders on pivots Interesting. I once talked to an investor (not YC) and they asked me what I would do if the product failed. I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting" > YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge Maybe. A write up about the new design would be cool I th…

> YC often also mentors founders on pivots It doesn't seem unlikely to me that YC coined or at least popularized 'the pivot' in the context of changing business / startup directions. The first mention of using the word in that sense is in this comment [1] which explicitly mentions the usage by YC, while it only gets used when talking about pivot tables or more traditional uses of the word before that. Edit: The "Lean…

That's a fun question! 806601 was from Sept 2009. I found 3 earlier cases of 'pivot' in the startup sense:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699611 (July 2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=676514 (June 2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562739 (April 2009)

All 3 of those posts were by YC founders, so the term was obviously in circulation by then. The last of them includes a (broken) likn to this article: https://web.archive.org/web/20090703130211/https://redeye.fi....

Edit: that one was discussed here, but the comments didn't say the p-word:

Yogi Berra wisdom for startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537331 - March 2009 (9 comments)

Re: New YC homepage

#38

Post by bflesch »

ripped_britches wrote: post #13

I mean trying to insinuate oai is a yc company is just shady right? I get that the subtext isn’t dishonest, but cmon, you know what you’re doing

It's fine they include openai, they can be very proud of sam. What I found a bit weird is that the reddit founder picture shows only two people. History is written by the winners I guess.

Re: New YC homepage

#39

Post by bflesch »

alephnerd wrote: post #5
ls-a wrote: post #4

I found the switch of focus from startups/businesses to founders/CEOs particularly strange. Looks like a political campaign to me.

YC has always been founder first. Back when they started in the 2000s, most traditional VCs didn't recognize that high impact individuals can easily pivot or define product categories, and only concentrated on financial engineering (DCF go brrrrrr ). YC often also mentors founders on pivots (I'd say at least a third of all startups that make it to demo day were mentored into some sort of a pivot). YC also needs to pi…

> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing

Depends who you're marketing to. Do they need to follow what others did or should they stay in their own niche? Because I'm not hanging out on a16z forum because they make fancy marketing materials, I'm one of the thousands of people who bought into the YC brand which was build over decades. Would be stupid to become one with the crowd of sleeky VCs.

As European I'm quite happy I didn't see YC involvement with the current administration, and if they stay a bit clear of the AI supergau I'm sure they'll be fine.

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