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Changes at YC

ycombinator.com

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Re: Changes at YC

#351

Post by arprocter »

alexpotato wrote: post #219
kylecazar wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Favorite example has to be Luis Suarez in his apology for very clearly biting a World Cup opponent in front of the world some years ago: "The truth is that my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite"

I liked Zinedine Zidane's: "I am sorry I was kicked out of the World Cup final but I was not sorry I headbutted him".

Or Eric Cantona

"My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan"

Re: Changes at YC

#353

Post by paxys »

djyaz1200 wrote: post #17

I'd be very interested in the specifics of how and why late stage investing is so different that the success of YC in early stages doesn't translate.

There's virtually no similarity between the two. They are completely different games.

Early stage investing – low cost, high risk of failure, high multiple return, you'll need to make a lot of bets so can cast a wide net, longer term (could be up to a decade or more before you see returns), no established business, so you are betting entirely on the founders.

Late stage investing – high cost, low risk of failure, low multiple return, you can only make a small number of bets so have to be more selective, shorter term, company already has a well-established business, and your decision will primarily be based on how well it is doing.

Re: Changes at YC

#354

Post by PierceJoy »

LightBug1 wrote: post #346
EngManagerIsMe wrote: post #306

> Unfortunately, this means we will no longer need some of the roles on the late stage investing team. Seventeen of our teammates are impacted today. I hate this passive voice. It implies there was nothing that could be done, that this was just a force of nature. That it wasn't an active choice by YC, but rather just some eventuality. Most of us understand the necessity of hard decisions. Own the outcomes. It's ok to…

Agreed. How about: "We fcked up. Sorry. We really did. We're looking to identify the source of the decision. We'll be placing the person, or group of people, responsible on a performance plan (that will include the leadership team if appropriate). If they make continued similar mistakes, they'll be fired, or their compensation will be impacted. In the mean time, we'll be working hard to help the 17 poor souls who wer…

Did they fuck up though? I understand that layoffs suck, especially for those who are layed off. But I don’t think a failed business is necessarily a fuck up. Should companies not try anything new out of fear of having to lay people off if it doesn’t work out?

To be clear, lay offs can be caused by fuck ups, but not all are.

Re: Changes at YC

#355

Post by ThatGeoGuy »

margalabargala wrote: post #62
bradleyjg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laid off is itself a less harsh version of fired.

They're not quite the same, those two terms have taken on different meanings. "Fired" has come to mean "for cause", and "laid off" has come to mean "not for cause".

I still retain a similar model to patio11: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1532509304846135296?s=20

Regardless of how you want to word it, or how you perceive it to play out socially, it does not diminish the act.

Re: Changes at YC

#356

Post by bradrn »

idlewords wrote: post #339
bradrn wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate this passive voice. To be pedantically clear, the first sentence here is not passive! Both clauses there have an explicit subject (‘this’ and ‘we’ respectively) and neither verb (‘means’ and ‘need’) is passivised. I like Geoffrey K. Pullum’s article on what is and isn’t passive: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html (Not that this means the announcement isn’t problematic, mind you. It still…

The parent cited a sentence in the passive voice; why not just leave it be? Why 'pedantically' correct things that aren't wrong?

Because (a) some people might find it interesting; (b) some people might misunderstand what they were referring to; and (c) I like languages.

Re: Changes at YC

#357

Post by froh »

bradrn wrote: post #328
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> we will no longer need some of the roles on the late stage investing team > I hate this passive voice. It's active voice, no? How is it different than we fired, except that firing sounds more tied employee performance, no longer needed more seems like employer fault.

> It's active voice, no? Yes, it is — at least in the first sentence. > How is it different than we fired, except that firing sounds more tied employee performance, no longer needed more seems like employer fault. I think this is GP’s issue with the phrasing here. Passive or not, it sounds like it’s deflecting focus away from something — as they said, ‘It implies there was nothing that could be done, that this was ju…

"they were impacted", the passive voice, has the actor eliminated. who impacted? yc. yc leadership made a decision which impacted 17 people. that's active voice.

Re: Changes at YC

#358

Post by CyberDildonics »

whitemary wrote: post #141
CyberDildonics wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize they can get a different job right?

The question is whether all families can sustain healthy and dignified livelihoods. And the answer is in fact they cannot. By definition, a capitalist economy has a hard dependency on labor surplus. Remember when the Federal Reserve literally said they were raising interest rates to increase unemployment? That's why.

The question is whether all families can sustain healthy and dignified livelihoods. And the answer is in fact they cannot.

This story is about 17 people being fired. I'm not sure what rants about capitalism have to do with that.

Re: Changes at YC

#359

Post by mv4 »

But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure.

Re: Changes at YC

#360

Post by dang »

martin_a wrote: post #107

Title should be "YC fires 17 people". Can someone change that?

I don't know of a title edit that would satisfy everyone, and pretty much any of the standard edits we'd make would generate accusations that we were censoring or whatever to protect YC, so in this case I think we probably need to go by the default.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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