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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

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Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#41

Post by cheschire »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12
paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

What would YC 2.0 look like? How would you build it?

YC was a child of its time though, right? Are you asking what could YC have done differently in the context of its history, or are you asking what a new accelerator started today would look like?

I ask because I’m not sure that now is the time for a new startup accelerator to succeed, and we have no way to predict the circumstances that are required for success without couching it in some major changes to externalities.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#42

Post by amirhirsch »

paulgb wrote: post #8

IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume. It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though. I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themse…

YC benefits strongly from network effects; the value for each founder grows superlinearly with more founders. Grow faster!

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#43

Post by pexabit »

What happened is adverse selection due to a stubbornly low valuation that doesn't even try to keep up, in the midst of a growing number of alternatives, worsened by a formal and therefore somewhat gameable process of getting in. The kind of person who really has an idea they are going to pursue regardless that he's actually committed to isn't going to part with his equity at the low prices a YC would offer. Instead what you get is people creating companies explicitly with the intention of applying for VC, which removes an important filter reflecting founder buy-in, and therefore average quality; and there's no way you can really tell one from the other.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#44

Post by toomuchtodo »

cheschire wrote: post #41
toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would YC 2.0 look like? How would you build it?

YC was a child of its time though, right? Are you asking what could YC have done differently in the context of its history, or are you asking what a new accelerator started today would look like? I ask because I’m not sure that now is the time for a new startup accelerator to succeed, and we have no way to predict the circumstances that are required for success without couching it in some major changes to externaliti…

Great question; the latter, because as you mention, YC was a product of a moment in time and that moment has passed, but during that time horizon, they were very successful (imho).

Edit: YC says "Build something people want." and so I'm going to riff off of that in a bit of a meta way: "Support experiments worth conducting." The accelerator bit comes in once you've reached product market fit and need fuel for the rocket ship, but until then, you're just running an economic science experiment.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#45

Post by hobofan »

buggeryorkshire wrote: post #19

Surprised this doesn't mention meticulous.ai, who seem to spam HN with "we're hiring!" each month but i've never heard of anybody using them, nor do LI show any new employees. Hey Gabriel, what's going on?

I don't think that's really connected to the topic here?

What you are describing here just sounds like one of their portfolio companies taking full advantage of one of the perks that comes with YC? I don't know what the limit on the "We're hiring" posts is for portfolio companies, and I also have a few on the top of my mind that showed up a lot, but having that as "ads" on this website isn't too bad.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#46

Post by lupire »

dotty- wrote: post #20
jmull wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the objection here. Forking is part of how open source is supposed to work.

The beauty of forking/open source is the ability to contribute back to the original project or take over an abandoned project. In this case, the original project Continue.dev isn't abandoned and actually has more traction/commits than the PearAI fork. But what PearAI did not do is a traditional fork. They took the commit history, re-branded everything to PearAI, pushed it up to their own repo, and claimed that the co…

The license is literally a statement of intent.

If they wanted to police use, they could choose a different license, like one of the GPL or CC variants.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#47

Post by bpodgursky »

bearjaws wrote: post #16
stonethrowaway wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll have to expand on this for us plebs. To whom is it a net negative signal?

A) Security is always an afterthought at YC companies - I know from firsthand experience. B) YC companies are risky to use, obviously we meme about people using IBM for "saftey", but there is an opposite side of that which is going with a seed stage company - it's very risky. C) Even if you are a happy customer, if you are too niche they will typically abandon you. I've been on the decision making side for this, some…

I'm bearish on the giant YC classes but (C) is an entirely necessary evil at any successful startup anywhere.

Re: Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth

#50

Post by coldcode »

blibble wrote: post #33
humansareok1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To anyone with eyes? Job seekers looking for startups to join, investors looking for places to put money, etc. I'm sorry if your company got accepted into YC, better luck next time. At least you can hang out with the founders of... 100 AI-assisted Code Editors, 'The first Travel Credit Card for Gen Z', 'Starbucks memberships for restaurants', 'a video first food delivery app, tiktok meets doordash', and 'the operatin…

have a look at this, it's hilarious https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=F24&batch=S24&ba... I expect "AI Nip Alert" to show up any day now

Many of these are "Use AI For Something" startups. A few seemed meaningful but most seem destined to fail.
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