Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not doing yourself any favours with comments like these. YC is going out of their way to make this stuff accessible and privilege has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Please, don't do this.
Perhaps it wasn't the most useful comment I've written, but I think I have a strong point. It's not the information or know-how that makes YC a game-changer. It's the connections and seal of approval, which are scarce by definition. And now the Stanford -> Funded pipeline is even stronger, which means that everyone else is slightly (imperceptibly) more an outsider fuckhead employee on 0.04%. I don't begrudge YC, real…
YC is composed of equal parts capital, smarts and process. That's not taking into account the connections or the seal of approval, those are results not inputs! You could claim they are inputs now but it wasn't always like that.
> It's the connections and seal of approval, which are scarce by definition.
Connections are not scarce at all. You - and anybody else - have the power to reach out to those that you want to reach. Assuming you play at 6 degrees for a bit you'll find a link to whoever you want to reach. What makes the difference is that once YC gives you that coveted 'seal of approval' (and that's also not that scarce, vast numbers of start-ups have received it) that some people will throw money at you.
But that's a curse and a blessing at the same time, for many of those recipients will receive the 'curse' and only a few will eventually see it as a blessing. But all of them agree: the experience alone was well worth it.
Now I'm not a YC alumnus, nor will I ever be one but I think that if a very large number of people that go through a program think it is worth it then that has my vote.
The seal of approval is something that VCs that do not wish to do their own vetting have come up with, they have basically outsourced their vetting to YC because YC does so much better a job of this than they could ever do by themselves that they might as well try to get in on the feeding frenzy aka demo day.
And YC has forever been expanding the size of their batches based on capacity available for processing. So the scarcity element would seem to be under control and reducing.
> And now the Stanford -> Funded pipeline is even stronger, which means that everyone else is slightly (imperceptibly) more an outsider fuckhead employee on 0.04%.
On the contrary, all the material will be made available, so you too can benefit from this.
Stanford is merely a convenient vehicle.
> I don't begrudge YC, really.
I'll take your word for it. But it seems as if you do hold some kind of grudge and a pretty deep one.
> It's a brilliantly run business and it's probably done a lot of good for the world.
So why all this negativity then? It's like walking around on a square attempting to insult random people for either being successful, connected, part of some perceived secret cabal or some other figment of the imagination. That's a strange line to walk.
> It's just fun to snark about these things because, honestly, most of the people "out there" (the ones who actually think protesting Google Buses makes some kind of sense) are going to react more harshly than I do. I just make fun of shit.
Well, it's good to have that on the table then because I honestly believed that you were serious in the way you present yourself. You're obviously a pretty smart fellow, the bit that I did not understand is if you're so jealous of all this why are you hurting your personal rep at this level. But if you're just 'making fun of shit' then that explains things sufficiently for me, I tried to make sense of it. My mistake.