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I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#81

Post by sama »

tehansen wrote: post #71

Do you think that YC could ever invest or advise startups / founders that can't move to silicon valley for 3 months for one reason or another? Is there something inherent in the in-person experience that cannot be overcome by technology (in general too i suppose, rather than just the type of work ycombinator does)? Personally i believe we're not quite there yet. I have some hope, that within our life time communicati…

There is for sure something about in-person interaction that cannot be replaced by any current technology. Alan Kay recently told me he thinks it's something biological.

Our model just doesn't work well for people that can't move to the valley for 3 months.

Remote work is good in many cases, but early-stage startup advising is not one of them.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#84

Post by liyanchang »

sama wrote: post #7
toddsaunders wrote: post #2

How has the relationship between mentors/companies changed since the batches have grown? Are there still ample opportunities for office hours, etc?

Unlike most other programs, YC does not have mentors--just partners that spend all their time advising startups (and some part-time partners). This is really important--most people give terrible startup advice, and people that do nothing but select and advise startups all day are probably the best source of good startup advice. We split into 4 groups, and each company gets 2-3 "group partners" as their main points of…

The group split was something that happened after S12, which was at the time the largest batch[0]. As the numbers of startups scaled, connecting all partners to all startups was order o(n^2).

I was in this batch - there didn't seem to be any negative impact on the companies given that most/all the founders figured this out and naturally distributed themselves to optimize for talking to the same couple partners week on week. It just meant that every once in a while, you'd be sitting across from a partner that you've never really interacted with and explaining what you do (probably good practice)[1]. Formally grouping partners sounds like a great scaling patch.

[1] Not sure exactly how they did it, but the partners had some internal communication. You'd be halfway through your pitch and then they'd be like "Oh, you're THOSE guys who did X, Y, Z". And then proceed to still give you great advice.

Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA

#85

Post by e0e12bd57348 »

What your thoughts on renaming completely technical or being all rounder who understands tech really well and can do above average coding etc? My question is should I keep on improving myself as a programmer, the real worker or trying to be decent programmer but a good manager/non-purely tech but tech related person? So that after 30, when the Valley's ageism kicks in I can move onto other non purely technical positions?
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