91–100 of 272 posts
There is a part in the Netflix culture doc where it talks about how sometimes people do bad things, and Netflix tries to not overcorrect by implementing burdensome policies on the company as a knee-jerk reaction to a single bad actor. The conclusion (YC's brand has been tarnished because of the lower quality companies in their larger batches who do bad things) doesn't follow from the evidence of this ONE company doin…
I understand that in broader terms, VCs operate in this way - investing in many things hoping that one will stick. And if this is spread across different products, industries, ideas, then it is a good signal that your company was handpicked and got attention of one of the best VCs, among many many contenders.
With examples like this, this signal is basically gone and getting a YC investment means nothing.
I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion. There’s a tendency in contemporary online culture to want to condemn the whole person. It’s not enough, it seems, to condemn Altman’s self-serving decisions with OpenAI. We also have to pretend he’s a bungling businessman, whose self-inflicted downfall is imminent. The same pattern can be observed with other public figures. It just d…
> I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion. Agreed. Making this level clam requires a lot more evidence. It would have been better if the author presented this idea as something like 'YC better watch out, quality does matter' or something like that. Even then they would need to bring in more evidence and outside examples of industries where this trend took hold.
Only punishment and court judgement requires that level of evidence.
Corruption often never gets exposed at all and at best is only revealed through weaker anecdotal evidence or even rumors.
A blurry picture is often better than no picture at all. Form your own opinion about my link above. If it’s actually true, then that post I made is likely the only thing you’ll ever read about it.
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> You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school Of course YC would want that (in the short- to mid-term). The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an acceler…
YC doesn’t benefit from founders who are just looking to pad their resume because they don’t follow through to a liquidity event for YC.
The challenge would come where the founders are not serious, and instead are viewing YC as a stepping stone to a level up position in a big tech/large firm. While I'm sure everyone has this idea to some extent as a fallback, you need people to be committed to making their business work.
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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…
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What's the most successful yc company started in the last 5 years ?
Is there a tracker or all YC companies and their outcomes?
YC did not have prestige in their early years (Jessica mentions they had to beg their friends to come to demo days). Yet people were dropping out of Harvard to join. So it seems prestige is not necessary for success and in fact may be a negative signal.
So it was prestigious, but it wasn't seen as a profitable investment before it made its first dollar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school Of course YC would want that (in the short- to mid-term). The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an acceler…
> The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely incorrect. They need liquidity events. Simply getting to follow on funding without ever making it to an exit is a negative outcome for YC.
While an exit (= aquisition, IPO and similar) is obviously always the optimal end-goal, every round of fundraising is a potential liquidity event for all existing stakeholders.
It's very common to have partial liquidation from roughly Series B-C onwards on the side of founders (e.g. wanting to keep up lifestyle with your C-level peers; removing personal financals as stress factor) and earlier investors (e.g. their funds entering the liquidation period of their lifecycle).