What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
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What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
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Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#2The failure rate will skyrocket as all these startups compete for users.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#3This is just silly.
Ignoring the fact that YCombinator probably wouldn't know what to do with $40 billion (a lot of rice and beans?), the jobs created by such an investment would benefit about 1% of the country -- smart, risk-taking, well-educated young men who are willing to live in California.
The point of saving GM is only nominally to save GM. The point of saving GM is to save the industrial base of a big chunk of the US population, and hopefully keep places like Michigan from sliding into permanent and irreversible poverty. The benefit is greater than the sum of the jobs saved.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#4I'm as much for promoting startups as the rest of you, but is a massive, blind infusion of cash the answer? The thing about YCombinator, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, DFJ, etc., is that there just aren't too many of them. There was an article on here just the other day heralding the end of VC as we know it, because the vast majority of the industry wasn't producing good returns.
Investing in startups is the most difficult capitalistic resource allocation problem you can get into because you have no "reputation" to go on. When you're investing in public stocks and bonds, you're usually dealing with companies that have an established track record, or an area of the economy where the variables are known. But that is by definition not the sort of thing we're interested in doing here.
The real question should be, how many startups can PG and team invest in and coach if money were not the limiting factor? Is money the limiting factor right now?
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#5The sudden lack of scarcity would cause the quality of the investments to plummet. YC uses its money carefully because the supply is not unending.
When you only have one shot, you aim.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#6Ha right, how the government allocates money, "Paul Graham" would spend $39,999,999,992.07 on coke and hookers and the founders would split a frappuccino.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#7[deleted]
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#8I think a lot of you are missing the point. I could be wrong but I think the gist of the message is to look at what 40B into ycombinator would mean in terms of value added, employment created, etc. (with the wild assumption that it all scales). His point is to heavily criticize the 40B bailout of GM.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#9If someone wanted to give us that much money to invest, I'd probably do it, just to see what would happen. We could probably cook up some schemes for scaling. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a lot like scaling software. You run into a lot of unexpected problems, but you also end up finding ways to solve most of them. Plus you get unforeseen effects of scale, some of them good.
Re: What if Obama gave Y Combinator 40 Billion Dollars
#10This is just silly. Ignoring the fact that YCombinator probably wouldn't know what to do with $40 billion (a lot of rice and beans?), the jobs created by such an investment would benefit about 1% of the country -- smart, risk-taking, well-educated young men who are willing to live in California. The point of saving GM is only nominally to save GM. The point of saving GM is to save the industrial base of a big chunk o…
Well yeah this idea is silly, but his original point about saving GM (that it's also silly) probably still stands.
His figure for GM employees is old (2005). Last I saw, the current unionized hourly workforce is 60k employees (see link below). If you simply gave those employees $125k each, it would only have cost the government $7.5 billion. That kind of money should allow all those employees plenty of time to find other jobs or get training for a new skilled career. Then if you gave the retirement/healthcare VEBA what it needed, that would be another $20 billion, for a grand total of $27.5 billion... we've already spent more than that just keeping it afloat the last 8 months.
If they let GM die, of course some parts makers would have to scale down too, but the parts industry wouldn't collapse, because they still have the other car makers to sell to.
Link to employees figure cited above: http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2009/06/...