Full disclosure, I'm a YC alum whose last start-up was acquired by Google, who applied to this batch and didn't get an interview.
YC is not the stamp of quality it once was, to be sure, though it still works as social proof, because investors (especially VCs) want to invest in companies other investors like (or failing that, companies they imagine other investors would like). YC would say that they aren't trying to be a stamp of quality or social proof, they are just trying to help start-ups.
If I had to take a stab at articulating how YC has changed, it's that it's become a VC, picking ideas to generate returns.
This rejection email from 2022 that someone posted online cements the idea for me (excerpted):
"Unfortunately, we've decided not to fund {Company} this batch. We enjoyed our conversation today and were impressed by you as founders building something they are passionate about bringing into being. However we weren't convinced that this product strategy is going to yield a big company in its current form. ...
Of course, things are very early and you are still figuring out the right way to build and structure your business. If you're able to make significant progress with it, we'd be very interested in hearing about it for a future batch."
Original YC would not reject founders over their current product strategy and because they haven't figured out the right way to structure their business--haven't put together the "proof" that they could be on track to be a unicorn, etc. That's a VC rejection. Of course, YC gets many thousands of applications and has to reject most of them. You could say they shouldn't be criticized for trying to give a little feedback.
It's just hard to convey the sense from the early days of YC that they really didn't care about the return, or the progress so far, or VCs, or fads, or anything. That said, I really was at the right place at the right time and got very lucky.
Finally, I want to call out the phenomenon in the world of VC where the ability to generate hype alone is enough to make you and your investors a lot of money, even if there isn't a lot of substance in your company (and even if things are morally or ethically questionable), through the mechanism of greater fools. Cryptocurrency is a whole exploration of this effect, turning hype into money by building a streamlined mechanism for bringing in greater fools, but we can also look at examples like Theranos. (There's actually a ton of money at the top of society looking for somewhere to go, which ideally would be routed to more worthy ventures than it is, but that's a whole topic in itself.) The point is, the greater fool "strat" works. In a moral vacuum, if you are trying to maximize returns, you lean into it.
If I were running a fund like YC with basically unlimited money at my disposal, balancing the goals (strategies?) of 1) make money for money's sake, 2) advance technology for technology's sake (let's go to Mars, etc), and 3) make the world a better place, I would focus on (3). Like can we at least try to build a unicorn that feeds people, and maybe fail, rather than trying to build FooBarBazCoin that eats the word, and failing? We mostly see a mix of (1) and (2).
This sounds like an episode of "Shark Tank" - If you have $1 mil in orders which will generate a profit of 500k they will fight each other to invest 100k for 40% of your company. If you dont have a full order book and a production pipeline - no bueno.
I can only assume your product didnt fit into the current hype investment bucket (you should have put Ai in the pitch and you would have been funded). LPs in the VC funds want their Blockchain Ai and whatever hype they hear about exposure - the VCs have to deliver it and have it in their portfolio. The investment hype cycle is self reinfocing; as the investment headlines get bigger and the hype gets bigger.
YC's original appeal was for builders/creators who were truly passionate about building a great product that solved a real problem. Dropbox for example at the time.
In my opinion, effectiveness of anything dilutes over time especially as you increase volume. There is no way you can maintain the same level of vetting and quality when you have a batch of 50 vs batch of 500+ which is now where YC is. So they must have to pivot to a different model of vetting companies.
I am curious as to why they continue to do more batches instead of less. Is it really a numbers game now ?
For example, what was the last truly great product out of YC built by a true hacker/team ?
> … yield a big company …
I assume that this sort of says it all.
Everyone wants “big.”
The article talks about brand curation, really.
That seems to be a lost art, these days. I worked for a corporation that had one of the most powerful brands in the world (but has taken some real hits). I watched them dilute that brand, and make lots of money, but really get clobbered. They are now regrouping, and, I hope, re-establishing their original luster.
They were able to take a fairly small corporation, and compete with mega companies, on the strength of their brand. When they grew rather explosively, in the 1990s, they sowed the seeds of their own demise, in the mid-2010s.
the whole mythology is nobody knows what will be a big company in general.
The known big company spaces are heavily oversubscribed so nothing can be predicted.
The unknown big company spaces are unknown by definition.
Strong brand value seems like insurance.
You don't think about it when you don't need it, but it bails your ass out of otherwise-impossible situations when you do need it.
Everything's fine for uninsured property... until it's not.
> It's just hard to convey the sense from the early days of YC that they really didn't care about the return, or the progress so far, or VCs, or fads, or anything. That said, I really was at the right place at the right time and got very lucky.
It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did. Web apps and mobile fundamentally transformed everyday life and communication in very visible ways and there seemed to be a lot of low hanging fruit. I observe, similar to your 2), that YC seemed to have a bias toward products for tech people by tech people, and that wasn't a bad strategy, because there was still a lot of plumbing to do; there still is, but I feel that there are established solutions for the mass market to a degree that there wasn't.
> Original YC would not reject founders over their current product strategy and because they haven't figured out the right way to structure their business--haven't put together the "proof" that they could be on track to be a unicorn, etc.
Imagine you ran a startup accelerator that didn't invest in a particular business model or product, but instead invested in a team of founders you thought had the potential to produce something great, even if it takes a few pivots.
Now imagine you didn't want to invest in a given company. Would your rejection letter say you disliked the founders, as people?
Of course not, you want to be on friendly terms, just in case. Far safer to just be "unconvinced" about their "product strategy" in its "current form".
If you ever go after 3) sign me up.
The most inexplicable miss by VCs (YC included)is the lack of interest in funding climate change remediation. Billions of people to help and billions of dollars to be made. E.g.: Could funding protection of Tuvalu’s dry land and status as a nation pay dividends through licensing/leasing fishing rights?
Such things are an area for innovation, and tech could be a part of it, but isn’t.
This hits pretty dead center from what I've seen.
You really hit home for at #3, that's the type of companies I want to see.
If you start such a fund, I'd really enjoy working on that project.
What I am seeing is that among Harvard/Stanford grads, being the CEO of a venture backed startup is the highest status. Some of them hate technology and view programming as "low class". But they still go into it, so when they see their peers its something to brag about. They may even stretch the runway as far as possible to maintain the status.
YC is just another brand they can add. It was so odd for me when I first realized this is how it works. And the investors are often just investing based on where they went to school. Real metrics dont come into play until later, during which they have the capital to hire people that actually know what theyre doing.
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 themselves, but I find the whole debacle a bit embarrassing for YC and I know some of my YC batchmates quietly do as well.
For the uninitiated like myself, PearAi just took the source code of continue.dev (not fork, they copy pasted) and did some clunky work on it. That was their entry to YC.
And to save anyone else looking it up, seems to be continue.dev is using Apache License in their repos.
(also, I did some poking around, this is the founder 3 months ago talking about using continue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0OylwLzBQw&t=257s - no horse in this race, just sharing)
"did some clunky work on it. That was their entry to YC"
For more context, YC doesn't judge your code, never has. It was never a code quality competition. Orthogonally, they do judge the results (user metrics).
> 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 accelerator they are in the best position to do that.
The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.
> 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 accelerator they are in the best position to do that.
That's really short term thinking.
It might work for a class or two, but eventually VCs will realize that they're getting bad returns from their investments, and YC won't be nearly as attractive as it is today.
For long term success, YC needs to pick companies that will eventually become successful. Particularly the big, standout successes.
> The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.
If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.
> but eventually VCs will realize that they're getting bad returns from their investments
I'm not saying that they are necessarily bad returns. It's just that for many reasons there is a strong opportunity for a disconnect between viable business models and seed-investments. E.g. exit event horizons are currently so long[0] that it becomes hard to correlate exit success to seed-funding (for better or worse).
> If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.
Oh, I don't disagree with you. But from the actions of YCombinator it seem like either:
- They don't see this as a risk to their long-term ROI (due to some factors we are not seeing here)
- They don't have proper means of self-assessing their selection quality and think they are scaling well while they don't
- The situation is not as bad as the article and some of the comments here make it look like, and everything is fine with YC
[0]: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ <- There are many 10+ year old companies on that list without an exit and YCombinator isn't even 20 years old yet
A question that has probably been answered, but...
In a hits business, does quality picking matter? You want to avoid adverse selection, but beyond that - isn't it just about scale?
There are probably a few levels.
Originally, at small scale, you need to pick hits better than others (or get lucky).
Next, you want to scale large enough that you can make enough bets to amortize individual bet risk across a large portfolio.
Then, once you're over that scale, you need to be back in the business of picking hits more reliably than the next VC.
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.
How do you tell the difference? Especially when so many YCs seem almost like comical vaporware or shovelware but with a charismatic CEO.
Very true.
Saw one recently that literally forked VSCode and Cursor and called it a company with some really shady practices. Not even sure what YC was thinking with that one, but it indeed falls into the category of comical vaporware.
How did something like this get funded? They must think there will be a follow through to liquidity event, but no clue how. Maybe YC is playing into the bigger fool theory that someone else will come along and pay more so YC can extricate their equity.
A high-quality early stage team that self-selects out of follow-up rounds may be a decent outcome for some VCs. This means early liquidity in all of the "positive" events. If the founders were high quality, spinning an acquihire out can still recoup some of the loss.
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.
Sure, that would be a theoretical failure mode. But that's not really what's happening right now, is it?
YC doesn't look to have a problem of people joining just to get the stamp on the resume and then "half-assing" it after they get into YC. I think that's something that YC is still quite actively selecting against. As long as they are selecting companies that make it to a series ~C (which most founders will stick around for as long as they are on an good-enough upward-presenting) YC can (partially) liquidate at good enough fund performance.
> 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.
Liquidity event != exit.
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).
Just looked up the etymology of prestige and it’s interesting.
It comes from Latin praestigium ("delusion, illusion"), then 1500s French prestige meaning “deceit, imposture, illusion”. In the 1800s it started to mean “an illusion as to one's personal merit or importance, a flattering illusion”.
I would have wrongly guessed it originally meant “good reputation” (same as the article author meant it, I assume) and that the association with bullshit/fakery is just a modern twist from people using the word with cynical irony. But bullshit/fakery was in fact the core meaning.
That is enlightening.
Without being aware of the etymology I've still had a lifetime feeling since childhood that it is very fragile for some reason that is hard to pinpoint or bring into focus very easily.
Really is about the same feeling as when you know something is hype or BS and for that reason more subject to collapse like a house of cards.
YC benefits strongly from network effects; the value for each founder grows superlinearly with more founders. Grow faster!
I think you mean PearAI[0], not to be confused with Pair AI[1], which YC also funded.
oops, thanks, fixed.
The "something" that they see is that they have a 1% chance of success. YC is an investment strategy. They noticed that equity which is 99% sure to be worthless is heavily under priced and bought a ton of it. That bet paid off handsomely.
If your batchmates are seeing embarrassment from who else is at the top of such a funnel I don't think much of their judgment. Investors provide capital, not prestige.
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.
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.
AFAICT, as much as YC was a child of their time, they (and PG) were also one of the parents of our current time.
I'm guessing it was inevitable that Wall Street would take over the field, and turn it into a machine.
And therefore it was also inevitable that people who, in the past, would've gone to Wall Street, now would flow into the space, and take it over.
But YC did put their own spin on that, in which the traditional affluent-family, prestigious-school kids could also be computer nerds.
It's interesting to consider what the evolution YC 2.0 could be. I do think we're going to be seeing more innovative organizational models that can be facilitated by adept use of AI.
For example, a network organization that hires individuals and small teams. The organization works on various projects and product streams, which which can be spun out as new businesses.
This is a flexible model that allows for many different outcomes and journeys for the people. Less of a startup factory and more of an enterprise garden.
I like the idea of gateways as a system for managing ideas and new business developments. Regular gateways every 6 or 12 months that assess projects for continuation, funding and further development. People can be involved in several projects.
I see this type of organization structure as a kind of 'hyper network'. By using AI to monitor and report on network activity it should be possible to have effective management oversight, direction and communication ... beneficent controlled creative chaos.
For founders? I'd buy into the network and mentorship maybe, but not with equity. Maybe a subscription or cohort based fee schedule.
So like accelerators before YC? No thanks.
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 doing something that people could view as a low integrity move.
This exact situation could have occurred even if they kept their acceptance rates, and cohorts, incredibly small. There can always be bad actors (not saying this company is a bad actor though). I think you wanted to share your conclusion, even if the available evidence didn't necessarily support your claim.
I think the bigger issue is that the main signal to YC (and other elite institutions) is the acceptance rate (<1%). That's probably the #1 thing people know about YC. A lot of people try to get in, and few do.
The main criticism I have of YC is their constants chants of "everyone should apply!". Here is what you commonly hear:
YC: You should apply to YC!
Person: But I don’t have a product
YC: You should still apply, we let in a lot of people with just an idea!
Person: But I don’t have a co-founder
YC: You should still apply, successful solo founders have made it into the program!
Person: But I [perfectly valid reason not to waste your time]
YC: You should still apply!
Person: Wow, you’re being very encouraging, does this means I have a chance to get in?
YC: Almost certainly not!
At a certain point, I can't really take the org's mission in good faith with this kind of messaging. They want a high application rate, a low acceptance rate (even with bigger batch sizes). Just infinite optionality and founders being strung along.
I wrote more about it in a blog post
The reason they want you to apply is twofold -- the application itself is a good exercise in getting you to think about things you should be thinking about. Honestly even if you have no intention at all of applying to YC you should still fill out the application for yourself, it makes you think about important things.
And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them. If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.
It has nothing to do with "juicing the numbers".
> If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.
Would it? With numbers that large, how could anyone possibly do a meaningful comparison and pick out the twenty or thirty or fifty that would get in?
In other words, if it's obvious to everybody that you are getting too many applications to meaningfully evaluate all of them, they everybody knows that you are not meaningfully evaluating all of them. You're applying some kind of mindless algorithmic filter to narrow down the possibilities. But that's not YC's brand. YC's brand is providing meaningful evaluation of startups. Once that brand is undermined, it's gone.
> they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them.
That assumes that evaluating a candidate is zero-cost, which surely isn't true.
I'm convinced those that say "I think its a good exercise filling out an application" have never actually read the application
Here are a few questions:
"How far along are you?"
"What tech stack are you using, or planning to use, to build this product?"
"Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?"
"Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't?"
"How do or will you make money? How much could you make?"
It's really not that deep or thought provoking. Its fine, you should have answers for these questions, but its hardly worth a founders time going over this as closely as many do.
> And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them
Yes, that's the infinite optionality for them. If I was running YC, I would obv promote the same strategy. As a founder, I think their incentives don't necessarily align with mine.
i realised this too late. and then noticed -- the type of founder they let me. for us the unwashed masses, who are blue collar coders who went to state school. we're just filling up rejection numbers.
yet the arbiter of what determines who succeeds is not YC but the market.
I don't think the main issue here is that a YC company acted with questionable ethics. As you say, people are people and that can happen with even the strictest due diligence.
The problem for YC's prestige stems from funding a company with an unoriginal idea and not even the beginnings of a prototype. I'm aware that YC funds founders more than it funds specific ideas or projects. Nonetheless, you'd expect an impressive group of founders to do more than just fork an existing open source project.
In short, cases like this show that YC is getting (non-illegally) scammed by some of its applicants. That makes YC look foolish.
Even the evidence listed (the retweeted tweet in the article) doesn't support the claim of the author to me. If you open source software and give it a license that permits commercial use on top of it, then you are okay with that use. If I was a cohort of a team that built an open sourced AI editor I would think they would WANT me to build on top of it. Otherwise, why permit that use? They may have a bad business model, where their business does not work if they open source their tech and other companies build competitors on top of it. But that's a questions for them and their decision to open source. But it doesn't seem shady to use open source software from another company that permits commercial use.
The point of my comment is that the alleged shadiness is largely irrelevant, so I'm not sure what you response is directed at.
“It takes two points to establish a line, and three for a curve.”
"The issue isn't that PearAI did something illegal—it's that they got funded by YC with nothing more than a codebase copied from another YC-backed company. This shows that (1) YC is willing to fund just about anything, (2) they’re not doing any real due diligence, and (3) they don't particularly care about their existing portfolio companies."
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding on how YC functions. YCombinator was never a test of how good (or unique) your code was. At its core it was a filter of people, people who can work well together and people who can build something useful. That's it. You can read more about this straight from one of the founders [1]. The fact that you used open-source code (within legal bounds) to get their quicker just shows your resourcefulness, something YC actually optimizes for.
More often than not, "good people" tend to be domain experts sometimes really good and unique coders but that, to me, was always a byproduct of the search pattern.
You can obviously disagree with this methodology, but it has worked pretty well.
[1]: https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i...
I think something people might be missing is the context around this post, which is that the founders are being dragged on twitter, essentially.
Since a lot of you hate the site, I'll summarise briefly: one of the founders did a thread starting with the following post:
"
I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang
We're building PearAI, an open source AI code editor. Think a better Copilot, or open source Cursor. But you've heard this spiel already...
"
One thing not conveyed here is the first line is in unicode bold and the end is littered with emoji spam. Essentially, the post ticked a few rage inducing boxes for a certain kind of tech twitter user. It was rather cringe, reading like a thread from get-rich-quick influencer types while also likely imbueing some readers and quote tweets with a little jealousy they wouldn't openly admit. This was probably the impetus that pushed one or two angry people to poke around their product and find out about the open source code cloning and the fact the founders were overselling (which founder doesn't, I guess...) which lead to a rout of publicly mocking them and YC in general, resulting in blog posts like the OP, I guess.
I personally don't really think one company amongst the whole batch is enough to judge the start of a trend for YC "trading prestige for growth" or whatever. I think the discussion of prestige is in general is an interesting one, I just don't think PearAI is indicative of it more than they themselves just being hucksters which happens in tech in general.
This is an indictment of Twitter tbh. Not YC. A lot (most?) YC founders aren't even on Twitter.
the founders were status-signaling on twitter.
it is clear they are in it for the "status" of being YC. and they dont care a whit about solving anybody's problem.
they do this for a while, get it on the resume and go back to their 270K jobs after a few months.
this in and of itself is a hustle, lol. they hustled YC.
The founders showed hustle, as every founder must. nothing wrong with that in my book.
But they need adult-guidance on communication. You dont go around twitter boasting about your 270K job etc. They need to show grown up hustle (grit, perseverence, etc). Not high-school (mine is bigger than yours) hustle.
I feel like that "270K job" comment was some sort of cultural signal to Zoomer devs on the FAANG leetcode job grind. I'm in my 40s so it just seems both tacky and unimpressive but maybe for folks half my age it's a meaningful signal towards competency?
The simpler break-down here is that they are crappy con artists and need to be be better at con-artisting. Which is fine, but please let's not pretend it's very different.
Honestly, I hate X/Twitter specifically for this - the click/rage bait cesspool that it has become in the past year after content engagement became monetized.
Every other day, or at least every week, there is a new topic that everyone piles-on rage and hate to - even accounts that have nothing to do with the topic. This is because eyeballs make users money from X - so getting any audience possible, and getting them inflamed enough to engage is the point.
Even worse, the algorithm is gamed such that the latest rage is pushed to every other users eyeballs, resulting in a constant stream of hate in your feed.
I think the real pain point you're hitting on there is that people feel like they don't get selected when they deserve to be. While there are those who don't deserve it but get selected anyway.
While I often feel this sadness/jealousy myself, and most probably a lot of the rage bait X replies do too (despite not admitting it) - someday they have to wake up and realize that life is/has always been that way.
Despite our collective desire, Tech is not a guaranteed meritocracy either.
VC firms are betting on the people. Most early startups are still looking for their market fit. The VC firm is betting that the people are able to identify that market which they'll be able to scale.
yc is a club looking for members. A lot of the members share similar traits/backgrounds which is why there's sorta this "populist" backlash. It's not meritocracy for ideas or viability.
This reminds me of something that appeared on hacker news a couple days ago:
https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart....
Basically, the proxy objective is "getting into YC" -- the real objective is producing value of course.
We've started optimizing for the proxy. Which produces outcomes like this, where YC is a Thing You Do, after Graduating From Stanford, and before Becoming a YC Alum.
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 doesn’t seem to me to beget a workable understanding of reality.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, except that I like reading HN, and I’d like it if this place didn’t descend into the kind of friend-enemy thinking so prevalent on much of the internet.
> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697929
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41697929
Hn claims to be largely independent of the YC fund. But we will never know the full truth.
> martialed
I think you mean “marshaled,” correct?
It's used as an attack, so both.
Something that I think is a bit misguided about this is that YC, at founding, was pretty unfashionable itself. The "accelerator" model wasn't particularly proven, and the thesis was that there was an untapped talent pool of "hackers" who just needed to figure out how to run a business and get connected to the right people/resources in order to be successful founders. Compared to other accelerator-type opportunities at the time (and some that still exist), YC was extremely founder friendly.
YC 1.0 made good on that vision — the success rate in the early batches is indicative of that. Once PG stepped back and handed the reigns over to Sam Altman, YC focused more on scaling up, while the startup ecosystem grew significantly as well, specifically around "Web 2.0". At the time, it wasn't particularly difficult to create a venture-backable web business if you had the technical skills and the right resources to achieve distribution. Along the same lines, being a startup founder became a viable alternative to becoming a banker or management consultant for high-achieving individuals. So naturally YC, as a backer of hyper-successful startups that generally have an easier time fundraising, became a magnet for the status-seeking subset of high-achieving individuals, leading to it becoming more of a stamp of prestige.
Since Sam Altman's tenure, it seems like a lot of the initial edge that YC had at founding is significantly diluted. There are a lot of aspiring founders seeking funding, but the Web 2.0 opportunity doesn't really exist anymore (at least not at the same scale). So today, YC looks much more like a large seed fund that funds more specialized businesses rather than the types of founders of the initial cohorts (i.e. hackers that want to build Web 2.0 businesses), and I think people are overly critical of that scale up. 2005 was a very specific point in time for the startup industry, and the YC thesis was not only well-timed, but extremely effective through ~2014 — but it's been difficult for them to figure out how to continue the momentum given changes in the ecosystem.
Well said. Things change
We were in YC S22 and it definitely has become a status seeker magnet. However, entrepreneurship is itself a status seeker magnet.
The point the author misses is that you need to think of YC not as an organization but as a segment of time for personal and team reflection. It can help you develop a coherent narrative for your path and goals. Others may deride this characterization and say it’s too expensive. But the only way to enforce that kind of reflection is to raise the stakes and give it a real opportunity cost.
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.
It wasn't. If you told someone you dropped out of Harvard back then they would think you were making an odd choice. That said, it was never very risky since Harvard will take you back if you drop out, but it was at least unusual.
I don't agree at all with this post. YC's mission is to help founders start companies and help them build sustainable businesses. Towards that they've made it super simple to get started and funded, and provide guiding principles and support in the form of advice and a strong network to help the startups survive. They were never about prestige -- that came as a byproduct.
Scaling this model is hard, however, and I think they may be running into scaling limits. There just may not be that many fast growing businesses (startups) every year. We won't know until years from now.
I love the posts about how YC was better back in the day. It was the same, it's the same. It's just bigger and there's more timeline now to reflect.
If you think the partners (the core of which have been there since day 1) have really changed their outlook that much then you've not been paying attention.
YC has always been a smorgasbord of status seekers, dreamers, ruthless pragmatists, creators and artists. It's a big community that keeps growing, the good parts and the bad parts.
There were scandals then, there are scandals now. They pick some teams perfectly and others totally wrong. The most important thing is that they keep doing it every year and more people get access and a shot at doing their thing.
FWIW I was YC W14 and yes it was totally better back then and we were all geniuses and pure lovers of startups only with no ego...
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.
I don't know what YC thinks, but the mission is not about prestige, but to help startups succeed, so these startups can make something people want.
Also, YC is mostly back in person and so pretty hard to scale (also batch sizes have gone down in the last couple of years).
Note that when YCombinator first started in 2005 (the batch that Sam Altman was part of, as a college dropout), they were not prestigious. They largely funded college students that nobody else would invest in. But part of Paul Graham's philosophy for it is that "If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious" [1].
Rather, I think that what's happened with YCombinator is that it's followed the growth arc common to all institutions. You start with somebody who has a good idea and a passion for making things better for some subset of humanity. That attracts other people in a virtuous cycle. But eventually you hit a growth limit and saturate your market. At that point, the focus of the people in charge turns to wealth extraction, leveraging your brand, reputation, and market position to make ever increasing profits. Eventually you squeeze everything there is out of your market, your product is shit, your employees don't care about you anymore, and you get replaced by a younger more beautiful que^H^H^Hstartup.
I wouldn't bother applying to YC now - I don't feel like they give enough for the equity they take, their advice has become formulaic and well-known, and I'd rather go do what I love. But in 2005, when nobody was funding college students and the popular wisdom was that the Internet was a dead fad, they were revolutionary.
There was a discussion a few weeks ago about YC betting on essentially the same product of adding support for chatting with LLMs inside your IDE (Continue.dev, Void, double.bot), which is a great example of this. No differentiation between investments, just spray-and-pray technique hoping that at least one of the contenders will succeed.
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.
YC went downhill during Sam Altman and then Garry Tan pushed it off a cliff. There’s no point in joining YC anymore.
What's the most successful yc company started in the last 5 years ?
Replit and Vanta stand out
Is there a tracker or all YC companies and their outcomes?
PG should return and go 'founder mode' on YC and clean house.
You were just waiting for somebody to get on the front page with something about PearAI, which was the main character on Twitter yesterday; might as well be this.
Article's assumption is that a totally incompetent set of startup founders were admitted to YC because it "loses quality in exchange for quantity" (not a direct quote but the gist). And this startup was nothing more than a copy of a different startup.
Maybe it is the prestige game that became a death knell for YC. Because it is "cool" to be accepted to YC, the "cool people" with a coolness factor started applying and tried to game through the evaluation process into acceptance. But these cool people aren't really cut out for doing sweaty, gross, sleeve-pulling work. So they likely fail.
What does Sam do? Refocus the company to drift away from the "cool" tech sector where cool people are looking to make their name cool. And start doing stuff in multiple sectors (that will seem cool in the future!).
What didn't he do? Make the grind of becoming a YC selectee even sweatier and harder. Or change the selection process entirely so that all previous books trying to get you through the system fall flat on their faces.
Counter point: there are so many more accelerators now. It was basically getting into MIT/Stanford in term of opening up big doors. Now you have schools with accelerators right out of undergrads. So, YC has to compete in the space (sort of). It’s still one of the highest prestige (as in validation) you can get EVEN IF YOU FAIL.
> (1) YC is willing to fund just about anything, (2) they’re not doing any real due diligence, and (3) they don't particularly care about their existing portfolio companies.
YC never said they were anything else, though? YC's strategy is simple.
Vet for y intercept, do little due diligence, and make it up through investing in enough people.
They never claim to be perfect. In fact, there's a number of YC founders who have had scandals:
- Bitfinex $4.5 B hack was a YC founder
- uBiome (wire fraud) was a YC co: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30899352
- Stablegain ($44M crypto fraud) was a YC co https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31461634
- DreamWorld is a YC co: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266
I guess hucksters are inevitable?
Just from public information my impression is that prestige was never a goal while scaling was in the plans from fairly early on.
Anecdotally, some of the best recent founders I know are opting not to apply, which I think is a bad sign. But their reasons have nothing to do with the scale, competitiveness, or prestige of the program.
Starting a startup is now a prestige game. Its a career path. Spend enough time with ivy league grads and youll realize this is true
I don't track these things, but as far back as I can remember, the appeal of YC was the tutelage of experienced founders, availability of office hours, and the atmosphere of being surrounded by like-minded, ambitious people.
When did that change?
That tight-knit environment couldn't last when they keep taking on a bigger volume of startups every year.
2005 - 8 startups
2010 - 63 startups
2015 - 216 startups
2020 - 435 startups
2024 - 509 startups so far (likely 600+ when the Fall batch is done)
> This decline will continue until cool, innovative companies no longer see any reason to apply.
I am the furthest thing from a business man / start-up news addict, but even I know that the point of starting a company is to make money (perhaps fulfilling a need or niche, sure) and "being cool" should have nothing to do with it. Hell, "cool" often doesn't really square with being "innovative" anyway.
Startups determine their ability to execute, and thus generate revenue (or promises of same) from appearing “cool” to prospective talent and future investors. Without it, they wither and die.
Eh yes, but half a million in income sure helps you avoid death too, and most of them are moments from death when they apply.
Please don't refer to an investment as "income". It hurts the ears of those of us who know a little accounting.
I have no objection to, "half a million in cash sure helps you . . "
I understand that.
However review my last month or so of post history for my views on earned/employment income, unearned income and asset income.
In essence I differentiate between revenue within income, but not income/investment. I don't think taxes should either. Specifically, I think capital gains/intermingling of asset taxes while requiring up to date taxed-upfront employment taxes is one of the worst decisions society ever made.
They seemed to trade quality as well. Its now a net negative signal for a company's success if they are accepted into YC.
You’ll have to expand on this for us plebs. To whom is it a net negative signal?
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 operating system for vacation rentals'. Truly a staggering group of talent.
Those are all real companies in W24 btw...
"100 AI assisted code editors" is not even an exaggeration.
I checked, and over 300 (of ~500) 2024 YC startups have some sort of AI tag. I'm quite curious how the current AI hype is gonna end...
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.
Not going to name names, but so far my favorite has been “AI for [somewhat arcane process]”.
I had no idea how “AI” could possibly be of use, so clicked through out of curiosity. Hilariously, it boiled down to “we occasionally use an LLM to email people for you.”
hahahaha, wow! I really thought this was a joke list. That’s stunning.
Yeah not a joke. Straight from the W24 batch page... I'm sure these weren't even the most absurd.
I was laughing thinking how you made up a list of the most stupid ideas. Just to be baffled they are really fucking there.
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, sometimes your early customers don't fit your new market, so you have to let them down slowly.
I'm bearish on the giant YC classes but (C) is an entirely necessary evil at any successful startup anywhere.
I mean I can't speak for that commenter, but I hold any VC backed startup in suspicion for a good amount of time because if they can't reach the size demanded by their investors, which runs the gamut from ambitious-but-achievable all the way to not-in-my-or-your-lifetime, a perfectly profitable modestly sized business is almost bound to be shut down and it's services terminated with little drama, leaving behind potentially useless products, or yet another fucking ZIP file to add to the pile of the things I have yet to open up and sort into other mediums.
> if they can't reach the size demanded by their investors
In this sense, how is YC any different from any other VC firm?
It's not, which is probably why I said VC not YC.
It's pretty clear that many VCs are starting to play the carry-game, it's much easier to scale up and make money on carry than it is picking winners or even pricing the 'winners' correctly as we saw during ZIRP. Tax advantaged too.
YC gets such great terms (because they invest so early and have great deal flow) that it's hard to see them declining unless the current venture model stops working. It does seem that recent YC batches are less impressive, but IMO that's less due to the quality of person that YC attracts and more that there's less low-hanging fruit. The "software is eating the world" thesis still seems true but now it's a lot harder to compete just on software you often need domain expertise in a complicated field.
This entire article is premised on the idea that YC accepts more startups now than before, but if I'm not mistaken, their acceptance rate has gone down every batch.
And since the OP specifically called out Harvard as a paragon of prestige institution, it should be noted that YC acceptance rate is lower than Harvard's too.
This is almost as embarrassing as data centers in space getting funded. lol.
The blog post is dumb, in the extreme. Sven doesn’t know the PearAI founders, the key metric YC says they assess when they make a funding decision. Where they forked a codebase from is a deminimus consideration — as Gary says, if it’s in the license, it’s in the license. Maybe Sven thinks that’s unethical, although in this case it’s funny to complain on behalf of YC, “Hey, YC, your money went to an open source codebase, and then some more of your money got to use it! You guys suck!”
Comments here miss a lot as well, (although I agree that YC’s prestige days are over) — PG’s plan was ALWAYS to be able to do more. He lays out the reasoning in an essay maybe eight years ago — if your portfolio looks like 1-2 companies (now 3) out of 500 made 80% of the returns, what should you do?
There are basically three answers to this: Rejoice, Write 497 less checks next time, or write 1,000 more checks in the hope of getting a fourth.
PG’s head was at: write 1,000 more checks. I like this attitude a lot, and believe there are good social, macroeconomic and financial reasons to act this way. Of course you will put up with more failures in that mode — you already went and got the “good” ones — you are now picking ones you didn’t love that much in the sure knowledge that you’ll happily be wrong about one (or maybe even two) of them.
Especially when you’re considering what to do mid-ZIRP, this is I think the only rational strategy if you want to make more money and help the world see more cool things.
That said, one thing YC companies benefitted from immensely in the height of the prestige era was just that, prestige; it was a virtuous cycle in that getting in to YC guaranteed a quality seed and probably A round just on the name. In that way, it was like getting in to Stanford or MIT. Today, along with mentoring, one of the main benefits is the larger network internally, and this is a different thing. Possibly better, possibly not. I do think that if the prestige is needed for their model, they’re probably over scaled for today’s markets and venture money.
Of bigger concern, I would say should be the question: “what does pre-seed/seed even look like in five years?” — Much of what seed capital is for can be done with quality LLMs today — and I expect that trend to continue. We saw the rise of pre-seed firms in exactly this economic environment — through the middle of the dotcom one boom, a tech startup was EXPENSIVE — ten engineers, $30k sparcstations, long data center contracts — the cash was needed. YC started at an inflection point when open source tooling and availability was driving that cost down.
The next YC / early stage fund is going to look very, very different than the last one. And that’s okay! It will be fun to see what’s next.
Part of the earlier appeal of YC was that it was a batch of approval that, at least imo, was a strong signal to VCs to take a good look at the company and more-likely-than-not invest in.
With larger batches and more lax selection that signal is so weak that YC comapnies are mostly like other companies with some traction.
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?
HN is rife with these adds masquerading as legit hiring posts. One company was “hiring their 3rd engineer” for years.
I thought I was the only one who noticed, I'd much prefer the YC companies do a monthly "here's who's hiring" much like the "who's hiring" instead of individual ones.
What about Imbue which has raised like 300mln, spams fake hiring ads all the time, and doesn’t have a product…
I briefly worked for Imbue, and got paid for it, and as far as I know they are still legitimately hiring -- their current team page shows a good number of people who have been hired since I was there -- so I don't think "spams fake hiring ads" is a fair thing to say; they are legitimately hiring people, and paying good money. My impression is that they make the top of the hiring funnel as wide as possible but end up hiring a tiny fraction of the people who start the process.
With the recent drop of batch quality comes more lifestyle companies and less disruptors. I can't imagine the YC of even 10 years ago funding quite so many zombies 3+ years no product but still holding out for the fabled founding engineer...
A half-decent Schemer in found3rm0de would've built 5 failed MVPs and exactly one unicorn in that timeframe.
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.
I interviewed for Meticulous a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure I was almost hired, but it didn't go through because they decided they wanted to go fully in-person in London, and I didn't want that. Gabriel seemed like a good guy, I was given a very believable project demo, Quentin also seems legit, my understanding is the product is difficult currently to roll-out to smaller customers but they have a good number of larger paying customers.
I don't think the continuous hiring posts are anything other than a sign that it doesn't cost them anything and they get good leads every time they do it.
Join us as Founding Engineer #207 !
I've used meticulous.ai!
I always thought YC growth was to fuel it's portco's initial traction. My understanding is that they solved each other's problems and then raised on traction largely within their own ecosystem. Having a wide breadth of companies would better enable this
Weird that his example of YC's decline is a company putting together a hacky MVP based on open source code, which is an absolutely classic YC thing to do.
Oof just watched a video from the Pear.ai guys and was happy to hear they made it into YC. I don't know much about the project, but they seem like good people.
"What we're doing isn't technically illegal so stop talking about it" isn't generally a phrase used by what I'd call good people, but we'll agree to disagree.
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 contributors of VSCode & Continue were their own contributors on Twitter.
That's not the spirit of open source. I'm sure the authors of Continue.dev did not intend for their work to be used this way, even if the license is permissive of it.
I'm not sure how to parse this, and one possibility is worse than the other.
Did they go through and alter each commit in the history, making it look as if the committer was talking about brand B instead of brand A at the time they made the commit?
Or did they clone the commit history, and add commits to rebrand, while keeping the historical commits intact?
Well, VS code isn't abandoned either. Shall we raise the pitchforks against Continue too?
No, because Continue actually added value on top of VS Code. PearAI has not added value on top of Continue -- yet.
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.
> That's not the spirit of open source.
That's because there's literally no such thing. It's a licensing choice, not a seance. If you don't want people to use your code, license it correctly.
There's a difference between forking to make a OSS project better and forking to create a clone just for the sake of VC funding that doesn't trickle down back to the original code.
Even if it's allowable by the permissive license of the original code, it's not a net positive for OSS.
That's your opinion. Maybe the original authors of this project don't care and are just happy that their invention is helping people.
I'll take the authors' published intent over your speculation.
I think the assumption people are making is that the YC selection team are dumb idiots, and don't understand that all the founders of that project did was fork an open source project and ask them for some money.
(I'm not saying this is what happened; I know nothing about this project. I am saying this seems like the assumption the author of the article and some people in this thread are making. I bet that's not what happened, but if YC is actually full of dumb idiots who do zero due diligence whatsoever, then I guess I have to agree with the article's thesis.)
The objection is it’s extremely unlikely licenses are being followed and they seek to profit from good will of free software.
I was part of the W12 batch of YC (which was a lot smaller, ~60 companies, back when Paul Graham was still leading YC).
YC funds a lot of companies and has always had super high variance in the companies it funds. Entrepreneurs are a wild bunch of people. There have always been companies where the founders turned out to be BS artists or sociopaths. Companies that folded immediately after the program started. Companies with messy cofounder breakups already brewing at the beginning of the batch. Companies that turned out to be slightly scammy. Some of the founders that were in those companies pivoted and became successful.
Picking on Pear AI (which I don't know anything about) as evidence of YC failing is silly. It's also a super early stage company and you really have no idea what they will do.
The test of YC to me is, can they keep attracting and picking some of the best founders (which you can't really tell for years). And providing the inspiring, warm, but pushy environment that best sets up founders for success, and in turn keeps them coming to YC. I'd apply to YC again in a heartbeat if I were ever starting another company.
Everyone is missing the reason they got accepted: they are some kind of tech influencers have 300k subs on YouTube.
You have 10 mins to pitch your idea, so they went in and said ”look, we work for coinbase, we're competent. Look, we have 300k subs on YouTube, we know how to sell shit and get attention. Look we have <some random AI thing>, we got it all" and that's all it takes. The problem is, they want to sell dev tools and those tend to be more grounded in reality than <some random social media thing> where their attitude and skills might be a better fit. Lots of devs like calling out bullshit as a hobby and making fun of shoddily built stuff, so it's a tough audience.
YC doesn't do "due diligence" and never has, not worth it for the $125k they put in. The real danger is they become known as the place for bullshit peddlers, influencers, etc.
Edit: 344k subs: https://youtube.com/@fryingpan?si=QIPTDvJATXFNYBPM
At some point, you have to turn reputational capital into real capital. The hope, then, is that you only spend the interest on that capital.
Do you have to? Doesn't YC have enough capital to spend it on meaningful endeavors instead of silly "moonshots"? How much would be enough before this happens? Genuine questions, no snark.
One of the biggest shocks to me was that YC now invests in war and killing people. Before their closest connecting to killing people was investing in companies that had severe negative effects for society, like Doordash or AirBnb. Now they're helping people make missiles.
Where's the problem in that? Given the actions of Russia in Ukraine, those of its proxy Iran (and their proxies in Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen in turn) across the Middle East and last but not least China's saber rattling in Taiwan and the Philippines, it's about high time that the West (as a collective of likewise-minded countries) finally wakes up and invests into keeping up with its enemies.
And if it isn't just the usual pork-gobbling shit from the usual MIC suspects that are more interested in gobbling up money than in developing actually new ways of waging war that our enemies will have a hard time counteracting, all the better.
Really manipulative how you're trying to frame that - the core problem in the Middle East is the colonial project called "israel"[0] and anyone who isn't a zionist or completely detached from reality or brainwashed by propaganda knows this by now. Israel has been committing that which jewish holocaust scholars like Amos Goldberg & Raz Segal have described as "undoubtedly Genocide"[1] so it's rather obvious why you would try to paint those who oppose the genocide as the bad guys.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9To_P8gX9c
[1] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go...
It’s true. With 40k applications and roughly only 100s accepted… they likely only chose pearai because of nepotism. It would be self sabotage if they regularly do this so likely only a few companies are selected this way with pearai being one.
The above is a very educated guess on pearai, but whether or not YC engages in nepotism or not is unmistakable to me. They do and there is real corruption in the selection process. It’s not just gross incompetence.
Not only is there actual evidence that can be sourced but I can offer anecdotal evidence from inside sources from within the family involved with a company that passed via nepotism.
the company is called dreamworld. See here: https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...
There’s whole YouTube videos about them including a post from one of the founders ex girlfriend. It’s all very shady the articles around them.
I encountered this company by being close friends with someone that is within the family related to the founders of dreamworld. I was literally told that the company succeeded because of family connections from dreamworlds ceo:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrisonbellack
Garrison is the ceo of dreamworld. And he’s from a rich family headed by his dad:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-r-bellack
who is part of some super rich real estate fund.
The bellacks regularly have big family gatherings in Tahoe and one of the attendees is Geoff ralston the previous president of YC.
Source not only confirmed dreamworld got selected via favors from Geoff but that Geoff was telling stories at this family retreat about how he had to fire Sam Altman from YC after getting a call from Paul graham. Yes pg fired Sam Altman from YC.
Dreamworld as it is right now got additional seed funding from VCs via connections as well and they are sitting on a pot of assets which is generating net positive income while that company can just stay afloat indefinitely. They don’t go through the hardships and risks other startup do thanks to nepotism.
There are other people in the bellack family creating startups and looking to Geoff to funnel them through YC via nepotism so Geoff is primed to make it happen again for sure.
So yeah. I’m sure Geoff isn’t the only person from within YC who does that.
Hacker news is pretty pristine, but the fund itself does shady stuff.
At least I think hacker news is pristine. Let’s see what happens to my post and my account. Maybe the moderators will be more strict with me? And use that to ban me? I am a bit rough with my opinions. But who knows?
"Yes pg fired Sam Altman from YC."
How can you be so certain?
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/30/paul-graham-claims-altman-...
I saw that too.
Pg is lying according to my source. I mean my whole post is about corruption. It fits the story that pg is capable of lying.
Keep in mind. I’m a random guy on the internet and my source isn’t 100 percent solid from my pov either. So keep that in mind when judging this whole thing.
Overall this is what happened: some person at the family retreat listened to Geoff tell the story about how pg made the decision to fire Altman and that person relayed the story to me.
Overall from the fuzzy evidence I’m thinking he was actually fired but I’m not 100 percent on that either.
You’ll have to be your own judge for this. This is one of those things that people will never know for sure.
Same with the nepotism. Nothing will ever be proven here. The best info an average layman can get is rumors from someone willing to relay this gossip anonymously on a forum and you can’t even be sure if this guy (me) is making all this stuff up. You’ll have to form your own opinion and take a leap of faith in either direction or leave it as an unknown.
Saved this post.
How many times did the author apply and get rejected from YC?
I have heard this sentiment before, from a less successful VC. After comparing them based on track record, it was clear YC is in a league of its own. I want to get advice from people who have built startups before. Looks at YC advisors on YouTube and you'll find they're all very successful.
Look at the partners and advisors at most VCs or accelerator programs, and you won't find that level of experience. You'll get mismanaged and start thinking like an investor instead.
> How many times did the author apply and get rejected from YC?
Author is not wrong.
This “YC is actually a negative signal” sentiment started back in 2018-2019.
The “actual” good entrepreneurs (e.g., the folks you expect from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley) stopped applying to YC a while back.
There are different signaling mechanisms in 2024, which I won’t reveal here, because the “plebs” will turn it into shit, just like they did to YC, leetcode interviews, and FANG ML jobs.
You have a good hart