Welcome Simon | Hacker News Reader

Welcome Simon

blog.ycombinator.com

46 pointsrunesoerensen12 comments

> He joined Twitter in 2010 and held various roles during his five years with the company in business development, corporate strategy, platform operations, and corporate development. Prior to Twitter, he was at The Carlyle Group, where he focused on technology and education investments.

I never heard of Simon Lu before, but from the given description of his background, he seems like a typical corporate MBA, rather than someone who has experience founding a company and growing it, which, along various things YC has done in the couple of previous years, makes me think that YC is slowly moving towards becoming a typical VC.

Yes, this has been more and more the trend. YC has slowly moved from adding people with deep technical skills, to adding people with finance backgrounds and deep ties in that community.

It is inevitable, I suppose. When you start a VC firm, for many of the people you chose to join you end up being capitalists instead of technologists.

And don't get me wrong, they sound like they're adding the best of the best and really amazing people in their fields. It sounds like these people are probably all really quite smart and amazing.

But these people aren't hackers, they don't sound like one of us and their field isn't this one.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to YC in the long term. I'm increasingly pessimistic. But it's not my portfolio, so it thankfully doesn't effect me in the least. :)

Who else do you put in this category?

Does that really sound like a productive conversation?

> But these people aren't hackers, they don't sound like one of us and their field isn't this one.

I was just wondering which "these people" you were referencing.

They're your colleagues... surely you'd have a better idea which ones are hackers and which aren't than I would?

I've known Simon for years. He's smart and humble and the real deal - welcome aboard.

Perhaps I'm just new to YC goings-on, but it seems the pace of adding new partners has increased quite a bit lately. The batch size has also grown, though seemingly somewhat slower.

I wonder how this growth affects the value accepted companies get out of participating.

I would assume with the growing number of teams that YC accepts, they need more people to give great advice. But not just generic advice regarding strategy, they need people to give advice about some of the more intricate things, like hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if they start hiring some people with a biology/chemistry/physics background given the increase number of biotech start-ups that I've been seeing.

Regarding your last comment, I think that's kind of interesting to think about. To think that their first batch had only 8 start-ups and now they're at something like 86 is pretty staggering. I don't think they're going to sacrifice the quality and credibility of their program for taking in more start-ups, because they are still pretty selective on who they take in and have the best reputation.

Really they're just trying to branch out to more teams in the hopes of "finding the next Dropbox or Airbnb".

Great to hear (I also love how transparent YCombinator is).

Off topic: My first name is Simon and I was a bit surprised seeing "Welcome Simon" with YCombinator.com as url. New personalization feature :)

With the current size of HN I'd be surprised if there was any first name at all that you could use and not hit a match with at least one user.

Deja vu! Exactly the same comment was made about a similar "welcome to YC" post a few months back.

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