Y Combinator: the X Factor of tech
economist.com
economist.com
The ethos is evangelism for basic business practices derived from common sense, rationality, and empathy.
The brand does have perks for founders, though. The network is actually that awesome, yes. YC is extraordinary for making it easy to raise a seed round. Some good ideas take time to mature, and a seed round helps them get momentum.
I wish more investors would try to emulate YC.
Nonsense. The article authors are so very wrong. There will be literally zero replicators of YC until someone replicates the most influential open tech community/media that is HN. A competitive advantage that is truly hard to copy. That's like a basic fact from real world startups 101.
You could imagine that HN is a direct solution to what many people consider that hardest problem startups have to solve: hiring good engineers.
That's factually incorrect. Only YC companies are allowed to post job ads at any time and as separate threads. But once per month any company can post job ads on HN, the 'who is hiring' threads on the first of the month.
Only YC companies are available on the "jobs" tab at the top of this, and every, HN page. Only YC companies can be the original post, instead of a comment. YC job postings are the only links that are not subject to comments/criticism.
The original point is that HN serves a very useful purpose for YC companies that it doesn't serve for non-YC companies.
HN pulls techies/hackers like a magnet. In a way, it was the internet exposure to YC/HN/pg's essays that brought me into the startup world. And in a way, it was always my aspiration to go to Mountain View and talk to those people that gave me that exposure.
:)
I've seen threads where people hard-core nerded out to the following topics:
- any/all programming languages
- processors (anything on silicon, really)
- tractors
- genetics
- Chinese law
- meteorology
- geology
The list goes on...
Of course I would love to see HN data, but I believe that there is a fair amount of users that are not located anywhere near Silicon Valley.
An indicator of this would be the fact that many people I know from the EU startup scene have an HN account. Different age group, background, and profession. Of course, the sample size is not that large here.
I'm not sure if it creates "such a big advantage", but it's absolutely an advantage. I never see job postings by non-YC companies because I'm not looking for them. I do see YC job postings at least 5 times per week. It's all because of HN.
A whirlwind of activity started up, within which a cofounder responded, as well as the president of YC. They both were actively looking for the CEO so that he could resolve the issue, and when he eventually popped up into the thread, a clusterfuck of absolutely biblical proportions ensued.
What people saw was the obvious mudslinging between parties, but what they didn't necessarily see was all of the cold, numeric computation going on behind the scenes whenever posts were being up- and down-voted, and karma points were being won and lost.
Say whatever you want about the validity of these kinds of emotionally/psychologically derived numbers, but the point is that they are realtime data points concerning large numbers of highly speculative investments, and they could not reasonably be ascertained in any other way.
When I was watching that whole thing play out just like a live sporting event, I was refreshing the profile page of the CEO in question, and his karma points seemed to be dropping like some kind of flash crash in the NASDAQ.
Some may say that it isn't in the best interest of YC to have so much publicity when these kinds of things happen, but I think the point is that it is always ultimately in everyone's best interest for the truth, no matter what it is, to be uncovered as quickly as possible, and framed within a language that is as objective as possible.
I can only imagine what kind of machine learning might be going on behind the scenes at YC, involving all of these data points that are so intimately connected to known human beings, many of whom are so intimately involved with the insanely dynamic economic activity that is starting up a tech company in Silicon Valley.
This should be a law: we tend to overestimate the amount of sophisticated machine learning used in anything.
Now you gave me an idea for a HN extension - tracking of karma points of selected users (via HN API) and displaying a sparkline next to their name in comments. Also a split-screen mode like this:
+---------------------------------+------------------------+
| ^ Tell HN: Something important | Score: flamebait |
| 256 points by flamebait ... | |
| | -- |
| | -- /- \--- /--o|
| | / \--/ \/ |
| ^ SomeHNer 5 minutes ago |--/ |
| Something something something +------------------------+
| | Score: SomeOtherHNer |
| ^ SomeOtherHNer 1 minute ago | /--- |
| HN turns into Reddit. |-/ \ --- |
| | --- |
| | \------\ |
| ^ LoremIpsum 1 hour ago | -o|
| Lorem ipsum dolor sic amet +------------------------+
| start-up cloud computing | Ticker |
| Docker Google IoT big data | |
| Uber for Kitten Litter | - comment nuked 5s ago |
| | - comment nuked 2m ago |
| .... | - new comment 5m ago |
+---------------------------------+------------------------+
You're basically told: Focus on the real stuff, not the hype machine. Hunker down, ignore HN and the press, and focus on making something people want.
Wat
Waat
The reason they received huge numbers of applicants because their criteria was wide and IMHO misleading.
The originals partners were brilliant founders. They were not young (drop out or out of college) founders. They had 'life' experiences. So they were very nurturing and compassionate and patient. They helped young smart founders to build companies and many become successful companies. With the current goals of scaling fast, and many new partners YC has diluted its success recipe. It's not about 'making what people want' anymore. It's about making what 20 something year old who live in the valley want.
Jessica Livingstone's book 'Founders at Work' contains many different types of founders. And not many of them were fresh out of college or college drop outs.
YC has become a big company, and along the way YC has contributed to build Silicon Valley as the center for technology. However, it needs to have big companies responsibilities as well.
No. 1 - Talent pool of 1000s startups to choose from.
No. 2 - Great alumni network.
No. 3 - Experienced partners.
I don't know. X Factor weeds out folks that are obviously fraudulent shams with a huge ego, but without any talent. I'm not so sure about YC.