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Comment by blasdel | Hacker News Reader

That's wildly inconsistent with everything I've ever heard from you on the subject before.

I thought the limit on YC was you -- that the partners didn't have enough attention to distribute to any more startups (or more tablespace to sit them all at for weekly dinners :)

How are you planning to expand sideways without drastically reducing your (non-monetary) contribution? Wouldn't this just make YC less valuable on it's own merits? You'd retain the brand value, but that would diminish pretty quickly if the startups you funded started getting crappier. If you did diminish your responsibilities, and the startup quality didn't go down, what would that say about the value of your higher-bandwidth contributions before?

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Really? Wildly inconsistent with this for example?

http://ycombinator.com/party.html

Till recently the two main bottlenecks in YC were my time and the size of our space. Which is why we recently hired Harj and expanded the orange room by a third. I'm not sure what the next bottleneck will turn out to be.

As I said in another comment on this thread, we approach scaling YC the same way we approach scaling software. You can never predict what the bottleneck will be till you hit it, so you just fix them as you hit them. If we did eventually hit a bottleneck that we couldn't fix, in the sense that if we continued to expand, the startups we funded would start to do worse, we'd stop expanding. But we clearly haven't hit such a bottleneck yet, and my experience of scaling stuff makes me cautious about predicting exactly where it might occur.

I thought about it a bit more, especially after seeing that article talking about how %74 of your startups from this round have taken funding or are profitable already -- which I saw as having only %26 of them not be successful (whether among users or VCs) in the super-short-term.

I think you could afford to increase that rate significantly -- if anything, it's too low! Do you have a better metric to gauge your expansion by?

How much of that tranche of un-profitable and un-funded startups has historically been just in continual stealth ramen mode, and how much is actual failure? It'd be really interesting if you could put up some anonymized statistics about the 207 startups from the perspective of the founders. I'd visualize it as a series of images for each quarter, with a grid of venn diagrams of none/dead/acquired/funded/profitable for each YC round up to that point. Put it in a slideshow so you can scrub back and forth in history. Would also work in table form with YC rounds on one axis and time (or time since YC) on the other. I know you're rightly hesitant to talk about YC startups that didn't do well, but I'm not really interested in them specifically, just the collective attrition/success rates over time.

The network of alum really helps. Having access to so many startups that have already optimize the hell out of the steps needed to start a company is a big value add.

The reality is that if you want/need PG's time you can get at any point during YC.

I think the really interesting thing about the alumni network is that it's not only growing in size, but experience. At this point there are companies inside of YC that have grown larger and been around longer than Viaweb was, so not only are you able to get advice from folks other than the YC founders, there's an emerging set of people who are in some aspects more experienced. (Though, naturally none who have seen more early phase startups up close.)

That's one of those surprising emergent properties that I think will be of increasing import as the trend continues upwards and also has an effect of distributing the load on the YC founders.

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