There's a pg essay that I can't find, but in essence states: Our rule is that it's up to the founder. If they want to aim small, that's fine. We ourselves aimed small with Viaweb. We didn't want to work on it the rest of our lives. It would be pretty lame to push founders into doing something that we didn't want to do. (EDIT: Found it: http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html#f1n)
Contrast that with the recent Paul B interview: https://blog.ycombinator.com/paul-buchheit-on-lessons-learne...
> Jasper: Sam Altman has said that the only criterion Y Combinator uses to evaluate applying companies is, “Can this be a $10 billion plus company?” like Airbnb and Dropbox. While this model works great for a fund, there is an Early Exits movement that suggests individual entrepreneurs have a much higher likelihood of success when they raise less capital and target exits in the $20 million range. What do you think this view?
> Paul: The math does not support this strategy but if other investors want to try it that’s fine. Also, it is not just returns we are looking for but really impactful companies. When you sell too early you don’t realize the full potential.
> For example, Facebook had an offer from Yahoo for a billion dollars, which everyone told Zuck to take. Fortunately, he said no. Had he said yes, it would have been another failed Yahoo acquisition and Facebook would not have nearly as much impact. The reason we have these big and influential companies is the founders believed in a long- term vision.
I think all YC companies have always aimed big, but some, like Zenter, were fine with being acquired by Google for a smaller amount. And YC was fine with that outcome in the sense that there weren't any institutional forces set up to discourage founders from pursuing it.
YC's signals now seem to say, "A small exit is equal to failure." And while that's true for YC as an investor, I'm not sure it was true for YC's institutional forces until the last few years. If you're in an environment where all of your peers consider you a failure if you sell for a few million, are you going to want to resist that peer pressure? Especially when they're your friends and mentors?
I want to be very clear that all of this is an outsider's perspective. Hopefully someone in YC will issue a smackdown if it's mistaken. I was just giving some supporting data for why people are feeling this way.