Y Combinator, Backer of Dropbox, Vaults from Experiment to Kingmaker

https://www.seed-db.com/accelerators

If you look at the runners up to YC, they're still far behind on a lot of metrics

Now, I agree that all these new "Entrepreneurship Master's" are a bunch of BS, but business school per se might have its merits.

> Kingmakers... hardly.

An IPO is not the only measure of success. Some successful YC companies are opting to remain private longer e.g. AirBnB, Coinbase and some have been acquired e.g. Heroku, Reddit.

Considering they’re almost always first money in, those are not even in the same zip code as normal returns. Those numbers are absolutely astounding.

I doubt that. Knowledge alone is not what they provide. Additionally, even if it were, we often don't know what we know and trying to capture and convey our knowledge is incredibly challenging.

What people soak up by being in the same room with those in the know and getting their feedback live and watching them model behavior is just not something you can actually convey by (say) writing a book. The book would be the tip of the iceberg, at best.

Hardly. Most of the knowledge is out there, and more.

Here is how I think YC can rocketship you:

- Access to capital. Suddenly, you are visible.

- Legal advice from top experts.

- Network of startups and guys that connect with you.

- Massive interest from media (vs. if you were a noname out there)

- Pressure to achieve. You are more pressured to give results along your peers.

- Forcing you to move to the bay area. A good idea since the startup scene is still centralized.

But I guess YC is more than knowledge. It has a strong signal effect, and the regular OH sessions you get with the partners potentially can help you a lot (even though you already might know what they telling you, but like a fitness coach, it helps you stay on track). Plus the alumni network, which I guess is especially valuable for B2B businesses and future partnerships.

I didn't go through YC but know some people that have and I think that what it breaks down to.

It's impossible to know if Mark Zuckerberg would be a billionaire if not for Harvard, for both easy reasons (maybe if he went to Yale, he would have slipped on a banana peel and then gotten hit by a bus) and deeper ones (how much did luck play a role in Zuckerberg's success, and did the network and prestige of Harvard help him capitalize on his good luck?)

Zuckerberg had many more factors in his favor than just Harvard, that's for sure. Anyone who tries to explain his success by saying "oh, that's because he went to Harvard," is wrong. But it's also impossible and silly to claim that we can know that he is just so talented and intelligent that all contingency removed he still would have become a billionaire.

This applies to the broader argument about Y Combinator. YC has a competitive advantage in that it attracts companies that have many positive factors behind them to apply. But that doesn't mitigate the possibility that YC itself is another positive factor, or that the only benefit to participating in YC is knowledge. From the outside, it seems like the applied knowledge expressed as case-specific advice and mentorship would be hard to "democratize," and that the intense amount of mutual support (start ups patronizing each other and becoming an instant, deep professional network for each other) are also not really expressible as knowledge.

Access is an incredibly powerful resource that YC can provide its companies, and one that has absolutely no correlation to being "the best or the brightest." The reason there are so many successful white male founders is not because they are the "best and the brightest," but rather because they are culturally and ethnically connected to networks that provide them with access to business opportunities and conversations and platforms and education that aren't nearly as available to non-white non-men yet. There are countless "best and brightest" women of color who do not have all of the favorable circumstantial factors that made success easier for Mark Zuckerberg (and obviously made it easier for him to get into Harvard in the first place in various ways) and yet are equally brilliant and talented.

From the page trailer:

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EDIT: I found this old HN thread from Loopt's exit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3683994 Top comments are telling:

"Michael Moritz (Sequoia partner) is still on the board of Green Dot, now a publicly traded company worth north of a billion dollars. Almost the entire board is Private Equity/VC guys, they do this kind of inside baseball all the time, it's no sweat off their back to do Moritz a favor."

"Buddy exits like this one and the Hunch exit are very demoralising. They make startups look like some sort of game. As you indicated, Loopt was clearly dying and yet people still got rich off of it."

(Of course, none of this should be taken as a negative view of Loopt's founder, who now leads YC - the chances of having a good exit are so low and so randomized that a qualified, smart, knowledgeable founder can still simply be unlucky. But it's still a fact that he was unlucky, and we shouldn't pretend Loopt was a successful exit.)

Update: "While we may deviate from this in exceptional cases, it will still be the case for almost all of the companies we fund." https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-new-deal/

http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/y-c...

Heh /r/didntmeanto

Well played.

That is really funny. Real life writes better material for Silicon Valley.