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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

How could there ever be a bad experience, if you just look at YC as buying marketing for 6% of your fledgling company now valued at a few hundred K you'd be spending a large multiple, and you're getting money to boot.

It would be cheap if you gave away your shares. Provided you have a product worth half a chance.

Then there's the network and so on. If you can get in do it, if not bootstrap but it would be very hard to find a 'negative'.

And if there are negative stories about being in YC I'd expect them to be vented elsewhere rather than here.

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Some hypotheticals and criticisms I've heard from people outside of YC:

1) There are so many YC startups that the brand has become diluted and it doesn't get you as much PR/street cred as it used to.

2) The YC team is working with so many other startups that they don't have much time to work with your startup.

3) If you're already in a position to raise more money from angels at a better valuation, is the YC rolodex worth the equity you're trading?

Generally everything comes with pros and cons, I don't think you can say that it could never be bad or that there are no downsides. At some extreme point the above must apply, e.g. it probably wouldn't be a good idea for google to apply to YC.

Google doing a YC is a pretty weird proposition, that's Goliath going to have breakfast on Davids dime, and asking him to help lifting a bunch of stuff to boot.

Of course YC is orders of magnitude larger than the companies they invest in, that's why it makes sense in the first place.

As to your other points:

1) I've seen little to no evidence of that, rather the opposite, even YC start-ups that would be non-starters or that already have an established competitor, sometimes with a better product that has gotten no coverage whatsoever are covered by anything from TC to CNN just because YC is on board

2) this may be true, but that also means the size of the pool of alumni with valuable knowledge is larger. I used to think that YC had a 'scaling issue' in the person of Paul Graham, but in fact the alumni seem to offset that in whole or in part

3) the marketing value is already worth it, anything you get out of it on top of that is pure cream.

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