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Comment by jgilliam | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to feel conflicted about these YC deals for priority API access. Yodlee is notoriously expensive and not particularly developer friendly. It's great YC is lessening that burden for their companies, but it's starting to create a competitive advantage that undermines core hacker ethics.

What I'd like to see is YC working with the Yodlees of the world to make their APIs more available to all startups.

Don't turn YC into the next Harvard.

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This deal will tend to make that happen. A lot of companies have such high thresholds to use their APIs that they prevent potential customers from getting off the ground. But if deals like this can show them that lowering the thresholds is in their interest, they'll lower them for everyone.

Angels/VCs are about return on investment, not making it easy for other other startups to compete with their portfolio companies.

I like how we can have this comment on the same day as a post titled "Ask HN: Is Y Combinator basically just communism?".

I think it's fair from a hacker ethics perspective as long as it doesn't make it directly harder for others to do the same thing i.e. by being exclusive in some way.

Why is it in YC's interest to do so?

If everyone has access more people will play around and/or be able to create things. Having an idea and applying to YC with "I want API access" probably won't work too well, even if they do "invest in people".

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