I will miss the old Y Combinator

If that doesn't satisfy, particular journalists looking for scrappy upstarts can still find them - the Internet is a big place. I mean, Andrew Warner manages to find a new story every day, with fairly little overlap with other sources of news I follow.

I think it's disingenuous to lament a change in funding models that appears to be a huge net gain for founders.

Considering many YC startups have been raising additional funding for a while now, I don't see much changing.

'ramen profitable' and it's derivatives should be taken as a cutesy fluffy marketing term and nothing more (like most startups were never actually started in a garage).

No one should be living literally off Ramen noodles and cereal. It's incredibly bad for your health and a total lack of investment in your body and your brain.

I'm not saying YC's small funding encourages this, but nevertheless we should not be encouraging the promotion of this concept.

How has Mr. Scoble convinced so many people to listen to him?

In over six years of following the Valley and tech in general with interest, I have heard Mr. Scoble's name so many times – but never associated with anything of substance. I've never read of any dramatic achievements, nor have I been pointed to any essays of any deep insight or poignancy. While he frequently comes up in conversation he does not seem to... do anything. Like a Paris Hilton.

From what I can tell, he worked for Microsoft, then wrote a book in which he appeared on the cover naked (Hiltonesque!)... and then convinced a bunch of people to follow him on Twitter and other social media flavors of the moment. Then Rackspace bought him an enormous tripod.

I hasten to reiterate that I have no specific ill-will toward Mr. Scoble, but I am... mystified and hope for some insight. Is this a case of wildly successful self-promotion? Is the success of the self-promotion, itself, the measure of success from which he derives attention and note? Do people latch onto him in the hopes of learning similar powers of promotion?

No longer will we hear stories like we heard from Airbnb’s founders of surviving off of cereal or "ramen."

That bums me out, because struggle and sacrifice makes for great stories.

I'm sorry that you're bummed out at less human suffering. These are people with friends and families and hopes and dreams and feelings, and you're treating them like characters in a movie. These are people working their asses off to make the world a little bit better and hopefully make money doing it. Mr. Consumer here is upset that their lives are a little better? And his only reason is that the stories he hears aren't as nice? This is disgusting. Fuck you, get some perspective.

Personally if it was me I don't think it would really change the way I went about things, would still work out of a house and go it cheap, just might be able to get an early hire in to push things along even faster without having to worry about how much equity I was sacrificing to do it at such an early stage.

"If you’re not an investor, here’s what it means. Yuri and SV Angel just offered to loan each company $150,000. That loan will convert if/when the company raises a proper angel or venture capital round at the same valuation that’s set in that round. Most convertible debt has a valuation ceiling and also gets a discount on conversion. This debt doesn’t.

It’s the most entrepreneur friendly investment that I can think of, short of just handing people money as a gift."

So, they're not just handing money over ('investing') - it's a loan, which would seem to require payback. If the company flops (some do) who is on the hook? YC itself? The original founders?

Yuri's funding isn't gong to change a thing for YC founders, except arm them with more ammo to build something great

We would of still lived in our office (not in an apartment that was our office, but in our office that was our apartment).

We would of still rented a total crap hole in not the greatest part of town. It might of helped WePay not have a neighbor who got macheted because we all wouldn't of had to live in the slums. It might of helped us not live next to other tenets that were growing weed and getting raided by the cops. The day we moved out the cops raided them. We had armed police officers in our hallway. These 'stories', while hilarious are not conducive to a good working environment.

I'm older then most entrepreneurs YC funds. Tommy is also older then most. A bit more money up front would of been very helpful and wouldn't of changed our drive or decision making one bit, except to make us not worry about raising money until later. And that would of been a good thing. Raising money stole a fifth to a quarter of our time during YC.

We always knew we would need more money. Right out of YC we raised another 200k. It was very stressful because if that didn't work out we were up the proverbial creek. Having that 150k up front would of helped ease a lot of sleepless nights...listening to our neighbors scream and yell as they tried to hang a sodium light, but I digress.

When my cofounder and I applied for YC this past round, we had a lot of hopes in getting accepted (we didn't, unfortunately, but got the interview). Even though I knew all of the benefits of getting into YC in terms of the experience and the contacts, I still had a certain amount of trepidation in terms of finances. I was ready and willing (still am!) to dive into YC and not look back, but I was also looking at giving up a job that pays well (I make more money than anyone else in my large extended family), the health benefits, 401k, stock options, and 2 weeks of vacation each year. I live in San Francisco, and it isn't cheap. That $17k, split between 2 people, doesn't go far. I'm a single guy with limited expenses, and it still would have been tight.

Having met Paul Graham and the YC crew a couple of times, interviewing with them, and meeting many other people at various YC-funded companies, I feel confident in saying that I highly doubt the spirit of YC is going to change. There is a certain character to all of the people I've met that's hard to define but is definitely there. That isn't going to disappear simply because an investor is trying something new.

I suspect that there are driven people like me who are in slightly different situations (family, etc) where they don't feel like they can take the risk if they get accepted. This stops them from even feeling like applying.

Now knowing that there's another guaranteed round of money to be accessed after a few months is going to let people on the edge make the decision to apply. Some will get accepted. It will let people feel like they can work as hard as possible on a dream and know they have a better chance of being ok longer. $150k + $17k at a startup of 2-3 people is enough to not only fund the company, but to also let the founders who need it to take a survivable income for the first year while they're getting off the ground. Its an extra safety blanket that lets those founders who need it to take the plunge and to fight a while longer to succeed.

For the people that get accepted into YC where $17k was enough, those people now have some extra guaranteed resources to help their businesses grow. That's the money that lets a 2 person team hire a 3rd after 6 months to let them keep growing while one of the founders concentrates on angel or VC funding, instead of hitting a wall because there's too much to do and not enough humans to go around to do it.

I'll grant Robert that YC may change a little, but it'll only be for the better.

Backseat drivers don't get to vote.

The Innovator's Dilemma even suggests established companies spin-out small startups to work on emerging technologies/markets, for this reason.

How many fail because they ran out of money trying to execute a pivot? All this added capital is going to do is increase the success rate. I respect you Scoble but you're wrong.