Ask HN: Do you think the next Apple is going to apply to YC? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you think the next Apple is going to apply to YC?

10 pointsdarkhorse1315 comments

I know it's a silly preposition, but it's fun to speculate about these things. YC is great, no doubt about that, but recently, the startups coming through it seem same-y in a way. Most are web services, and often focused on the hot trends in SV right now, like Spreadsheet as a Database Startup #271, generate app from another popular service like Airtable or Google Sheets, etc.

No doubt these are cool products, and personally, I really like companies like these. But it seems to me that companies favored by YC are in a bubble of sorts. So this got me thinking, do you think the next Apple is going to apply to YC? It does not have to be Apple specifically, what I mean by Apple is a company that is doing something so novel that most of us don't even recognize (either because of the novelty itself or their genuinely tiny scale) that they are creating a new industry.

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I don't think so. Accelerators like YC are less appealing these days, at least to me. IMO this also has to do with tech startups being more mainstream than they were 10+ years ago. With how the startup space has evolved, the value YC offers over bootstrapping or other funding options is less than it was previously. Even the pedigree has dwindled. I used to be impressed with all founders/companies coming out of YC, but now the market seems so saturated that it's nothing special. When I look at YC companies they are typically boring - the same old, over and over again. That's not to say they are bad businesses, but they don't seem as "contrarian" or innovative as they were a decade ago and I don't think a truly innovative company would want to attend or fit into YC (or any accelerator).

I would say tech startups are beyond mainstream and are pretty clearly a bubble, at least in the informal cultural sense. In some ways, like you say, it's easier to take advantage of all the extra ecosystem that comes with that and to get yourself off the ground without 'institutional' help.

At the same time, _funding as a signal_ is losing meaning with all the cheap money floating around, so it becomes harder to distinguish yourself in the noise. Even if you have a truly great/revolutionary/whatever product, the changing parameters make mis-timing things more likely.

Personally, I'm less worried about early stage and more worried about what the state of the startup world will be when we eventually do need to raise larger amounts of money.

Most of the companies in YC have always been boring starting from the first batch.

Reddit was BBS software.

I personally wouldn't do YC these days. Just based on my impressions of how it is though, so I could be totally wrong and bone headed, but:

(1) It does feel like a conveyor belt that works well for YC and its investment funnel, but not necessarily for the zoo of startups out there. It seems to me that the classic-YC-startup space has been well-mined now, which is exactly what makes me not want to start one of those companies. Wearing myself out to carve tiny niche in that tropey space is not appealing. Nor is working on SaaS #99999 in general. That's just boring. And I expect people who find contrarian/non-mainstream things interesting think similarly.

(2) They are struggling to scale, IMO. I signed up for Startup School (quite a while ago) out of interest and the other candidates were really, really poor. As in, the group sessions were mainly me offering knowledge to others and getting nothing in return. Not only that, the advice we were being given by our group mentor was also pretty bad. I just felt like... if this is the standard, what am I getting from it? Granted, SS is not YC, but the mentor was a YC partner and giving out advice I just wouldn't have followed anyway. I also feel a lot of the recent graduates are more of the same and nothing I'm deeply interested in replicating. Maybe this is all hubris on my part, but at a minimum it suggests I'm not really compatible with the cookie-cutter stuff YC might push.

(3) YC feels really cliquey and valley-centric to people on the outside. I remember reading something in the application materials like "we didn't want to say here that we prefer MIT/Stanford/etc grads, but it's just a fact that they turn out better". Maybe that's even objectively true, but why write this? You can reject applicants for any reason, without making large swathes feel unwelcome by broadcasting the in-group on your marketing material. A similar vibe can be found elsewhere too.

Of course if you _are_ a good fit then there are probably benefits from the program. Not getting screwed by shady investor behaviour. Alumni network. Etc. Everyone knows those, though.

I agree that everything feels very cookie-cutter in general, which is honestly not even a bad thing, all things considered.

No, because founders that are truly as visionary and intelligent as Apple's co-founders are unlikely to be willing to give up a sizable amount of equity for a tiny amount of money and the promise of being able to meet a few people and call in a few favors.

Even more so in recent years, since YC has essentially turned into a conveyor belt incubator (in my opinion).

Markula got 1/3 of Apple for about $350,000 as its first investor.

He got 30% for $1.1M adjusted to today's money and became employee no. 3. Woz credits him as being more important than himself to Apple's success. So, you could make the argument he was closer to a co-founder than just an investor.

In contrast, YC wants 7% for $125k, and you get a few talks, some introductions and "office hours" meetings.

It's an apples to oranges comparison.

You could make such an argument, it's the internet after all, but the third founder of Apple was Wayne.

The likelihood depends somewhat on whether they are in or out of a network that can provide the quality and quantity of capital, advice, and process that YC provides. If you're out of network, YC is (I think) a no brainer. Even people "in the network," like Justin Kan and Suhail, repeat YC so there are likely also non-fungibles that YC provides.

I would say odds low;

Pros:

- Great history and serves to attract talent

- Team have a great history of spotting and brining forward start-ups with potential which would imply some future odds.

- Team in better position (knowledge/connections) to increase companies changes of success.

- US dominated which has best history of unicorns to date.

- Scale increasing helps increase possibilities.

Cons:

- Quora says about ~2m tech start-ups a year. Even if YC has huge likelihood of success over average, its still a drop in the bucket of possible.

- While they are global, unicorns will increasingly come from non-US where they have less coverage

- YC is growing in scale and I assume that will come at some cost in how much they can add value.

- Apple level company is such a rare event even with successful startups. I'll define 'Apple company' as $1 trillion+ - that one of 5 companies in the world today. So even if you build a $500bn company, its far from 'Apple'

- I think Internet/IT revolution is getting hard to succeed at that level form a start-up from a start-up. There so much more established business to fill/buy/build out products than there was 20+ years ago vs 2 guys and a dream.

...but really who knows, so many variables vs my 5 min pondering. I feel the odds are slim.

Stripe could very well be the next 1T+ company. So yes it could be YC. Who knows.

Apple was not an overnight success. It had its dark days. The reason Apple became a 1T company was because Tim Cook blocked the world and its dog from the supply chain in the early days of the iDevice launches(that is also the reason he became the CEO and not Scott Forstall). If a company has to become 1T then it has to have a very strong moat. It does not matter whether it is from YC or not. Some YC companies do have the advantage of building strong moat. But it all depends on the management of those startups. So will next Apple come from YC, who knows; because it does not depend on YC but on how a startup exploits its moat.

I'm sorry but you missed the point about Apple which I mentioned. Basically, by Apple I mean a company that essentially creates a completely new industry. In their case, it was personal computers.

Well, they already might have, and if so they already might have been either accepted or rejected.

It could be difficult to know for sure.

Depends on which qualities of Apple you want to focus on.

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