Just want to preface by saying - this is not a comment on you but rather YC. You're trying to improve the VC process for consumer brands, and I'll take you at your word for that.

I'm surpised, and a bit saddened, to see YC investing in a PE rollup kind of play. I’m probably reading too much into it, and maybe I had a misconception about YC was supposed to be, but to me, the brand was about innovation and scrappiness. YC founders use technology to move the world forward, usually through a better product. This brand conglomerate is way more blatantly of the form of “lets try to take a pile of money, and turn it into a bigger pile of money”.. of course they need $160M in funding, it is a fund. That money will go chiefly to buy companies, not into massive scale.

Not many entrepreneurs start out hoping to engage in raw capitalism, guided purely by returns. YC seemed like a place that catered to that dream of building something for yourself. Maybe that was never true, and I just had stars in my eyes. Maybe there’s no longer those low hanging fruits and everything’s become harder. But this seems almost of a betrayal of that original dream, only showing that YC is the same as everyone else in our capitalistic society.