Just look at the Show HN - YC batch companies, none of them are doing anything remotely groundbreaking or risky. A ton of them are solving minor workflow problems trying to skim shit off the top.
Why is YC funding this sort of shit? https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/24/beacons-seed-round-creator...
I do think companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Ginko Bioworks, etc. are doing pretty neat stuff. Even if these businesses don't seem groundbreaking, they clearly are, somehow. But the recent batches of YC startups seem disappointingly... competitive. As in the Thiel-ian sense of not doing much fundamentally different from other players in the market.
I wonder if this could be attributed to Paul Graham stepping back from the front lines.