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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to conflate YC with all Silicon Valley startups. This is clearly not the case and I would argue that if you are looking for big, world-changing ideas and only considering YC companies, you're looking in the wrong place.

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Actually you should expect to find them disproportionately often at YC, because our structure (investing a small amount in a lot of startups) makes it in our interest to take the biggest risks.

That would be true if your investing structure were the only variable. I think Aloisius is talking about the YC culture. You have said that the idea doesn't matter nearly as much as the personalities of the founders. The implication is that founders are laborers with special skills who can produce a valuable commodity: start-ups.

As far as I can tell the founders' personalities are about the same as in the Valley generally. If there's a difference imparted by YC, it's that they're more confident. But confidence usually makes people more willing to take risks, not less.

Not always. I know many people whose "confidence" was predicated on success -- such as being accepted to Harvard, Y Combinator, medical school, whatever. As a result they felt compelled to be successful -- and ended up doing things like becoming a lawyer or selling their company for $1 million because they were too afraid of being "failures."

For the startups to be less of a commodity, perhaps you could look for some sort of unique perspective on the world that founders should have. It seems Google founders had a lot of that. This may not help with the returns though; maybe more money are there to be made from commodity startups than truly disruptive ones.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but don't you think you're a bit biased? :-)

I mean, I bet James Gosling feels that Java is a disproportionately better programming language.

I came to the exact opposite conclusion - I figured the author probably just doesn't have access to the quality startups. It's very easy to meet hundreds of low quality startups in SV, but it would be a mistake to generalize that experience to the entire population of startups in SV.

You don't have to have access to startups, you can look at results. Maybe there are a bunch of stealth startups about to break through, but the only things the public hears about are groupon clones, photo sharing sites -- trivial apps with less of a business plan, less innovation, and less impact in the world than pets.com -- or biotech & green tech companies burning through massive government grants.

The last startup to have much impact was probably twitter, and there hasn't been much else before or since in recent years. Groupon is big now, but in a couple years it'll probably be sold for fractions of a cent on it's acquisition cost to someone who thinks the brand name and mostly defunct email list still have value.

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