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Comment by mburney | Hacker News Reader

This article makes a good point. The problem is not that startups are derivative or solving trivial problems. The problem is that the whole startup process has been manufactured and scaled to the point that it has lost its intrigue and stifled its innovation.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft were outsiders when they were startups. Current SV incubator teams are more like elite in-crowd communities, safe and insular.

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Wrong, wrong, wrong. Nobody thought that Apple, Google or Microsoft would be game-changers when they were in the startup stage. When Apple and Microsoft were in the startup stage, their customers were hobbyists. When Google was in its startup stage, it was clear to everybody that they would never be anything more than a modest compliment to what Yahoo offered.

If every startups were to listen to this author, nothing would ever get done. We'd spend our lives trying to "change the world" without making the millions of incremental improvements that are necessary for the world-changing stuff to happen.

My point isn't to agree with the author that every company should try to be a game-changer. In fact, too many SV companies already think that they are game-changers before they've even launched anything. That's part of the problem.

My point is that when you have the startup process manufactured and replicated into a kind of meta-startup (like YC), at a certain point the goals of the founders become more about conforming to the community and impressing each other rather than creating a genuine product.

Obviously not all YC startups are like this, but any time something grows and scales, there is a danger of it losing its original purpose.

My goodness. You know what this means? This is essentially Peter Thiel's argument against college applied to startup incubators. Think about it- these incubators are giving startup folks aid and guidance that past generations of never had. This is essentially creating a new elite who instead of going to Harvard and getting a leg up, are going to YC and getting a leg up. In neither case are the kids scrapping together in a garage, driven only by their own vision and living hardscrabble until they can score their first angel investor.

Interesting thought, but there's a difference between an "elite" (who may or may not have earned what they have) and a meritocracy (who worked for what they have). Most people (except maybe the talentless children of billionaires) would probably agree that meritocracies are better.

I'm not saying that acolytes of YC do not deserve to be there. I'm just building on to the previous commenter's points about the creation of new Silicon Valley in-crowd communities. Now, I think this whole point is debatable- certainly incubated or otherwise guided (like YC alumni) startups are a minority of startups. And unoriginal, make-a-quick-buck startups can come from anywhere. I just think that maybe there is a point to be made that the road of startups is getting more and more structured and unofficially regimented, whether it is through an incubator, or just by a culture that promotes certain patterns to success. And with the guidance of groups such as YC or incubators, it's made more and more easy. But then perhaps that is about as valid a point as complaining that Stack Overflow (not to mention Google!) makes it quicker to solve programming problems these days, or that memory managed languages make developers lazy, or that not walking to school in 8-foot snow distorts the soul, and so on.

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