Today is Y Combinator's 17th birthday
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Interesting to see how long even the industry insiders failed to take YC seriously. And then once it was working, they flipped immediately to complaining that YC was too powerful and too influential (unbeatable network effect, seed/A valuation inflation, and so on).
I also remember the constant naysaying about scalability and batch size. Our batch was ~19 companies. People kept naysaying, "Well this model is fine for now, but it will never work past 20 teams."
PG would always reply with something like, "Yeah, they said that when we had fewer than 10 teams also. We aren't thinking too far ahead; each batch, we just find the next bottleneck and solve it, and we'll see how far that gets us." Which evidently got them pretty far. A lovely example of doing things that don't scale.
YC absolutely has accomplished something, as have some of its companies. I don't want to be dismissive of that. But we should acknowledge that it embraces and encourages the high-risk/high-reward model, which should be entered into with open eyes.
Exactly. Which means the risk level to founders is high. Because it is a roulette wheel where the VCs are the house, and the founders are the gamblers. With TechStars vs. YC being akin to the difference of the wheel having one zero or two. Founders are still gambling... even if YC gives better odds than others.
Again, VC has it place, as does YC. I'm not saying nobody should do it - I'm saying they should do it as a fully informed decision.
Startups are a high risk game but no one says you have to play it.
VCs get more shots on goal, so the typical outcome of a VC could approach that of the average of the industry. (It doesn't, but that's for other reasons.)
Founders can't because they have too few shots on goal.
Suppose that I'll give you a 10% chance at $100k if you pay me $1k.
If you can take that offer "enough" times, you have reasonable odds of making 5-12x on your money.
However, if 100 people take that offer once each, around 90% of them will lose their $1k. (They should pool.)
> Your success and the success of YC doesn't make your friends wrong
His friends weren't telling him to leave the startup world. His friends were in the startup world themselves, and felt that there were better options out there compared to YC. In this context, his friends were absolutely wrong
We were W21. I would argue one of YC's main goals is to reduce the risk to founders, and enable starting startup more accessible to those with the right skills, regardless of circumstance.
Getting into YC guarantees a certain minimum amount of funding and essential support, which not everyone outside SV has access to. It's commonplace to see people quit high paying jobs, and start businesses whilst married with children (the old narrative of 20-something male dropout is no longer the norm). This all happens because YC creates a platform that reduces risk for founders.
For me as first time founder YC was super helpful and they really drill the right kind of mindset for you. Build product, talk to users. The stuff they tell you is often very simple but I think lot of founders naturally complicate the startup building and focus on the wrong things because they think thats what should do. YC cuts through all the bs and just makes you focus on the few actually important things
(By Instagram, I imagine you meant Instacart?)
Easily the most memorable summer of my life. I agree that even though we were told everything was falling apart at our batch size, it was arguably the best batch of YC, there was some real magic.
Even though I'd never apply and thus never get in because of my preconceived notions about YC's preconceived notions (too "old"?, proud Dad of a bunch of homeschooled kids, mostly solo founder (well, I've got kids who code!), building a social/chat app way outside of the Bay area echo chamber, and not toeing any particular political lines (hey, I'm a coder so I'm allowed to recursively nest parens -- don't tread on me), and even if I'm doxing myself a bit with this comment!), YC and PG (through his essays, Hackers and Painters, and his genuinely kind and sincere approach to everything, even with people who are on the opposite side of the political aisle, like me) have taught me so much about how to be a force for good in this strange and weird world.
PG seems to truly live out Jesus' wisdom and the Golden Rule. He wisely avoids getting dragged into political discussions, and the HN moderators wisely steer even very wild discussions away from flame wars. For my next act, I'd like to build a social app that scales up the same sort of non-partisan (or multi-partisan!) active, intelligent discourse that occurs here, even if there are, sadly, very few dang's in the world.
I would like to say a very, very warm and very sincere thank you to pg, dang, and the rest of the YC team who make it possible to still have a civil, mostly uncensored, and wide-ranging conversation, and has helped so many great startups get off the ground, both inside and outside of YC with things like the SAFE and the startup-school opened to all, proving to VC's how things can and should be done, and just pursuing the most interesting startups, period. If I truly thought I had a chance given my coloring so far outside the SF political lines, I'd apply in a heartbeat!
Much love from someone deep in the heart of Texas. Keep up the incredibly awesome work.
The application itself can help your own thinking about what you're building, so it's worth doing just for that.
Great products come from all sorts of unconventional backgrounds, precisely because the people who made them were from an unexpected background. Some of the best new ideas come from the need to solve a problem that mainstream products don't cover, or from an insight that someone in the mainstream would never have.
Airbnb's founders weren't conventional startup founders. They were struggling and needed to pay their rent.
Also, 1000% agree on the sentiment and thanks to YC for the community here. HN is one of the blessings of the current day web.
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6t-how-to-apply-and-succ...
There's also a separate short talk on creating luck that has an interesting story about how Brex started, and also about how sometimes you need an "outsider's philosophy":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmEyx9TEkRw
These helped my thinking. The application is a helpful way to think about your startup even if you don't submit it. And once it's done, you might as well submit anyway :)
Good luck!
Also, check out YC Startup School. That's where the video was from. It really helped our startup, it has great resources, and a really friendly and encouraging community to get feedback on what you're building.
An acquaintance was in the 3rd batch of founders and turned me on to the ecosystem and community here. Around that time, I was a few years out of high school and working for minimum wage at a pizza shop.
I was experimenting with web design, making a few extra dollars running google ads on phpBB forums, and learning to code in the process. I never realized my geeky side could translate into something entrepreneurial until I started spending time here. Tracking the progress of my friend and this community planted a seed that turned into a dream of someday being a founder.
Today, my two business partners and I have been running a successful software business for almost a decade. We were distributed before it was mainstream. We're in the WordPress space and have a team of 20+ people all over the globe. I've had the opportunity to travel, meet investors, smoke cigars with business heroes, sleep in if I want to, and enjoy an exciting and fulfilling life.
I still find myself regularly googling about issues that arise in my company with "hacker news" appended to the end of the query. The stories here helped us navigate a very stressful M&A process and countless other "business stuff" hurdles that we encountered over the years (ie business insurance "hacker news").
YC provided me with direction and inspiration when I was floundering around in my early years. The simple ideas that you don't need an MBA to start a business and being an odd duck is a valuable entrepreneurial trait were life-changing. The community and discussions here are where I come to learn and be inspired. I sincerely hope it continues to be that for myself and others for many more years to come.
Thanks YC!
When I was 17, I: (a) was immortal (b) knew everything (c) had boundless energy (d) was out to change the world (e) did not know myself.
Fifty years later, I am • finite • humble • energetic in spurts • want to teach and encourage • still learning about myself.
Y Combinator, my best BD wish is that all your mistakes will be instructive. <3
17 years seems like a long time, but looking back, it's not, and it's an example of how much all these things can grow. Cheers to another 17 years of finding and making things people want.
This is about a ten minute walk from Harvard Square near an area known as the Radcliffe Quandrangle.
Congratulations to Y Combinator on 17 amazing years. Here’s to many more years to come!
You owe me $100. Please PayPal it expeditiously to don@donhopkins.com.
And if that 10-year-old hateful ESR quote I already provided you with isn't enough for your upwardly mobile goalposts, then here are a couple more recent, even more explicitly vile, hateful, racist, and demeaning ESR quotes. And there are lots more where those came from.
https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/816449724127608833
“Unfortunately, this doesn’t cover the BLM crowd, which would have an average IQ of about 85 if it’s statically representative of American blacks as a whole. I’ve never tried to train anyone that dim and wouldn’t want to.” -Erik S Raymond
https://quotepark.com/quotes/1914270-eric-s-raymond-in-the-u...
"In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." -Eric S Raymond
Did you really mean to carry Eric S Raymond's water so enthusiastically with such aplomb? You're the one who foolishly decided to publicly bet your own money that he couldn't keep his hateful racist mouth shut, and you spectacularly lost that bet, so please pay up.
Thomas Ptacek raised over $30,000 for charity from people who wanted him to stop posting vile ESR quotes to twitter, so consider yourself getting off dirt cheap for only $100 to make me stop posting ESR's own words, after you asked for it.
hn.devss.io
It says I can't post to hackernews so if somebody else can post it for us it will be great.
Thanks