Changes at YC

They can't even bring themselves to say the words 'laying off', 'redundancies' or even the milder 'letting go'. The staff are merely 'impacted' by this change in focus!

Execs just feel like they need to retreat to the safety of euphemisms in these kind of announcements, after first boasting about how well the company is doing, of course.

It seems like it is taboo to even discuss the collapse of the so-called "tech" industry. The people invested in it appear to police the dialogue online, which is not something I remember before the dot-com collapse. (Of course, in the early 00's we did not have the same level of manipulation through data collection, tracking, re-ordering of results, comment voting systems, etc.). The attempts of the "tech" believers to "argue" with simple questions or the presentation of facts is hilarious.

Too many years of "zero" interest rates has resulted in some warped thinking.

> Wow. First time I've seen a layoff post that starts with boasting success.

Something similar with IBM recently: "IBM posts biggest annual sales increase in more than a decade, announces 3,900 layoffs" [1]

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ibm-posts-biggest-annual-s...

Why do they need "taking care" of? Are they fragile school kids? Desparate single mothers who can't make ends meet?

What is with this "save our babies!" attitude towards people who are

- Well off

- Highly skilled

??

It is not boasting, it is part of the explanation that YC is good at early stage investing.

They did not say how their late-stage investing turned out, but supposedly not as well, and that's why they won't do it anymore.

If they're so successful, how are they then not moving people into new roles in the company's front end investment group?

They have "graduated"... :-/

It’s not even a great boast. Their success is due to the Federal Reserve. Oh, sweet summer child.

I wonder what the revenue per employee of YC is. 85 employees, with 1/6 companies unicorns (though some of that is paper valuations, but still huge returns).

Oh, come on. This is three days after their favorite bank got shut down. We all know what the proximate cause is.

I think it's clear that the venture world (at least the top of it) had turned itself into an industry on its own. They didn't make money on startup exits anymore, they made it on services. They'd fund startups, get those startups into later rounds by milking less sophisicated VCs[1], push them at their favorite bank, collect fees at each stage, and then take the profits and roll them up into more startus.

Now that the favorite bank is dead, this gravy train is over immediately. And the smart VCs at the top of the heap are the ones to exit the wagon first.

Honestly, the industry has had a toxic feel for a while. But the last 72 hours have made it clear that there was just no soul left.

[1] Yes, this sounds like a pyramid scheme to me too.

Thanks Finbarr. The group partners and MD's and I know these are important and valuable programs, and there is a lot more we need to be doing for alumni and the experience after companies do YC.

I don't have more to share now, but know that I really value you and this note.

"Exonerative tense," "mistakes were made," etc.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past_exonerative

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...

This comment comes across as a silly nitpick given the sober content of the post, but I think it is completely fair given Paul Graham's many writings and tweets on the virtues of writing clearly and his hatred of what I call corporatese.

I think this is just a matter of opinion. When something severe happens it's natural to not use the most harsh term to describe the event. It doesn't seems like something malicious.

When describing a death many people will say "they are no longer with us" instead of describing the circumstance of death. When talking about traumatic events we as a society have a natural propensity to not use triggering words. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that unless it's hiding information. As described above no one is hiding anything because we all understand what happened.

When there's a PR person involved, truth goes away, double-speak comes in. Even in the case of YC, which in general is way better than most other organizations.

I knew an ex co-worker who grew up in another country whose manager, in a "sync up meeting", told him that he was "impacted" and he didn't need to continue work on his current sprint. He came out of the meeting with a smile, had no idea what this meant, and he showed up the next day.

Does this accomplish anything other than increasing resentment?

You are absolutely right. This is the only correct wording.

Never mind "I was impacted by layoffs", I often see "my position was impacted by layoffs"

Passive voice afflicts many people's writing, not just corporations. Yes, it's a bad practice, but I don't feel it's egregious in this case.

> Never allow corporations to speak in passive, weak, blameless terms.

And yet, when they don't they tend to be excoriated for being harsh and cruel.

So whaddya do?

Just read it in a dental sense: seventeen of our molars were impacted today, and had to be extracted.

What you're talking about linguistically is the difference between passive voice ("I was laid off") vs active voice ("YC fired me"). It is a pervasive technique and a form of blame-shifting. Whenver you see a headline, ask yourself which voice is being used and why. It is a key part of media literacy.

Laid off is itself a less harsh version of fired.

I, too, prefer that companies spoke in direct, plain terms, without PR shenanigans.

Does anyone know why do they do this, though? Is it to de-risk potential lawsuits or do they believe people prefer that way ("sounds professional")?

Maybe they weren’t fired? The way the post was worded has me wondering if they’ll be retrained and have their roles changed to fit YC’s new needs.

Perhaps they meant seventeen of their teammates have impacted colons? It's an odd thing to share, yes, but these are trying times.

This immediately stood out to me as well! It didn't come across as tactful, just bizarre

There isn't even a need for a public blog post about this change in business strategy. This reads fine as an internal email, but I've never worked at a company that publicly referenced their layoffs.

YC is not special. It’s a business and they’ll use weasel words like the rest of them.

I actually believe he put out a 10/10 example of how this should be done. We all know what he meant, he was concise and then reminded you of the mission and that this is all about the mission.

While those examples do use the passive voice, the passive is not the real problem. "These events impacted seventeen of our teammates" is the active voice, and it is no more forthright. "Mistakes were made by Bob, Sean, and Susan, who have been fired" is (if accurate) quite clear about assigning blame while using the passive. It's true that some people overuse the passive, and for those people noticing and considering whether to rephrase can produce better writing, but insisting on forgoing the passive entirely probably won't. If we want to prevent evasive writing, we should look for and call out evasive writing, whatever voice is used.

Why is it the corporation's fault though? We live in a society and governance structure which encourages corporations to consider revenue over everything else. Why would they act differently? What should Google do? Sorry I understand the human cost of layoffs. But it is a reflection of what this society values. If you want corporations to consider the human cost, you need to make it feature in their financials. Or the government should offer better protection to unemployed people.

I find the euphemistic use of “impacted” to be more irritating than the passive voice.

“Seventeen of our teammates were laid off today” still suffers from the passive voice, but is much more up-front.

(Plus, presumably many other teammates will be impacted to one degree or another by the departure of these 17.)

From my experience these things are an after thought, the people writing this stuff are disconnected from the people making the actual decisions and I guess the typical audience that reads it. The people who do the marketing, HR, or "run socials" tend to be from the demographic that over values safe corporate speak. CEOs occasionally write these but usually it's some pre-written stuff that gets signed off on.

We all review these like a ton of thought went into some blog post, and maybe it should, but often it's just a lower end employee who is asked to translate things into an announcement when they played zero role in the hiring/firing part.

Considering how much these posts always bother people [1] maybe higher ups should care more about the blog posts too.

[1] At least a few in every HN thread, whether most people actually care/read it might be different.

I think it's time to admit that there's no way they could write announcements like this that will please absolutely everybody. It just can't be done.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean companies will stop doing layoffs either, sometimes it will certainly happen.

I'm at least happy when I see an announcement that spares us the theatrics and just says what it needs to say.

> If you think that looks too bad, then don't do the thing -- find other opportunities for the people in the company.

The needs of a business change. Sometimes roles are eliminated and other times roles are added. This is normal and healthy process of every business. Can we get away from infantizing the individuals affected like they're some children whose family disowned them? It's unfortunate and you can certainly empathize with those that no longer have a role in the firm, but it's a business, not a family.

I think they are owning the outcomes. Saying "we fired 17 people" would be more disrespectful and not accurate. If I was let go due to a strategic business decision or through the natural course of the industry I wouldn't want my former employer suggesting they fired me.

Not to mention that the title of the post ("Changes at YC") is a euphemism for "Layoffs at YC".

> I hate this passive voice.

To be pedantically clear, the first sentence here is not passive! Both clauses there have an explicit subject (‘this’ and ‘we’ respectively) and neither verb (‘means’ and ‘need’) is passivised. I like Geoffrey K. Pullum’s article on what is and isn’t passive: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.html

(Not that this means the announcement isn’t problematic, mind you. It still feels like it’s trying to avoid focussing on something. And yes, the second sentence does this by means of the passive voice. I just get annoyed when people misidentify it, as they seem to do regularly.)

A lot of the tradition of passive voice comes from lawyers because you can’t always say somebody was fired or transferred or laid off. There can be different standards of local employment law for different employees. Passive voice can be the least risky of defamation or expressing favoritism to those who didn’t get cut.

That said, it’s abhorrent to see YC cling to tradition here, especially in light of the industry-wide layoffs as well as just how insanely rich YC is versus the headcount at question here. This is absolutely a place to question tradition and seek progress.

And also yeah maybe even own the consequences.

I don’t want to pick on your post specifically, but I find this legislating and nitpicking over the exact wording of layoff announcements — that follows every single one of them — to be pretty pointless

>> we will no longer need some of the roles on the late stage investing team

> I hate this passive voice.

It's active voice, no? How is it different than we fired, except that firing sounds more tied employee performance, no longer needed more seems like employer fault.

> If you think that looks too bad, then don't do the thing

lol what?

No serisouly: lol what?

"Don't do the right thing if it looks bad" is a loser strategy.

> Most of us understand the necessity of hard decisions.

Do we? Because you suggested that they could have not fired them.

Agreed. How about:

"We fcked up. Sorry. We really did. We're looking to identify the source of the decision. We'll be placing the person, or group of people, responsible on a performance plan (that will include the leadership team if appropriate). If they make continued similar mistakes, they'll be fired, or their compensation will be impacted. In the mean time, we'll be working hard to help the 17 poor souls who were sacrificed on the alter of this mistake".

Also wanted to add: never forget that “the law of averages” is our friend when this happens. It ensures that there is always a good chance to lend somewhere if one keeps trying (submitting applications and giving interviews).

“Everything that arises passes away.”

Yes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35142261

Probably, or at least scaled back?

Id guess that YC has a much greater competitive moat in the former. It's much "easier" to do late stage investing - a few big transactions instead of many many small ones, and everyone's working with the same information.

Very few places have the infrastructure to deal with large volumes of start-ups + a lead flow of small companies trying to join YC, so there's no acquisition costs. Add to that, YC's experience with small start-ups compounds - they can probably predict start-up success way better than competitors at this point. That's almost certainly not true for late stage investing.

There's virtually no similarity between the two. They are completely different games.

Early stage investing – low cost, high risk of failure, high multiple return, you'll need to make a lot of bets so can cast a wide net, longer term (could be up to a decade or more before you see returns), no established business, so you are betting entirely on the founders.

Late stage investing – high cost, low risk of failure, low multiple return, you can only make a small number of bets so have to be more selective, shorter term, company already has a well-established business, and your decision will primarily be based on how well it is doing.

Not privy to special information w.r.t. this change, but I can think of a few:

1. Breaking focus / competing on multiple fronts. Lots of firms specialize in A-stage or later. By investing in seed and later rather than just seed, the later stage firms see you as a "competitor" for, rather than a "supplier" of, early stage startups. You have that many more competitive relationships rather than cooperative ones.

2. LP fundraising. LPs have to make choices as to who to fund, especially in this economy. Later stage vetting, returns, etc are different than early stage. May not be worth the heavy lift of competing for LPs.

3. Specialization. Once you get into later stages, you get firms that specialize by industry vertical. Not just business (marketplace, fintech, hardware) but even within software (SaaS, dev tools, consumer, enterprise, etc). Might make it harder to make deals. You now have a multi-front problem where each potential counter-bidder for the deal lead has hyper specialization to the startup, whereas YC is a generalist by nature.

4. Competition for deal terms. Most of the time, the deal lead sets the terms. If you can't aggressively bid to lead deals, they may not get the best economy for each of the deals since the lead may have other priorities. This may produce less optimal returns vs just putting more money into seed.

5. Partner / investor preference. VCs compete for partners / investors. If partners in the late stage at YC are limited to only YC companies vs the whole late-stage market (or have other limitations), it may not work for them vs going to a firm with less terms.

Ultimately as a generalist investor, pre-seed/seed/A-and-later are very different markets. With interest rates this high and everyone being more picky, it becomes harder to outperform unless you can operate in that market independently. I suspect YC looked at a model for their returns and came to this conclusion.

My pithy observation - Early stage investors are fantastic at extrapolating from minimal data points. Late stage investors are fantastic at extrapolating from many noisy data points. They screw up because the methods for each of their extrapolation functions are entirely different, so much so that they manifest as cultural differences in investment firms.

I am not VC but I think this is kinda apparent from the get go.

In early stage you are betting on and nurturing a small team with a full-of-hope business plan. They need relatively small bits of help that can go a along way. So both "who you are chosing among" and "how you are helping them" is very specific.

With bigger companies, the team and the business plan is more proven and they need help navigating size and scaling their offering - a very different set of people you are chosing from and what they need from you.

I am sure there's a lot of additional nuance.

> is so different that the success of YC in early stages doesn't translate

that's not a claim made in the article. It just said the late state was different enough to be a distraction from their core mission of being an early stage investor. A company with just an idea and 2 founders and nothing more is obviously very different from a company with many employees, a revenue stream and a long list of customers. It should be obvious how different that is.

All of Y Combinator startups try follow the same playbook: successfull exit, or successful IPO. YCombinator benefits from both.

Since most YCombinator startups never see any profit, late stage investment becomes a risky proposition since even "top YCombinator startups" lose billions of dollars a year, for years, with no path to profitability or recouping investments.

> how and why late stage investing is so different

It requires due diligence and knowing how to invest instead of throwing darts and celebrating the occasional bullseye as proof of your acumen.

Well, for one, I imagine the "network" provided by YC is less valuable to late stage companies than it is to early stage, so YC probably found they were not able to bring as much value.

Second, the amount of capital needed to invest in later stages is much higher, and with companies delaying IPO, they would be tying up capital for much longer than they probably expected originally.

I have no insight into YC, this is just my guess as to how it is different.

They have the absolute advantage in early stage, from marketing to skills and focus. Surely everyone thinks YC first. Not true in late stage.

Focus. Much easier to have the entire company focused on one thing.

Specialisation of labour. Become experts, make sure nobody catches you.

When you start diluting your goal you trade off focus and specialisation, potentially reducing your advantages.

Now I’m wondering how to apply that to myself. The answer seems obvious but I like being a generalist.

It costs a lot more to invest in a late stage startup than an early stage one.

In the current economic climate they probably can't afford (or just don't want to risk) to invest large sums, while on the contrary can "take advantage" of early stage startups which will struggle more to get funding.

More upside on the table if you get in early. It’s probably just not an efficient use of their time since the returns from gettin in early are so outsized.

Prices were higher, and upside was lower.

That's a really bad take. YC has a responsibility to the startups they fund to maintain the best team for the kind of work they're focused on. It's also not necessarily the best thing for employees to "be utilized on other roles" within their current company when their roles cease to exist due to business changes. Often the best roles for those individuals is at other companies or in founding their own companies. In truth, most people I've known who have stayed at the same job for a decade were worse off for it, not better.

I'm not advocating for reshuffling your workforce for very short-term needs, but if the longer-term goals change, the team often has to as well.

> YC is sitting on top so much money and profits

This is true of every big tech company doing layoffs. They can all easily afford to keep everyone. They choose not because capitalism has no room for humanity.

and yet Anu Hariharan and Ali Rowghani seem to be leaving to start a new fund. no failures in VC, just pre-success :)

What else in the post is worth debating?

YC made a decision about the value of one of their departments, and HackerNews generally accepts it as given that companies can make these kinds of self-determinations. The reasons for the decision were given. As a result of that decision, 17 people no longer have jobs with YC.

All that’s really left to debate is how YC phrases it. “17 teammates were impacted” is weasellier than the average layoff announcement so it gets the criticism.

As an aside, there seems to be a general but informal understanding that fired means you did something wrong while laid off means you’re alright but the company no longer employs you. Other terms like “impacted” have to be matched to one of these two cases. Probably a lot of benefit for everyone from formalizing this distinction. The military uses “honorable discharge, other than honorable discharge, dishonorable discharge” https://www.zero8hundred.org/types-of-discharges for example.

Sticks and bones may break my bones, but words can divert me into hours and hours of endless hairsplitting and bickering until I die of being bored with myself and doctors gather and marvel at the inexplicable fact that I am still complaining in the absence of a discernible pulse

Clarity and technical honesty are very important in technical work; especially so in a startup: you want people to focus on solving technical issues, not translating corporatese to human.

Plus, if a group tries to hide behind the wording for an inconvenient message what else would it sweep under the rug? YC is usually way better than this, which may be the reason there is so much attention to the wording which reads like the standard PR spin. My 2c.

Probably because there’s not much new in the layoff story that hasn’t been covered in tens of thousands of comments on previous layoffs. But this is the first time a lot of people have had an outlet to discuss the frustrating linguistic phenomena that have been on display this cycle.

not only that but it's the exact same top-comment subthread that appears at the top of literally every story involving corporate comms. I wonder if it's the same people every time or if there's a constant influx of new commenters who feel strongly about corpspeak.

Yours too

This thread has to be best description of nerds i've seen

Yes, the proper style is:

Leading venture capital innovator, YCombinator, is delighted to announce that over 80 percent of our team remain unimpacted by recent employment-related issues, while other team members will be exploring exciting new opportunities going forward

I doubt the late stage investing team will suffer that much. They'll probably move to similar high paying roles shortly.

I don't think that'd be accurate - YC is exiting the business of late-stage investing, and that's the main news. It sounds like they had 17 people who were working on that part of the company who they laid off as part of this transition, but given the major role that YC Continuity played, it's significant news that they're no longer doing that.

I don't know of a title edit that would satisfy everyone, and pretty much any of the standard edits we'd make would generate accusations that we were censoring or whatever to protect YC, so in this case I think we probably need to go by the default.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

"fire" != "laid off"

I’m not sure why YC is an example of something that has scaled well. There’s so many companies now in each batch with 95%+ never amounting to much success. It’s not clear how the scale is helping anyone.

There have been plenty of scaling problems (my batch, S12, has been publicly referred to a few times as "the batch that broke YC" for example).

Scaling is an iterative process :)

Or perhaps writing pro rata checks doesn't require that many people?

can those employees not be staffed to other projects? surely the skillsets are reusable. Something is very fishy about this and the timing.

When I saw the March "Who is hiring?" I couldn't help but think "truly, who is?".

My friend is on the lookout for a new role and his experience so far is that it's mostly CV hoarders who approach him on LinkedIn. One case we all but confirmed because I used to work for the company which was supposedly hiring, but I asked a person from there and nope, not very actively, no.

Creating a position for employees that aren't needed is generally not a business priority.

Besides, it's likely that this is primarily a cost-cutting measure given similar industry trends at the moment.

You mean like a fund where corps like YC pay into on the regular and then people who are laid off get back some of their salary for a portion of time? It would be like insurance but for being unemployed, just like we have insurance for your bank failing.

> Wasn't it just recently that YC posted a plea to bailout so that people wouldn't be fired?

No, that never happened where did you see that?

> So where is the bailout for these impacted people?

Unemployment exists and I'd bet a lot they got severance pay.

I'm not necessarily pro-bailout but there's a clear distinction between job losses due to money trapped in a failed institution versus job losses due to a business deciding to eliminate those jobs.

Is "impacted" the euphemism of the 2020's? In the past I've seen "affected", but maybe that's passé now. So hard to keep up with all the progress in our language ...

I find it almost impossible to not see them as related. Take a look at [0]. Long-term this could be a good decision, I believe early-stage investing really is different to late-stage investment, but of course the moment to make this decision makes it evident there are other factors at play that influence this.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35114009

It's not, this is about making YC awesome for early stage founders right at the beginning.

It's not—my understanding is that it's been in the works for quite a bit longer than that.

I don't think the timing is random considering the climate. I have a feeling these seventeen will land softly compared to 99.9% of those caught up in recent layoffs.

"current down turn in risk assets" is almost as wonderful a phrase as "17 team members were impacted". The fact is that SIVB shares are now worth $0, and that many VCs and LPs were surely holding those can't be a total coincidence with today's "changes".

That is the point of writing it that way. So you have to do the mental work yourself of translating "impacted" to "fired."

Late stage means series B+ usually

Maybe your question is a joke but I assume "impacted" means laid off in this context.

Kind of like when people say someone "passed away" to mean they died

no, they meant the way when a car impacts a wall, or when stool gets impacted in a colon

Why is American corporate structure a mess? What are existing real-world examples of alternatives that outperform American corporations, and along which metric? Why should corporations be equally controlled by capital and labor? Some American cities indeed have slums, but what leads you to believe it's a consequence of American corporate structure (rather than a million other possible reasons)?

Without fully entertaining the hyperbole, American society and government are fully captivated by the wrong metrics: GDP growth is an extremely narrow measure for economic well-being. Unemployment rate is biased by not counting people who want to work but gave up because they can’t find a job. Average salary is far less meaningful than median salary due to huge skews in income distribution.