Unfortunately, this is a tech industry problem, not just a YC problem. Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol, and increasingly new entrants in the field are the types of folks who would've gone into law or finance in the past.
Its about $$$, there's been a ton of disillusionment about all the companies especially unicorns who've taken billions in investment and still have yet to prove that they can make a continuous profit. All the ride shares, delivery apps, so many SaaS companies are all burning massive amounts of cash trying to get to a network effect and becoming an "infrastructure provider" but every time there's more than 1 and they have to actually compete it turns out they can't survive without more investor money. That and people finally realizing that the crypto industry is a den of snakes and grifters.
For the past 3 years on the Who's Hiring threads almost every other post was crypto, now its LLMs - they're the companies that are getting investments from VCs, almost purely out of hype or not wanting to miss the "next big thing".
The tech sector as a whole seems to be primarily about moving money out of legacy industries (advertising, business solutions, automation) and into knowledge workers. The thing is its also an engine for massively concentrating money power and wealth. Human labor is getting cheaper by the minute and there's a massive power and wealth imbalance. Which is ironic given how in the early days tech skills were very democratizing of earnings and power. I hope something comes along that will bring about that sort of thing again. Or at minimum maybe we can provide a basic standard of living for everyone - an iPhone doesn't give shelter.
...Yes? It's a company, the sole purpose is for the founders to make money from their products, which a VC like YC would also want. At least it's better than companies which don't make money (or profit, rather), like many in the 2010s.
How is it massively different? In one case you care about the need; in the other case you care about money. From those different motivations flow different actions, which lead to different kinds of companies (and even different kinds of comments on HN).
Like... whether they truly believe their product is going to make the world a better place, or something like that?
I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves.
The VC's are mostly investing based on whether they think a thing will make them lots of money, and always have been, no?
> I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves.
This is likely a common thing, which further ambiguates this. Makes me wonder if there's something about recent goings-on which makes founders more willing to deceive themselves, therefore increasing the likelihood that their intentions are assumed by outside observers to be more negative.
Also startups are about making money (generally), it’s a means to an end. Otherwise it would be an open source GitHub project, no?
If someone can make $1bln integrating some APIs and negotiating hard, writing a bunch of CRUD code duplicating what a bunch of other folks have already done is pretty silly.
Ultimately, startups are about making money.
Now the ability to build things is more widely available, and there are lots of opportunities to make profitable companies without being on the cutting edge of tech skill. For those, being able to sell and reach customers is more critical. Hence what you are seeing.
In some domains of course, cutting edge tech skill is the key advantage, and for those kinds of startups, that’s where you’ll see YC fund the hacker types.
Eventually, many areas will have locked in incumbents which can’t be dislodged using the existing tech and/or tactics. Those incumbents will get increasingly terrible to deal with due to red tape, MBA types squeezing every drop of profit out in a destructive way, internal core value prop folks (engineering, product, etc.) getting more disillusioned or whatever, etc.
Then along comes some change (in market or tech), and the cycle repeats, with much hand waving and gnashing of teeth from some folks (usually older and more establishment) and with much rejoicing from others (usually younger and more up and coming/flexible.).
Next time will YC be disrupting?
Maybe, maybe not.
Since they’re aware, if the trend continues, they might actually believe this conformist archetype has equal or greater chance at success in today’s environment. If that's the case, it's probably bc the archetype tends to overlap with other skillsets that correlate with success (e.g. fundraising, recruiting, management).
“Help revolutions the sales cycle”
“Build developer tools”
“Block chain in your build chain”
Like it or not, that one could be a game changer.
Since the dawn of time builders have partnered with popularizers in search of building wealth or power; that's not new.
For MBA's, the easy money is in consulting, financial engineering, or monopolizing enterprises - mergers, crypto, pharma, etc. Tech startup's are typically a romantic sideline for those who want some added meaning. But now that deals, consulting, and crypto are dead for the moment, tech startup's look like a good way to go long or at least keep busy until the river runs fast again.
Against this influx, YC still has technical achievement as a barrier to entry and natural moat.
The real question is not hackers vs MBA's, but how honest investors are with each other. Some might latch on to exciting but opaque technologies, knowing they could sell them in later rounds to other investors. Conversely, later-round investors might only work with early-round investors who provide excellent accurate insight into the viability of technologies. New, hungry investors might give up more insight, while established ones jealously defend opportunities in their space. Investor cohorts might flow in and out with political or currency tides unrelated to opportunity.
The investor signal is much stronger than the market signal. Profitable companies now are cutting employees AND doing stock buy-back's and dividends, to satisfy investors. The same is likely true at YC.
YC deals reflect investor interest and shape the next generation of companies. Let's hope they stop veering from disruption to destruction (and from self-interest to divisiveness), and start figuring out how to reduce coordination costs of all our new prosthetic powers without reducing everything to a bureaucratic corporation.
I couldn’t imagine any group that organizes with the the primary intention of raising lots of money, making lots of money and then redistributing lots of money not eventually attracting lots of “suits” of the MBA sort.
The money is stacked way too high. YC has been around for almost twenty years.
It may be worth questioning whether a young tech company with altruistic intentions that fit your expectations getting billion dollar loans is a promising scenario.
Granted I don’t agree with the outcome or the format, I “get it”. People are trying to get paid. The money is getting too long for banks to just up and disappear overnight.
Half the stories are about ChatGPT or AI, the other are about Twitter/Musk.
I find it a chore to scroll past these two topics some days.
Am I alone in noticing this?
I actually wrote to dang to ask why a prominent "Ask HN: why so much GPT" post disappeared after an hour and they confirmed this. I still am disappointed to have learned from that conversation that "downranked" means "basically shadow-banned and you can't find it anywhere unless you use a direct link".
So yeah, I dislike what HN has turned in 2023. We're not the only ones, but we're the vocal minority and thus put aside.
I don't even want to blame dang, he's got the short end of the stick moderating this chaos, but the result is that HN is less and less about hackers because we're the minority now.
(In any case, this post is about YC, not HN itself, so we're probably off-topic here)
I am not sure what the stats are for the site but I wouldn't be surprised if there was significant growth and when communities expand you start getting average content and average users which can change the experience old timers expect. I have seen these occur in many niche subreddits that grew.
10 years ago, the majority of candidates for a tech startup qualified as 'builders', very broadly speaking. Now, a larger chunk want to work on 'product' and growth, with an immediate focus on financial upsides.
And there is nothing wrong with that inherently, but this is a different (and I daresay, more conformist) culture.
I think most founders/startups in AI space are in it because its the new shiny thing to chase just like everyone wanted to start a blockchain startup 5 years ago.
Blockchain/Crypto Bros ==> AI/GPT Bros
As it becomes more lucrative, more people get involved for the primary reason of making money, whereas formerly a larger proportion of people were involved because they found it interesting.
Both are legitimate reasons to be involved in tech in my opinion, but it's definitely a shift in demographics.
But what’s wrong about good business education?
Really? I'd imagine back then building a product was much tougher given the dearth of resource, low/no code tools and such.
2. The bar for impressive is now "insanely complex."
3. The tools were shittier, but more flexible, and you sucked it up and learned to deal. Now? The majority of our tools are overengineered in all the wrong places, because their contributors wanted to build something "impressive" (using today's standards) -- rather than useful and practical.
We had jQuery (a library) and PHP (a language modeled after the hit Microsoft classic, Minesweeper), and that was enough. Now you need React/Vue/whatever framework to build an "impressive" website (because you'll look like a clown if your website isn't as "polished" as your competitors -- who are also using newfangled frameworks)
It was easier to build shit back then, because the standards and expectations were saner.
The tech startup formula has merged with the startup hedge fund or VC fund formula. It has mostly to do with connections to capital. I’d also suggest that most ‘tech’ startups have nothing to do with technology. The biggest have been weird schemes to give something away for free or run unlicensed marketplaces.
At some point we have to admit that technology skills are a tiny part of the formula, but still worshipped because it’s the only part of it that is accessible to all, sort of like how we respect athletes more than sports broadcasters. MMA had a parallel rise, so it’s kind of like YC started out developing fighters and now they start dojos.
Can a fighter start a dojo? Yes; that is the natural order of things, and many do, but many more dojos are started by people with more money than skill.
Startups were not new in 2005; the fervor was just as strong as today, but the role of money was a lot less. The standard advice was ‘going Bedouin’, which worked because the cost of living was a lot lower, and it was much faster and easier to get a job if you needed one. Most people funded from job savings, part-time work, or living with parents[1]. The Facebook deal was unprecedented and weird. Even he took some very strange deals to fund his ideas before that came along. I know because I had a ‘job interview’ with a guy that MZ had some weird deal with to co-fund their projects, of which his was a parking app, and he was mad at ‘the Harvard kid’ for taking $6000 and not doing the work, which he wanted me to finish. I was working on a ride sharing app, so he offered me the same deal. He went to jail soon after, and then sued for 25% of Facebook when he got out. There’s also the infamous deal with ConnectU. All I’m trying to say is that everybody was hustling in weird ways.
Now it seems that the money is freely available if you are in the flow of it, and no amount of sheer brilliance can compete with that if you’re not. I think that may change in the near future, but I’ve been saying that for over a decade.
Also, if I may editorialize even further, the standard advice has always been inconsistent or inapplicable broadly. I liked the YC idea, but didn’t even apply because I was literally taking his advice not to focus on things like that, but obviously club membership has had benefits. When you succeed doing it your way, hacker, hustler, MBA, YC, vagabond, or whatever, you can tell everybody that’s the only way to do it.