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Happy birthday YC & Co. Been a fan since it was publicly announced.

And not to take anything away from YC's effort but I find it rather amusing that first time some good hackers take their turn at improving the VC industry they transform it and become (arguably) the most successful investors in it.

I wish more people would try to improve the VC industry. There's at least a few YC-level waves that could occur. AngelList the best example.

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what I wonder is if/when YC will start to take institutional money....that's what's going to take YC up to upper caliber of VC funds.

sequoia is already an investor

no, I meant like direct to institutions like pension funds.

why would a pension fund give money to Sequoia, and then have them give it to YC? that's an unnecessary management fee the pension funds have to pay

Because the pension funds want to invest such huge amounts of money that I suspect Y Combinator wouldn't know what to do with it.

If a pension fund wanted to invest $250m in YC, they'd have to scale up by so much I doubt it would work the same.

so are you saying there is an upper limit to entrepreneurship? I don't think so.

I wonder if pg has written anything about this, if there is some point of diminishing returns in the lean startup scene

I think there's an upper limit to the quality of entrepreneurial mentorship you can give, mostly as a function of (1) the mentors and (2) the mentor-entrepreneur ratio. Right now, YC invests in roughly $20k/company * 60 companies/batch * 2 batches/year = $2.4M per year. If they were forced to invest 50-100x that in a year, it'd be really hard to find 50-100x more mentors on the same level as the existing ones.

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