75% of founders in the Y Combinator S24 cohort are working on AI startups | Hacker News Reader

75% of founders in the Y Combinator S24 cohort are working on AI startups

sherwood.news

19 pointsbillplayfair12 comments

Did many founders in the previous years before the SBF/FTX Incident work in cryptocurrency fields?

I ask because that's where the VC money and hype was back then and yet to me it didn't seem as if YC founders were playing that game. I may have the wrong impression of the past. To me AI appears more "real" than crypto but that might be because it's the current thing.

yeah! they did. Nowhere near to the same extent though, which is interesting (and as you said suggests the majority of YC founders weren’t as enticed by crypto as they are by AI).

“In 2022, when “Crypto / Web 3” was the hottest thing to work on, 33 YC startups were working in the space — in both of the most recent batches there was only 1.”

So that’s still only like 5% working on crypto stuff even during the mania I guess?

Why not apply to YC with the concept of letting AI launch an AI startup? AI should know best what's needed for success...;'p

I mean, that's where all the current hype and VC is, so it's not too surprising.

From my layman's perspective, the collapse of SVB seems to have tightened the belt on the startup scene, with AI-hype bubble(?) being the only viable escape hatch.

Interest rates, not SVB have caused the belt tightening.

One service that SVB provided that is uncommon for a typical bank is venture debt financing. I'm curious what percent of venture debt financing was provided by SVB, how big the market for that was before SVB collapsed, and how much venture debt financing is done now.

Well in a way, the hype train killed SVB.

What specific link between SVB and belt tightening do you see?

SVB was pretty much a non event for the vast majority of companies and people. And 3 months after the collapse I didn't see a single story about it in the startup scene.

What link are you drawing and what data are you basing it on?

I already admitted to being a layman, but I'm referring to SVBs venture debt offerings. I was under the understanding that the SVB collapse was so devastating (and the reason there was the government bailout that went above FDIC) was because the lucrative venture debt offerings SVB had were contingent on having all your money and payroll through the SVB account.

meh. they probably require a ai pseudo feature in the deck because investors will not touch it otherwise. just like you needed SaaS a few years ago

New starup idea: build an AI that generates slidedecks with exactly the buzzword soup VCs are looking for this week.

Obviously using reinforcement learning :)

$5m inbound at demo day

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