Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

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> The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an accelerator they are in the best position to do that.

That's really short term thinking.

It might work for a class or two, but eventually VCs will realize that they're getting bad returns from their investments, and YC won't be nearly as attractive as it is today.

For long term success, YC needs to pick companies that will eventually become successful. Particularly the big, standout successes.

> The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.

If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.

> but eventually VCs will realize that they're getting bad returns from their investments

I'm not saying that they are necessarily bad returns. It's just that for many reasons there is a strong opportunity for a disconnect between viable business models and seed-investments. E.g. exit event horizons are currently so long[0] that it becomes hard to correlate exit success to seed-funding (for better or worse).

> If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.

Oh, I don't disagree with you. But from the actions of YCombinator it seem like either:

- They don't see this as a risk to their long-term ROI (due to some factors we are not seeing here)

- They don't have proper means of self-assessing their selection quality and think they are scaling well while they don't

- The situation is not as bad as the article and some of the comments here make it look like, and everything is fine with YC

[0]: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ <- There are many 10+ year old companies on that list without an exit and YCombinator isn't even 20 years old yet

A question that has probably been answered, but...

In a hits business, does quality picking matter? You want to avoid adverse selection, but beyond that - isn't it just about scale?

There are probably a few levels.

Originally, at small scale, you need to pick hits better than others (or get lucky).

Next, you want to scale large enough that you can make enough bets to amortize individual bet risk across a large portfolio.

Then, once you're over that scale, you need to be back in the business of picking hits more reliably than the next VC.

>That's really short term thinking.

Isn't that exactly what we're discussing happening to YC?

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