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> It's just hard to convey the sense from the early days of YC that they really didn't care about the return, or the progress so far, or VCs, or fads, or anything. That said, I really was at the right place at the right time and got very lucky.

It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did. Web apps and mobile fundamentally transformed everyday life and communication in very visible ways and there seemed to be a lot of low hanging fruit. I observe, similar to your 2), that YC seemed to have a bias toward products for tech people by tech people, and that wasn't a bad strategy, because there was still a lot of plumbing to do; there still is, but I feel that there are established solutions for the mass market to a degree that there wasn't.

> It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did.

Definitely, it's called ZIRP and QE.

I think so many questions about “Why did business X operate like this in 10s?” Is answered with that statement.

So much was funded on economic smack high. A few sobered up and a ton bottomed out bad.

It didn't hurt that there was also a burgeoning new computing platform that everyone and their grandma was buying into for the first time.

Yes, because ZIRP and QE are deflationary policies: they reduce the amount of interest paid by the government.

There were a lot of preferable options for connected, generally non-technical people after the dot-com implosion, for the first ~15 years of the 2000's. I joined a comp sci grad and his engineer brother in a software startup because we couldn't get jobs with an established company, big corp, investment bank or other much more likley "sure thing". The equation has completely changed, and the startup landscape with it.

Startups went from “let’s become the next Google” to “let’s get acquired by Google”. FAANG+ have become way too big and have effectively become a multi-opoly (oxymoron and a half) that has ossified the entire market.

But two decades earlier couldn’t you say the same thing about Microsoft?

It’s part of the cycle.

Oligopoly is a close word.

10-20 years ago the internet was still an unpopulated continent that everyone was rushing to settle. It just isn't the same wide open green pastures it used to be. This is my guess of what is the largest reason for the declining success of YC companies.

> … yield a big company …

I assume that this sort of says it all.

Everyone wants “big.”

The article talks about brand curation, really.

That seems to be a lost art, these days. I worked for a corporation that had one of the most powerful brands in the world (but has taken some real hits). I watched them dilute that brand, and make lots of money, but really get clobbered. They are now regrouping, and, I hope, re-establishing their original luster.

They were able to take a fairly small corporation, and compete with mega companies, on the strength of their brand. When they grew rather explosively, in the 1990s, they sowed the seeds of their own demise, in the mid-2010s.

Strong brand value seems like insurance.

You don't think about it when you don't need it, but it bails your ass out of otherwise-impossible situations when you do need it.

Everything's fine for uninsured property... until it's not.

I would say you could trade hard-earned goodwill and respect for a number of different things, maybe because it is such an unquantifiable asset.

I think earned leadership can be legitimately exploited where everybody wins up to a point, and if you put your mind to it you can engineer an operation to approach that point more successfully than those who do not.

You could be monetizing your "prestige", at a maximum sustainable level, without drawing down the asset.

OTOH it would be possible to go overboard on the march to maximum monetization, and arrive where the asset begins to dwindle. It may not be such a clear picture since it's so unquantifiable, and dwindling returns as a consequence can be some of the most easily misattributed.

the whole mythology is nobody knows what will be a big company in general.

The known big company spaces are heavily oversubscribed so nothing can be predicted.

The unknown big company spaces are unknown by definition.

That doesn’t provide any information since an incubator like YC is hoping for Stripe/Reddit successes. That’s not changed.

But I know W20 guys who pivoted inside YC three times, and eventually raised money. Their company didn’t exist when they applied. So what OP (of Etherpad IIRC fame) posted about the rejection comes as a surprise to me.

> That seems to be a lost art, these days. [...] I watched them dilute that brand, and make lots of money, but really get clobbered.

Maybe this is the normal lifecycle of a successful organization, unless one decides to grow more slowly? Infinite growth is what ruins most things. Scaling is hard.

YC seemed to attract genuine founders, back when starting something up was not so trendy. As it became fashionable, and YC began to be seen as the Harvard of startups, it has still attracted some great founders but also some less genuine ones. All successful organizations experience this issue.

A key element here is that neither PG nor Jessica Livingston seem to be actively filtering out people. I doubt anyone from batches curated by them would have posted on Twitter bragging about quitting a $270k job to work on a re-licensed fork.

It was sad to read about this whole affair and, frankly, I think discussion on HN has become less interesting, reflecting a similar trend. Front pages were full of technical discussion back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Content of that kind is less frequent these days.

> Front pages were full of technical discussion back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Content of that kind is less frequent these days.

Yeah, noticed the same trend. Reflective of the overall, as you said.

YC's original appeal was for builders/creators who were truly passionate about building a great product that solved a real problem. Dropbox for example at the time.

In my opinion, effectiveness of anything dilutes over time especially as you increase volume. There is no way you can maintain the same level of vetting and quality when you have a batch of 50 vs batch of 500+ which is now where YC is. So they must have to pivot to a different model of vetting companies.

I am curious as to why they continue to do more batches instead of less. Is it really a numbers game now ?

For example, what was the last truly great product out of YC built by a true hacker/team ?

Supabase is one.

It looks like a numbers game. As Brian Chesky said, Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. Now, YC seems to be operating in 'Manager Mode.'

When we got accepted into S23, our call started with Seibel saying something along the lines of "We like you, but we're pretty sure you're going to have to pivot." A non-trivial amount of my batch mates also joined with minimal product strategy, so I don't think you can read too much into the rejections.

I don't have anything to add re: YC over the years, just that my anecdotal experience differs.

> Original YC would not reject founders over their current product strategy and because they haven't figured out the right way to structure their business--haven't put together the "proof" that they could be on track to be a unicorn, etc.

Imagine you ran a startup accelerator that didn't invest in a particular business model or product, but instead invested in a team of founders you thought had the potential to produce something great, even if it takes a few pivots.

Now imagine you didn't want to invest in a given company. Would your rejection letter say you disliked the founders, as people?

Of course not, you want to be on friendly terms, just in case. Far safer to just be "unconvinced" about their "product strategy" in its "current form".

This sounds like an episode of "Shark Tank" - If you have $1 mil in orders which will generate a profit of 500k they will fight each other to invest 100k for 40% of your company. If you dont have a full order book and a production pipeline - no bueno.

I can only assume your product didnt fit into the current hype investment bucket (you should have put Ai in the pitch and you would have been funded). LPs in the VC funds want their Blockchain Ai and whatever hype they hear about exposure - the VCs have to deliver it and have it in their portfolio. The investment hype cycle is self reinfocing; as the investment headlines get bigger and the hype gets bigger.

This hits pretty dead center from what I've seen.

You really hit home for at #3, that's the type of companies I want to see.

If you start such a fund, I'd really enjoy working on that project.

He won't be starting such a fund for awhile, because the two of us are building company to make technology to foster a creative and curious childhood. We would be a good fit for any investors trying to do (3) though :)

https://cartwheelcomputer.com/

amal@cartwheelcomputer.com

It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but children don't have much disposable income, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

There are many industries aimed at children(‘s parents)

Did their landing page seem like it was talking to children or parents?

This feels like a side tangent, but why have you focused on technology for creative and curious childhood? I.e. Maria Montessori (founder of the Montessori methodology of teaching) did a pretty good job showing that's the natural state of kids, and there's quite a bit in her teachings about the importance of physical things, being outdoors, etc.

There's some pretty strong reasoning that technology might in fact be the problem, and while I'm sure you can make better technology with that focus in mind, it seems like a better approach might not be technology.

Here's a few articles that lead to this point:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phon...

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/childhoods

This feels like a side tangent, but why have you focused on technology for creative and curious childhood? I'm curious if you have considered the following:

I.e. Maria Montessori (founder of the Montessori methodology of teaching) did a pretty good job showing that's the natural state of kids, and there's quite a bit in her teachings about the importance of physical things, being outdoors, etc.

There's some pretty strong reasoning that technology might in fact be the problem, and while I'm sure you can make better technology with that focus in mind, it seems like a better approach might not be technology.

Here's a few articles that lead to this point:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/honestly-its-probably-the-phon...

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/childhoods

Because it turns out #1 is one hell of a drug.

I definitely don't think babies should have iPads or preteens Instagram, but I believe that technology can be great for childhood because I had a computer from age 4, in 1987, and it was great for me. I learned how to program, I wrote an entire ~50 page book (which I wouldn't have done with pencil and paper), and by middle school I was sitting down with adults and showing them how to use the computer, which was really empowering for me.

Balls and blocks and Magna-tiles and Legos are forms of "technology" that we universally recognize as good for kids, and a semiconductor junction doesn't magically make something bad for kids. What makes today's technology bad for kids is that it's designed to be hyper-addictive and hyper-extractive.

In short, I am a huge fan of Maria Montessori, and the company we're building, to a first approximation, might be what Maria Montessori would have built herself if she was a TypeScript developer in 2024.

Amazing, thanks for the response.

Hey, it's the author of the tweet quoted by the article!

I'm actually gauging interests. Crowding for immediate return -> Lowering return eventually. Case in point the OG geeks in the valley or quant funds doing those for hobby vs now people go straight to career. Same as Bitcoin was dope in 2012 and lame in 2020. New comers get in mostly for greed not passion.

But feels like LP are holding their $$$ for the fed rate to stabilize a bit.

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There's actually a ton of money at the top of society looking for somewhere to go, which ideally would be routed to more worthy ventures than it is, but that's a whole topic in itself

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Forget "ideally": the experience and world-view of the collective deciders for that money is financial. Other factors are filtered out. Vanity investments - for the glory of the human race or technological progress - only reflect inefficiency and excess discretion that are squeezed out with a few selection iterations or process controls. (This is setting aside the large cohort of big-money behind overt/covert national funds, with major non-financial strategic objectives.)

That finance focus won't change with YC's focus or with more morality or regulation. The only path I see is innovation not in finance or technology but in law: to somehow create and sell a stake in the future, to avoid future environment and peoples being now basically a huge externality sink.

"YC's reputation" matters mainly insofar as it provides access and credibility for individual YC startup's, based on their collective promise. If governance access and credibility were conditioned on long history/holding period of protections for future, then both selection and resources would flow in favor, and we'd have a race to the top instead of the bottom.

If you ever go after 3) sign me up.

The most inexplicable miss by VCs (YC included)is the lack of interest in funding climate change remediation. Billions of people to help and billions of dollars to be made. E.g.: Could funding protection of Tuvalu’s dry land and status as a nation pay dividends through licensing/leasing fishing rights?

Such things are an area for innovation, and tech could be a part of it, but isn’t.

I'm not sure it's a lack of interest so much as a shortage of good startups.

Here's YC's statement of interest https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech

They say they have funded over 100 of them.

Prometheus seems a good one https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/prometheus https://x.com/paulg/status/1385338452544217095

Prometheus has all the hallmarks of vaporware, over promised (self proclaimed "first electrofuel unicorn" lol) and under delivered. They've been at it for over 5 years and 120M dollars later they have nothing to really show.

120M could have bought a lot of rainforest or planted a lot of trees.

That's not inexplicable. There's not much interest in it because a lot of things founders believe about climate are false and believing false things is a quick way to lose money. Tuvalu is a good example of this phenomenon. If you'd invested in a startup planning to make money by protecting Tuvalu from global warming, you would have lost all your money because Tuvalu is growing, not shrinking.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5 ha (2.9%), despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls. Island change has lacked uniformity with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size. Results challenge perceptions of island loss, showing islands are dynamic features that will persist as sites for habitation over the next century

You didn't get unlucky with your choice of Tuvalu, a lot of common beliefs about the impact of climate change are like that. There's little discussion of this phenomenon, because it's taboo to criticize climate related narratives. Only argumentative gits like me are willing to do it. But the smart money knows this and quietly stays away.

BTW this isn't specific to climate. I've known and talked to a few VCs over the years, and what I learned is that if there's an important and valuable area they're all collectively ignoring it's usually because they know things that other people don't. For instance, you may have noticed that Silicon Valley VCs usually avoid biotech startups, despite biotech being seen at one time as a high tech industry with potential similar to computing. That's because such startups often come out of academia, and VCs were aware of the replication crisis/fraud problems in biology earlier than most.

The study you reference is from 5 years ago, perhaps the impacts cited here[1] are less “incorrect”.

My anecdotal evidence of VC’s level of knowledge is very consistent with people at large. That is, flawed.

[1] https://zenodo.org/records/8069320

Kench et al is a historical study of satellite imagery. Unless they made a counting error there's no way for a new study to invalidate it.

But let's take a look. That document starts by admitting that it's motivated reasoning:

"this report is written in support of the objectives of the Rising Nations Initiative (RNI), enabled by the UN Global Center for Climate Mobility"

and it goes downhill from there. They're providing ammo for their clients, not attempting to neutrally answer questions. As a consequence they never mention the fact that Tuvalu is growing. They very carefully avoid the topic of whether the country is getting bigger or smaller despite that this is the entire problem the report is predicated upon, indeed they don't even seem to cite Kench et al, let alone try a refutation. Instead they rely heavily on presenting a few isolated data points followed by model predictions (of the type that were already proven wrong) and give you a good hard inferential shove in the direction they want you to go in.

This isn't scientific but it is what the UN Center for Climate Mobility needs in order to advance their own mission of maximizing immigration. It's clever in a way: when someone calls them on it, they just say "oh! well we never said Tuvalu was sinking, that's all in your head, don't blame us we're just scientists it must be journalist's fault".

Which is the problem I'm highlighting. There's lots of misleading material out there. You could read this report and very easily conclude Tuvalu sinking beneath the waves is a great problem to devote your life to. Investing in solutions to non-existing problems can sometimes work temporarily, but it won't give you a new Google or Apple.

Apples and oranges. The 2018 study shows increasing landmass at the coast lines in middle to large non-sand islands during the raising water levels.

The newer 2023 study merely shows the rising sea levels, as also shown in the first study. It concentrates on the risks of more salt water intrusion, so they'd need to invest in closed sewing systems or salt water filtering systems.

>Original YC would not reject founders over their current product strategy and because they haven't figured out the right way to structure their business--haven't put together the "proof" that they could be on track to be a unicorn, etc. That's a VC rejection. Of course, YC gets many thousands of applications and has to reject most of them. You could say they shouldn't be criticized for trying to give a little feedback.

My controversial opinion is that they should stop giving feedback. "Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

My startup got rejected because "valuation is unlikely to cross 100 million". Everyone is entitled to their opinion but we are already at 10m valuation and AI in ecommerce doesn't really have 100m cap.

Most of the founders on reddit and discord take the YC feedback as gospel and give up/pivot when its absolutely the last thing they should be doing. Unfortunately we will always have this power imbalance between VC and startups

+1 any feedback that is not based in data, I dismiss it as anecdotal. Congratulations on your success.

> Everyone is entitled to their opinion but we are already at 10m valuation and AI in ecommerce doesn't really have 100m cap.

Or so you think. Keep going at it! Chatting with a lot of enterprise retailers for my startup (not in AI for e-commerce), but there's a shit ton of stuff where AI in e-commerce can help imo.

YC would be stupid if they dismissed your startup on valuation grounds - enterprise retail can't be arsed with this AI debauchery directly but would gladly pay for the privilege of claiming to use AI.

What I am seeing is that among Harvard/Stanford grads, being the CEO of a venture backed startup is the highest status. Some of them hate technology and view programming as "low class". But they still go into it, so when they see their peers its something to brag about. They may even stretch the runway as far as possible to maintain the status.

YC is just another brand they can add. It was so odd for me when I first realized this is how it works. And the investors are often just investing based on where they went to school. Real metrics dont come into play until later, during which they have the capital to hire people that actually know what theyre doing.

Founder, CEO and Serial Entrepreneur.

How many here have that (unironically) on their linkedin profile ...?

>Finally, I want to call out the phenomenon in the world of VC where the ability to generate hype alone is enough to make you and your investors a lot of money, even if there isn't a lot of substance in your company (and even if things are morally or ethically questionable), through the mechanism of greater fools.

Amen brother. VCs and the Valley elite think the society at large has turned on them, without introspecting on how VCs seem to reward bad behavior and grift.