Not to bag on anyone who’s in YC right now, but it seems to be going the way of many ivy leagues - still meaningful, but very much not the same proxy for extraordinary it once was.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in-ivy...
YC has lost all of the people who were there at the start. Saying something like “what ever was the ‘luster’” is akin to saying “who the heck was Steve Jobs, who cares, Apple is still the same business.”
Sheesh.
Apple does still make hugely popular products and still makes a huge amount of profit.
Plenty of institutions, from universities to businesses, have managed to continue succeeding across multiple generations, just as many have failed after losing a generation.
I've no idea how YC helps now vs. the beginning, but different people isn't proof of it being worse.
I believe the same is true for YC. The primary value is being able to claim that you’re funded by YC and you were part of a cohort. That opens doors, to both investors as well as potential partners. The education/advice is standard and freely available everywhere.
YC's huge advantage is that they have an internal network of startups who support each other with YC money as customers, which then get pushed to VCs as revenue growth numbers. VCs have learnt to get in on the gravy train early, because the brand-name still carries value downstream. For no-name startups and no-name founders with no fancy universities (who are increasingly being ignored), this is a huge disadvantage.
If you want to look at YC's actual success rate, take a look at any of their public market companies' performance. Hint, none of them have outperformed their IPO price. In fact, many of them only found their ways into exits through the SPAC frenzy of 2021.
250ish per cohort meant the partners were spread very thin, and founders could realistically connect with just a subset of batchmates.
I'm glad they're scaling back the batch size.
I do like your comment as the critique of contemporary tech entrepreneurship culture that is very hype oriented, likely at the expense of comparatively few blue ocean ideas that get crowded out.
However I do fear that's global and not something specific to YC or the valley. Here across the pond we have the same gold rush, except at minor league level.
There is so much market up for grabs. Most companies will fail, but the ones that succeed can win really big. And the surface area is so much larger than attempting a non-AI company since the advantages are potentially huge.
> ChatGPT wrappers.
Create value. Doesn't matter how you do. Just create value.
ChatGPT isn't particularly useful.
A wrapper around ChatGPT which extracts specific entries from a PDF bill? That's incredibly useful.
The only niche so far that seems to have caught on for LLMs is code autocomplete, but that's already recording real revenues.
May. Not can.
There is no evidence yet that AI is anything other than a feature.