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Comment by light_triad | Hacker News Reader

> YC startups don’t have to be unique. Far from it.

Slow news day. YC has made it clear over the years it's almost all about the founders not the idea. It's almost impossible to know if an idea is good at the early stages, and ideas change, startups pivot, often the timing is wrong, and the market unproven etc. More often than not most of what startups do is not unique, otherwise there's no market for it. A new take on an old idea has a much higher chance of success than something totally new that ends up being too early.

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Steve Jobs or maybe just Apple used to pit teams against each other to develop a solution to a problem and then pick the strongest of the two.

It also offers a convenient way to pull investment out early if the doppelganger startup isn't meeting targets. Just get the original startup to buy them out.

It's not something that is a negative for YC, but it could be for the startups they back.

Even today there are decent odds that within Apple the macOS and iOS groups are locked in a multi-decade long fight in which one may prevail...

Reminds me of how pelicans will raise two chicks and then kick the weakest of the two out of the nest and devote all future resources to foster the stronger of the two. YCombinator as convergent evolution, I guess.

> how pelicans will raise two chicks and then kick the weakest

there is a youtube video ( pls don’t watch ) that gave me nightmares for days on end. i had completely forgotten about those pelicans and now you had to bring it up again in the comments. the little pelican had a broken leg. It was limping, so mom and brother together pushed it out of the nest. Very cruel.

Pelicans are brutal mindless beasts. They are known to fly to neighbour nests and eat other birds, sometimes other pelicans.

So similar to companies.

Or, maybe they know exactly what they are doing.

Nature has a tendency to ignore human ideas of justice and ethics.

The will of the stronger is the primary “law” of nature.

Having evolutionary success does not mean having intelligence.

For sure... but birds in general are surprisingly smart if you really pay attention. Even chickens are smarter than they usually get credit for. Chickens mostly lack the opportunity to learn...chickens raised in a completely open environment develop surprising behaviors and show unexpected insight.

Im guessing that pelicans, being predators, are probably much smarter.

Bird intelligence is popular culture. Parrots, crows, even seagulls.

Not pelicans. Pelicans are dumb.

Could be. Not that well aquatinted. But whenever I take the time, birds tend to surprise me.

Agree. I have watched several YC videos where they state this again and again. What they are less specific about is how precisely founders are selected.

last time I read it's concentrated to a few elite school graduates

I think that's the old criteria, doesn't the newer one forgive lesser schools if AI buzzwords are present?

>Steve Jobs or maybe just Apple used to pit teams against each other to develop a solution to a problem and then pick the strongest of the two.

probably that's Apple. Steve Jobs is more famous for jumping from the failing project (Lisa) onto the winning team (Macintosh)

Macintosh was, by all financial accounts, a failure; at least the first iteration. That's what got him fired.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-how-the...

if they were firing him for failures, he would already have been fired for Apple 3 and then Lisa

the Apple /// shocked people when announced, instead of being a 6809 or 68000, it was... two 6502's? what? who does that

but you're making the same point, he was casting about for success, not predicting the future.

Worked for a major ecommerce company that did this too - It was extremely unpleasant to work under (yet profitable if you won) and I don't like the practice but it was pretty effective. I'd guess that YC would take the "sea turtle" reproduction pattern here of hatching a bunch of mostly similar turtles and hoping a couple of them make it to sea. Stinks for the small guys that don't make it though.

Truly curious, why does it "stink" for the loser? Being funded with pay to pursue a failing business venture with a chance at wild financial success seems like a pretty good gig.

From the perspective of people with capital, it doesn't. From the perspective of a loser it sucks because they may or may not have invested significant emotional, financial, and otherwise non-fungible capital into a future that relied on the success of this venture (and also the people they employed), and I can tell you from personal experience being an underling when this kind of venture collapses really sucks. Maybe not for founders, but for everyone else it definitely does.

... but still, they have just about as much chance as the other guys, no?

Competition is a given usually anyway.

Maybe even in the same batch having very similar companies makes sense -- see the recent rush of YC funded companies that build on whatever OpenAI released -- because different founders/teams can be introduced to different contacts in the YC network.

You can do the same thing by working a temporary contractor role and playing the local lottery.

I can hypothesize that it may give startups the incentive to behave in reckless ways (e.g. pursue the MVP instead of the MVSP); think of the modern distortion of "ask for forgiveness, not permission" [0]:

> So “Ask forgiveness, not permission” meant:

    Do the right thing within the organization, whether or not they know it. That way you can help the people that you work for.

> It did NOT mean:

    Move the extrinsic cost to the public domain so that we can profit.

[0]: https://changelog.com/posts/what-admiral-grace-hopper-really...

I think this is what happened with the Dune PC game. They both turned out pretty well so they released the second one as Dune II. A 'sequel' despite the fact that it was not a follow-on, nor did it bear any similarity to the other contender. I'm not sure which game was more commercially successful but Dune II was certainly the most influential, launching the modern realtime strategy format onto the PC.

I think at this point in time most founders should try to avoid accelerators and things like YC especially if their goal is to just be a business owner of a sustainable company rather than climbing the VC funding ladder hoping to win the founder lottery.

YC and all similar accelerators are an investment tool for its owners and investors, and they really don’t have any financial incentive to ensure that its founders achieve the best outcome for themselves.

> More often than not most of what startups do is not unique

The message is also that if your start-up is based on deep tech moats choose another seed. (Think of YC's home runs. None had an industry secret/IP secret sauce.)

YC's roots are definitely the software hacker/painter/kill FAANG from a coffee shop type founders, although they've shown that deep tech teams can make interesting progress without years of R&D. Finding investors that get your idea and can help with their network is paramount. YC might not be the best fit in all cases.

YC is more focused on B2B now, so this will change.

YC has only been investing in deep tech for about a decade, I'm not sure that's long enough for them to have had a home run yet.

For example, Boom Supersonic was founded 10 years ago, and just this summer completed their second test flight. They are scheduled to launch commercial operations in 2029.

Lucid bots was founded in 2018, and just did their Series A to fund their growth of their autonomous drone fleet.

I wouldn't count YC out of the deep tech game just yet.

What is "deep tech"?

Things that are difficult to do in tech, e.g. AI/ML that's in-house (not using an API).

They say that, but what if the opposite was the actual truth?

Look every VC is "founder friendly" because without founders there's no deal flow. At the end of the day though every VC is optimizing for exit value.

So it makes sense to bet on the same idea twice. If Founder A screws the pooch, you've still got Founder B.

This matches typical VC investment patterns.

The article lists a few, none of which were unique - coinbase? Cryptocurrency exchanges already existed. AirBnB? Booking.com and other hotel or bed-and-breakfast booking websites already existed. Stripe? Yet another payment provider. Reddit? A Digg clone. Dropbox? rsync. etc.

Airbnb was basically a monetized form of Couchsurfing, not a hotel alternative. It only later turned into a direct hotel competitor. To my knowledge there was no similar service at the time.

Folks had been using alternatives to rent space like HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, BedandBreakfast.com and Craigslist for years.

Airbnb won because:

- Better design, easy to use, nice pictures they took themselves at first (per PG's advice)

- Integrated payments and reviews in a seamless experience

- Popularized the idea of sharing a space when the host is there

- Offered unique accommodations in urban places

- Lots of buzz about treehouses, castles, teepees, shipping containers, etc.

- Their timing benefited from the Great Recession

- Very good at promoting their rag to riches story with YC's help

- Also you didn't need to constantly repost like Craigslist, just post once

I agree with the reasons for their success, but I don't believe that any of those alternatives allowed you to book a room/couch in someone's apartment. They were merely ways to either use properties for vacations (VRBO), semi-hotels like beds and breakfasts, or just regular renting space (Craigslist) for short/long term. Not the same thing as AirBnb at all.

>> - Popularized the idea of sharing a space when the host is there

this was not a popular option, and I don't believe was ever intended to be. It also opened the door for VRBO to gain traction explicitly marketing NOT sharing accommodation. The "rent out your spare bedroom" has never been a major component; it was a fake-out to counter the regulatory & licensing complaints they were facing.

It was a huge focus of their early marketing, to the point where I was surprised to find out later that people were just renting out the properties vrbo style.

It's also quite literally in the name - 'bnb' - which necessarily implies the hosts are there with you.

In addition to the sibling comment saying that it was a major marketing focus, it was also an internal culture focus for some time - the archetypal host as discussed internally was something like a 50+ couple that just sent their kid off to college and had a spare bedroom and some free time. I didn't work there, but based on what I saw there was a genuine focus on "non-professional" hosts. If this was an intentional ploy to fool the world, they were also doing a very good job of fooling themselves too.

I'm not debating that professional, non-resident hosts were and are the majority of the platform, just that it wasn't the original intent.

Yeah, back then Booking was hotels only, not people's apartments or couches.

The first resonating problem you solve is rarely the bigger problem you end up completely solving.

But AirBnb didn't "completely solve" the hotel industry, and hotels still exist. If anything, they seem to still basically be operating in the same space as they started: owner-based rentals, for both individual rooms and entire properties.

It disrupted it in the way of bringing new inventory online, and owning demand search for lodging while travelling, without owning any assets like hotels.

This pattern, of owning demand for food (instacart), transport (uber, etc), delivery (uber eats, etc) is a different model that doesn't own the assets outright and facilitates it instead.

Ignoring local regulations, like Uber also was an "innovation".

Uber is a net good since it reduces drunk driving. Not sure about Airbnb destroying the rental market...

Well, one data point: Airbnb cheap rooms allowed me to travel widely while in my twenties. I definitely couldn’t have done so if I needed to pay for hotels. This very much changed the trajectory of my life.

That said, I was an active member of couchsurfing.org prior to Airbnb eating its lunch, so maybe you could make the argument that we’d be off better as a whole with a free community-oriented platform.

What do you mean no similar service? You put it in your own sentence. couchsurfing.com was founded in 1999, launched the website in 2004, and still exists. It was, of course, a nonprofit founded on a principle of reciprocal generosity, not a way to make money, so it might be fair to say no similar service existed for homeowners looking to rent out spare rooms without a formal lease agreement or people looking to turn property into a hotel without it being zoned or licensed for that.

I literally mentioned couchsurfing in the previous sentence, so yes, that is obviously what I meant: no similar business services existed.

The CEO of YC gave a talk about how you should first assemble a founding team and THEN come up with an idea. The idea seems way less important than identifying founders they want to back.

>The idea seems way less important than identifying founders they want to back.

Especially when you can take an idea you like from a team you don't, and give it to a team you do!

>It's almost impossible to know if an idea is good at the early stages

But identifying the "right" people is easy?

It's not, but that's ycs entire business model

Spoiler alert: it's "easy" when you narrow down to applications who come from wealth and/or went to a prestigious university.

What is wrong with selecting founders who attended a prestigious university? It seems like an excellent signal. Also: "Come from wealth" might be useful if their idea will take a bit longer to germinate. They can survive longer in "ramen profitable" mode.

One could imagine a more equitable society where startups weren't solely (hyperbole) reserved for those who come from wealth and privilege. Nothing wrong with prestigious schools until that's the only metric you're looking at when you could also evaluate on sound fundamentals, ability and technical competence.

Of course modern investors (or a least the ones at VC) probably aren't qualified to judge applicants on merit.

Where do you see that it's reserved? I get that it's a hyperbole, but startups are the best, most used and most successful tool for upwards social mobility. Nothing has changed the life of so many people, no amount of taxes or regulations was able to improve lives of so many, so much.

A good idea will not scale if the founder and founding team are bad, and a mediocre idea will scale if the founder and founding team are good.

Picking people is also hard, but if you narrow it down to:

1) folks who follow the directions on the application, 2) have the technical ability to build, 3) demonstrate high achievement in school/career, 4) show commitment/persistence, 5) have an idea that makes some sense, 6) are able to clearly communicate the idea, 7) have good team dynamics, 8) have some plausible strategy for growth

AND are willing to sell 7% of their startup for 125K

then the resulting pool of startups is probably smaller than you would think.

i don't think it is either. at least not for me.

but YC has always been pretty vocal that they can identify the right people. And their results seem to bear that out at least to some degree (or maybe it's all just scale, and giving opportunities to enough people means you'll give opportunities to the right people often enough to balance out the cost of the wrong people)

The idea of a VC firm investing in something because the founders are just swell fellas isn't easily acceptable as a premise. If you're prompting a move fast and break things culture, you can't then excuse your mediocrity with a "new take on old things" excuse. Pick a lane.

Sounds like you're describing complicated nepotism.

Theoretically, if I as an investor, believe strongly in a given thesis, it would be prudent to place bets that address it from multiple angles.

Yeah, YC definitely has a soft spot for familiar ideas, but they’ve also backed some pretty unique companies that came out of left-field.

Our startup, The Ac28R, is a good example of this. It’s a whole new approach to specifying and developing software - way more accurately than LLMs like ChatGPT, thanks to it being a new kind of AI. So even if it doesn’t really fit into any typical category, we still believe that any idea will find its audience, if it is strong enough.

"Don't have to be unique" is very different than "actively trying to copy".

HN has turned into an anti-billionaire, anti-VC, anti-success cesspool. It's a very dangerous echo chamber that'll destroy within

I can see that it has already eaten both your participles and your punctuation. Your user name couldn't be more apropo. However your sycophantic ramblings will not likely enhance your own bank account.

They have shifting and conflicting and nonsensical reasons for what they do. Just like PG lambasting someone as being too stupid to see when they asked why so many YC companies are things that should just be features on other software.

You mean they're just a bunch of people working on a complicated problem? Why, I never.

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