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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

I see it more as more of a hedge. If you believe in the opportunity, placing extra bets makes sense. Uber and Lyft weren't the only ride share companies but sometimes luck wins out and sometimes execution does.

Additionally, if one seems to be winning, you just acqui-hire the "loser" in the winner, use that problem space expertise to scale faster AND you still get to claim a higher exit rate even if it was just to yourself.

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Sure, though I'm not sure that "I see it more as" makes sense in context given -

You're talking about how YC sees it.

I was talking about how it affects things from the companies's point of view when YC does that.

As such, so far as I can see our actual statements about the upshot of the situation are probably both correct :)

Exactly right. Traditional VCs come up with a thesis and then buy 20% of the company they think will be the winner who fits that thesis when they're at like $1M to 10M revenue (series A)

YC can instead get ~10% of every plausible winner they come across when they're at $0 revenue

As noted elsethread, I think that almost certainly *is* what's going on; I was explaining why it's probably a good thing from (at least many of) the companies' perspectives too.

    > sometimes luck wins out and sometimes execution does

Can you provide an example when lucks wins over execution?

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