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Comment by ActionHank | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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