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Comment by jf | Hacker News Reader

Not any more than you need to in any public forum

Not the point. One should be allowed to be critical of the institutions of the valley without getting their name written down in a secret blacklist.

YC will fund anyone who is building a company that looks like it could be highly successful.

There's one case I'm thinking of now where someone was as critical of YC (both the org and individual leaders) as anyone could possibly be, in a highly public and sustained way, and their startup later got funded by YC.

Well that is contrary to what is stated in the article/book.

What in the article (sentence or paragraph) contradicts what I wrote?

The article is about how YC defended one of its funded companies against a legal attack. It doesn’t say anything about YC refusing to fund someone who criticized it.

> Y Combinator was the sort of unforgiving power player that remembered the names of investors who had crossed portfolio companies in the past, *or who had disseminated unflattering portraits of YC*, and blacklisted them from any YC dealings, or from the minds of YC founders

If you said something unflattering about YC once and got uninvited from demo day, that's on you. But being black listed from ever investing in any YC-backed startup even if you reach out to founders directly is taking things too far. And potentially an antitrust issue. Cabals are illegal, after all.

The quoted book was being purposefully colorful and inflammatory for literary effect, but it still doesn’t make any claims of investors being “blacklisted” just because they said something unflattering about YC. (“Disseminating unflattering portraits” implies some kind of organised campaign to damage YC, and I have no idea if that really happened or if it’s just part of the colorful/exaggerated writing).

The only cases I know of where an investor was banished from Demo Day/YC’s network was for acting in bad faith towards founders. If YC banished investors who had a track record of being great to founders, they would be doing a disservice to founders, and therefore acting against YC’s own interests.

That aside, my original comment doesn’t contradict anything in the article (I can’t speak for the entire book - honestly when I tried reading it I couldn’t get past the first few pages).

That's good to know, thanks.

Which case was that?

That’s an ideal but how would that work short of stringent government regulation? It’s never been easier to mine text and since YC is giving people large sums of money they have both a valid reason and broad deference to their assessment of applicants. VC isn’t like a car or home loan so I don’t think there’s anyway you could cut out bias less blatant than circulating a list of racial slurs or explicit threats of retaliation for funding people: since they’re basically making a large unsecured loan there’s simply too much justifiable discretion to exclude something like reviewing posting history.

This is the traditional role of regulation, yes. Note that if what they were filter out for were things like union sympathies, it would be illegal.

Yes, but how would you tell? Unless they straight up tell you why you were turned down it’s really hard to know what someone was thinking when they say “I just didn’t think they had the right idea”.

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