Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator
twitter.com
twitter.com
It possible we may have met you too. It was a long time ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_at_Work
Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007).
I love that this podcast only comes every two weeks. Some (like Software Engineering Daily) are far too often so I either feel the paradox of choice or that I’m missing out.
Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )
What format of DOB is that? M/DD/YY?
This has been true since https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=20190615 was posted on June 15, 2019.
Edit: HN is apparently written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62
and
I applied twice (once alone, once with a really amazing co-founder) and it felt like applying to a large faceless corporation, both times.
Automatic rejection after 30 days with zero feedback.
Kind of sucky, to be honest.
I'd just love to hear that the idea was shit, the application was shit, that my face was ugly, or anything, really.
I still use newsgroups (NNTP) and IRC everyday, hackernews is pretty good considered it's HTTP based
Btw, Scott Alexander also does a pretty good job.
Somewhere in the multiverse a universe exists with HN died a horrible death because Dang made alternative life choices.
Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship & web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe, or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important ways, but huge successes will surely happen.
As usual, the death of entrepreneurship and startups has been greatly overstated. :)
Every effort has some defect but it’s intention and effort which matters.
World would be a very different place without YC.
Thank you all !
I think I understand what you're saying, but this is a very dangerous generality. I think the HOW matters more than the intent.
The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Ynez_Corrino
Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search engine.
I love the near-non-BS nature of it. And even though the techland changes, HN itself has had very little change, so it acts somewhat safe stable ground/forum/club for observing the ever changing techland. Although I recognize there is somewhat minimal degration in comment quality (less professional pragmatic comments over the years, at least so I feel), it still trumps every other alternative there is.
So, thank you PG/HN, and of course the HN community that makes most of it.
PS. I have been read-only mode for the past ~15y (and there was nothing valuable for me to comment on anything), but now I created account and this is my first comment :)
I bet a lot of people here would say the same thing about Slashdot ten to fifteen years ago. @HN: Thanks and please don't change.
IIRC, Slashdot stopped being great around the same time as the decline of the Digg era. It started to sink in quality around 2007, which gave it ten years at most of being a central part of the online tech community (1997 - 2007).
I started reading HN in 2008. It's lasted nearly twenty years as an incredible community.
Here are some graphs:
Before HN, I used to hang out on Joel on Software and Eric's Business of Software forums; I occasionally used to post there and here but lost old accounts. If you have friends who have friends who has HN archeology skills and access, maybe I can recover my old account :)
They're the kind of people who consider themselves "tech enthusiasts", they can install a nifty tool via pip if the instructions are clear enough, maybe even figure out what's wrong if there's an error, but they're definitely not programmers by any means.
Quite a few of them speak "tech English"; they can figure out a settings window or a signup form, they know enough tech vocabulary and basic grammar to mostly understand manuals, maybe with some help here or there, and can barely string an English sentence together. Ask them to define "lettuce" or "salmon" and they're lost.
Another possibility is to write the comment in English inside gmail, and let suggestion gmail fix all the errors.
To me that's like 'I love doughnuts, I buy one every day, but the paper bag bits do get stuck in my teeth'.
It’s also amazingly inclusive. There was a poster here who complained that they were effectively homeless and upset their Pixel phone would no longer hold a charge. Someone offered to send them a used laptop.
I think we thoughtfully discuss issues related to tech, even though we don’t always agree.
(If you are gearing up to reply to the last three words of the previous paragraph, I can promise you I'm not interested in hearing it. You have your preferences and priorities, and I have mine)
My analysis was excellent, thank you very much. I don't run from challenges, I just don't want to derail threads with endless back-and-forth arguments too much. I think generally once two people have said their bit, back-and-forth discussion tends to focus on minor rabbit-hole manner-and-form disagreements rather than anything substantive.
And yes for the record, I stand by the comment I made with the provisos that (1) anything I say is based on what information I have at the time, which might change, (2) opinions and philosophies change over time as well, and (3) nothing I have seen so far has changed my mind on that point.
I quite like(d) that silliness - but your could always choose to downgrade and hide 'funny' posts. I still miss the post/comment visibility functions from Slashdot.
Looks like pg 'joined' 6 Oct 2006; so we've a bit to wait for the HN 20th anniversary.
Thank you PG, thank you Dang! Thank you to all the contributors for the high quality content.
You're half way there.
Incidentally, after years of lurking, applied to the latest YC batch. Didn't make it, but will try again once further along, or with a new idea.
There isn’t a website on the internet that I’ve learned more from than this one.
Thank you.
I wonder if he is raeading HN still...
For the longest time I thought Hacker News must have been some proof of concept for Reddit and must pre-date it, which is not true. Reddit was launched in June 2005, shortly after Y Combinator.
I'm creating a mobile reader (iOS app) specifically for HN and if you want to join to speed up the process, you're Welcome!
https://www.acpul.org/blog/yc-happy-birthday-20
For those who don't have iOS, I started a Twitch stream for the vibe.
PS: I fear that I’ll never get into YC and in the future there will be no more startups, only an AI, and I’ll have to work as a battery cell in the Matrix.
Another year gone, new one to come. Happy Birthday!
He says he likes things to be "informal" by which he really means "opaque".
What we don't do is try to answer all the questions in advance. That's for several reasons, the first of which is that it's impossible.
That's opaque.
If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.
Why? Will dang send his goons after me?
dang is simply repeating "my way is better".
Will dang try it?
I don't believe I've ever had sanctions put on my account here (though dang did admonish me, once, among numerous other interactions). But I've had my IP address caught up in bans (I often read HN without logging in), and a few other things.
That is: if you want to know what's happening to your account, you can fall back on the slightly-higher-friction option of asking what's happening. No, it's not there automatically in your account profile, but then, that solution would permit for an attacker to automatically detect (and presumably counter) such information. The soft / opaque / translucent failure mode of HN actually works reasonably well in that context and environment.
NB: I'm in general agreement with many of your concerns about HN, and in particular how it fits and how it is behaving in a rapidly-changing political environment in which HN and YC have a considerable role. But not everything you're proposing bears out, and even some of what does (e.g., opaque limitations on accounts) doesn't work well in a larger context. I do have strong concerns about how HN's comments guidance hits unevenly in political discussion especially. I'm not entirely sure how to best improve on that, though I've been thinking through options and doing some reading (Jurgen Habermass's work in particular).
I've spent about 15 years studying HN (and often being wrong about it). If you'd (again, zfg or others) care to discuss via email my contact info is on my account page.
I think it's become a huge society-scale problem caused by information overload, and I don't see it improving any time soon.
Thank you @dang, and everyone else!
So, ideal accelerator/VC would be one that would want to fund your (ad)venture without taking too much motivation off by having large ownership/control, and have connections/pool of domain-specific professional expertise. And wants to believe in you.
If you are doing hardcore data infrastructure software, some kinds of defense tech, et al the startup building process is sufficiently different that first-time founders would benefit immensely from accelerators that really understand from direct experience what those startups need to do to be successful.
This exact username Ive used on and off from 2007 to 2013/2014 then solely since then. My karma is low for such an account but my thoughts are odd lol ..i guess
Also thankful for demonstrating that investors are just lucky humans and there is no secret sauce to all of this. 20 years of YC, nearly the same time frame as the low interest rate policy (started at 2008). The rising tide lifted all boats and thanks to social media we can also see the magic go away in real time.
HN's software rewrites URLs back to twitter.com for two reasons: (1) people still call it Twitter colloquially, which is the real measure of what a thing is called; and (2) anything else feels weird.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 (Oct 9, 2006)
https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html (Feb 20, 2007)
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html (Aug 14, 2007)
Makes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype wise).
Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
* YC founders are usually very young, and young people can be capricious. They don't want a solo founder just deciding to do something without a second founder having some leverage to protect YC.
* YC is in the US and has a very pro-US perspective, so they invest in what they know and like.
PG said "Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be."
Also see: Does YC fund solo founders: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/7P-does-yc-fund-solo-fou...
Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing.
Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care.
I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a passion.
I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that YC has not had a success for a very long time.
It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen to the tech industry.
Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums.
All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky, made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same way on AOL 15 years before.
Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an existing idea or resell polished turds as new.
B) peaked* :)
C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place."
EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely massive wins that they have yet to (and shouldn't expect to!) replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.
Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it actually due to YC selecting so well.
Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article and a few social media posts.
But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for a few people.
= Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity infrastructure company.
OpenAI and Anthropic come to mind
Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak, Marshmallow.
But another one is that the first batch has had 20 years to grow and compound while the rest has had less time to become massive.
I'm not saying YC is perfect now (though it's still great). But I think a simple factor could just be time for many portcos.
You had to go big or your thing would fail, whereas nowadays you can fill a tiny niche and get rich by being acquired by the incumbent you're a complement to.
The era of "any promising startup gets swallowed by big tech" seems over with antitrust, but M&A is still happening.
Reddit (yc 2005) only went public last year
I know "going public" doesn't define success, but it does show that companies can still be growing after 10+ years
When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for disruption.
Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and less successful. The big successes already happened. I could see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999 entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3 technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he was totally on point.)
In that context it's a fiendishly genius move to atomize and distract the "obsolete parts of the economy" and have them vote for their own disempowerment.
It's maddeningly obvious and feels unrelentingly deterministic. If the plutocrats fail to properly cement their position however, we already know what happens next.
The mid/late 00s came with the rise of "Web 2.0" and mobile that was a gigantic technological shakeup, and YC was definitely in "the right place at the right time", and their Web 1.0 pedigree and expertise transitioned perfectly to these new technologies. Importantly, these technologies required relatively little capital for new startups because all the infrastructure in terms on the Internet, GPS, mobile, etc. had already been built.
I'd just argue that in the past 10 years there simply hasn't been nearly the "greenfield" tech landscape that existed in the mid 00s. AI obviously has been a tech sea change, but so far the contours of that change just look much harder to monetize. The frontier models are becoming more and more commoditized, and everyone else is just trying to figure out how not to get shoehorned as "just an OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper". Looks like there may be some winners that are really putting all pieces together in an attractive package (Cursor and Glean come to mind), and it's fair to wonder why YC doesn't have one of these "AI app winners" (and maybe they do, or will, I don't know), but in general, I think there is just nothing like the opportunity there was in the late 00s/early 10s to gobble up a big part of the new tech landscape.
Isn't this what an early-stage VC firm is supposed to be doing? Lots of investments in companies working in whatever the hot new tech may be. Most companies lose, some break even, one wins so big you forget about the rest.
High risk, high reward, high volume is always how I thought of a firm like YC. And one expects a lot of investments to evaporate to nothing for such an industry.
Most of their recent communication is going all in on AI. Saying stuff like this batch prefers hiring devs that use AI, and 95% of their codebases are all AI generated.
Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top companies")
https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report
If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of the S&P500! 14 of the 17 companies lost money for the investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO value. Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500 benchmark
Thank you everyone. I come here to learn and I do. The standard of discourse is heightening.
You're amazing
Can we please add target="_blank" to the links now?
(Seriously, I've got a crisp new $50 bill for whoever takes 30 seconds and slips it into prod. )
In 2008, I transferred schools and moved to San Francisco with just $600 and a dream. Soon after, I started my first design agency, Badaboom Labs, hiring my college roommate and friends. With no company formation experience, I had no idea how to get clients either, so I walked to every coffee shop in the city, hoping to land my first gig.
My break came at The Creamery in SoMa. They were still remodeling, but I was determined to talk to the owner (shoutout to Ivory if you're reading this!). Eventually, they became our first client, then Vans. Back then, Squarespace, Stripe, and Shopify didn’t exist, so I hired developers off Craigslist to build the e-commerce side. Looking back, the opportunities were endless in building software!
We barely made any profit, but we had our first client and were building something real. At the time, I was more focused on building with a team than understanding customers. I knew little about scaling or growth, but I just needed to start—and learn as I went.
As the team moved on, I sold the business to a small print shop. That experience led me to experiment with new ideas, but my limited technical skills slowed me down. I knew I needed to level up, so I worked at startups, then moved into SAP & Apple—but corporate life wasn’t for me. I learned what I could, then quit.
The YC Journey
Around that time, I started meeting founders from YC through mutual friends and our soccer club in the Mission. I didn't understand what YC was exactly, but I was intrigued.
Some of them lived in a hacker house on Howard & Rausch St. in SoMa, where I remember meeting Justin Kan, Drew Houston, and Brian Chesky for the first time. Twitch didn’t exist yet, Dropbox was still new, and Airbnb was struggling with growth.
Imagine if I invested in just one of these companies. holy cow.
It was a defining era, but at the time, I had no idea just how much these companies would shape the future—honestly, I don’t think anyone did. I was simply inspired by the energy, the community, and the drive to build something great!
That’s when I decided to apply to YC with my third company, RecurPal
I was rejected multiple times..
But I kept pushing.
Then, YC opened up applications to their second program. I applied, interviewed, and got in.
Shoutouts + Gratitude
I’m super grateful for the mentors, friends, and investors who shaped my journey:
Jude Gomila (always believing in me & taking a chance), Anton(wisdom + friendship!), AJ Asver(former co-founder & friendship), Immad Akhund (support + friendship), Roger Dickey (building epic community at Greenwich Castle), David Langer (wisdom + friendship!), Sumon Sadhu, Dilan Dane(my first Burning Man Project), Gustaf Alströmer ( footy teammate + friendship), Keith Rabois, and many more!
Lastly, thanks to Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, and the YC Community.
Excited to see YC continue shaping the future and fueling the next generation of founders!
Wow, small world! We may have overlapped. I was really close to Howard & Rausch around the time and was walking around, one thing led to another, and I briefly talked with Brian. It was a fun time and the paint was still very, very wet.
Vladislav Yazhbin at Startup School with many early YC founders (Stanford, 2007):
I don't know why I missed the talk by pg (Paul Graham) in 2005 when Y Combinator was founded, but I recorded videos in 2007 because I saw "Pirates of Silicon Valley" in high school about early days of Apple and Microsoft. It was obvious that my videos about Y Combinator could be valuable some day. And, I liked that Paul Graham studied art and programming with many people, while I had made a desktop product with paying customers all over the world. I even joined the companies that Y Combinator accelerated, Justin.tv in 2009 and DoorDash in 2020, to help them succeed.
I visited Boston in 1995 (to get an award in the Governor's Office for winning a poster design contest judged by reporters, politicians, and art critics). I visited Boston again in 2002 after 9/11 (September 11) for my US Citizenship. I applied to the US Naval Academy and was nominated by U.S. Congress, although I was already attending a two-year technical community college. I focused on programming, similar to MrBeast making videos while attending a community college. My college is where George Washington built the first federal armory for United States, but they did not have student email accounts.
In 2002, sitting in my Student President's office, I came up with the idea that I could verify students with the .edu domain name and I could make a website for my college. I was already Student President and already started a printed newspaper. Although each issue was funded with Student Activity fees, Student Activities Office wanted to review each article. However, an employee showed me she used "Black Planet" to share news, and MySpace and Facebook had not been invented yet. Unfortunately, I didn't want Student Activity Fees to be spent to buy server hardware and software because student had free personal @aol.com and @yahoo.com accounts already. I might have mentioned to a friend at Harvard University. Also, I worked as a high school volleyball official, therapeutic recreation aide at a nursing home (entertaining residents who have alzheimer's and dementia), and the campus police department on weekends. I also attended monthly meetings with other Student Presidents of Massachusetts public colleges.
In late 2003, I launched "assfirm" to find and watch items and pay later for merchants on eBay, Yahoo! and Overstock. It was a bootstrapped, paid app for middle-age users who bought physical items on their computers. This allowed me to market and support a product for people older than students but younger than nursing home residents.
In spring 2009, Sequoia was interviewing YC founders in the Mountain View office. I attended this event after arriving from the airport. I stayed in a Hacker House with some YC founders. I met new founders who were excited that I had "assfirm" as a company to buy physical products from merchants. I explained I wanted a name with A in the phonebook. I talked with Max Levchin (founder of PayPal and Slide) in the street in Palo Alto the same week. His next company was named "affirm" years later.
Apple liked the user experience design of my Windows app in 2008. My company "assfirm" was selected by Apple to be the first to make native apps for the App Store in March 2008 before App Store existed. (At Startup School 2008, I don't think anyone else had been selected). I joined UMass Amherst for degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. I proposed iPhone app designs for a Fortune 100 before I left to the four-year college, and built an app to track my phone's location as calendar events in university. I convinced the enterprise company and university to join Apple's corporate and education programs in 2008.
In summer 2009, I consulted at Justin.tv and co-founded "Hot Or Not Live" with Michael Seibel, Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Kyle Vogt. Michael Seibel said he wanted to partner with me for their first API hackathon but said he was CEO and had no other contribution except his idea of rating livestreamers. I had better ideas like live shopping, maybe as a future company. Employees loved the "hot or not" rails demo that I built in hours. It had a video embed and used the REST API to find the next channel. Within hours, Justin.tv founders hosted it as hornotlive.com, and a new hot-pink design and logo, making sure it was on the company's heroku account in case they need to take it down. It was launched very quickly, like investors ask for. This scared Paul Graham and investors when they heard about it via Hacker News, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Also, the HotOrNot company threatened to sue. About two years later, Justin.tv founders launched "SocialCam" for chat and "Twitch" for gamers in 2011.
Before I joined YouTube founders in 2012, I applied to Y Combinator with a mobile app to send messages and photos, and to sell stickers/emojis.
I came up with the idea of a chat app with self-deleting photos, plus the way it would grow quickly. At Startup School, I overheard Evan Spiegel talk about Picaboo. I decided to excitedly share my ideas to a group and walked with him for a bit. When I joined YouTube founders in late 2012, a coworker told me she used Snapchat.
At Startup School one year, Paul Graham smiled at me as I entered the building with a "Mohammed" nametag.
When I was at Startup School to watch Emmett Shear's talk, Justin Kan said "you didn't do anything!" about my three months at Justin.tv, which was completely not true. I noticed that Sam Altman was staring at me with a neutral face. I didn't know what to say. I thought that maybe Sam Altman thought I looked like Elon Musk, which I heard before from YouTube founders (who worked at PayPal with Elon Musk), Instacart founder (who said I looked like half-Elon Musk, half-Jimmy Fallon), co-workers, etc. In 2019-2022, I built a gym at my house in San Francisco and thought I could be a magician, singer, and do impressions as Elon Musk, Jimmy Fallon (I wanted to interview BTS for "Dynamite" while I was in South Korea in summer 2020), Dimash, Keanu Reeves (who filmed Matrix 4 in 2020 in San Francisco but I hadn't seen the movies), etc.
Another YC memory: I started a tech show on YouTube in April 2007 after Startup School. It's possible that I'm the first YouTuber to make videos to ask viewers to do things that help with algorithms (like leaving comments) while having almost no content about the topic. Also, an early usage of "Let's Go...!" Here's the episode about Justin.tv:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210109212744/https://www.youtu...
There is still a gap that needs fulfilling. YC is one player who can fulfill it. Late-stage startup development is a business structuring problem and the biggest blank slate for new founders. From term sheets to understanding convertible debt to navigating VC maze.
There's plenty of places to get into that. Can't we have one that's focused entirely on hacker news and not any political news?
If you want to know how we think about this, here's a pointer to a bunch of past explanations:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
HN has a policy of moderating discussions of YC companies less than other threads (and yes, "less" != "not at all"). There's a strong argument that a similar policy should apply to HN-adjacent politics and political acts.
Posting to what was once called Twitter today is an increasingly political act. and a strongly anti-democratic one. Yang (as evidenced by his Wikipedia bio) is a political actor.
HN is about the size of a medium-popular subreddit. Its impact on US politics is not much different than that of /r/relationshipadvice.
If you want to talk size, the US House has 438 members, the Senate 100, the Supreme court 9. Their significance has nothing to do with size and everything to do with position, connections, and capacity.
HN punches far above its weight.
I'm looking at a medium sized nerd messageboard. Obviously that's not a meaningful thing to compare to a legislative body or court.
We basically moderate posts that break the site guidelines (the ones that we see, at least).
Is there a particular post that you feel was censored that should not have been? I'd be interested to take a look.