Michael Seibel is leaving Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

Michael Seibel is leaving Y Combinator

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73 pointskhaledg31 comments

Big fan of Michael's content over the years - will miss his videos with Dalton.

One incredible thing about Michael is behind every sentence you can hear the amount of pain he had to endure to succeed. He's not just giving you startup advice, he's a lone survivor who's come back to tell the tale. The whole startup game is about extreme outliers and he's always been very real about this fact.

Was re-reading his post on How to Pitch Your Company from 2016 (The Seven Questions), it's a great read:

https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/how-to-pitch-your-company

> He's not just giving you startup advice, he's a lone survivor who's come back to tell the tale.

Well put.

Seems like there's been a recent exodus of YC partners all looking to pursue their own interests. I wonder if partner coverage in YC will be consistent as before, given that the ones who left are heavyweights:

- Michael Seibel leaving for working on government - Eric Migi leaving to restart Pebble - Surbhi Sarna and Nate Smith leaving to start Collate

I remember going to some sort of BBQ YC hosted years ago. Michael went up on stage and talked, with exasperation, about their heroic efforts to keep Socialcam up as it skyrocketed.

Seems like a good guy.

Michael is one of the most positive founder champions around. His positivity is infectious.

He seems like a genuinely good guy. I wish he’d stop using twitter, though.

> The next adventure I’m excited to pursue (after taking the summer to relax) is how I can help government better serve its citizens. Thank you to the countless friends who have been pushing me in this direction for years. Government was the passion of my youth and I’m excited to reengage.

Uhhh... why now? Right now, (at least the Federal) government is currently on a self-destruction spree. AFAICT, they're not really interested in help to improve itself and serve citizens better.

Maybe in 4 years--if there's anything left of it--it might be a good opportunity.

Most of the government that ordinary people interact with isn't federal.

He might also mean some other country's government, in which case, he might have better luck.

Or just local SF politics… the billionaire/VC obsession with SF politics is very odd and unhealthy from my outside perspective.

It could also be related to the libertarian utopian startup cities VCs are funding.

It's a deeply dysfunctional city with lots of low-hanging-fruit policy changes available, it's surprising there aren't more VC people involved.

I'm not sure what special skills VCs have that would make their contributions more useful and valuable than those of other contributors. They have a certain perspective around improving the startup business climate, but cities aren't built and operated to serve them in particular.

I don't think they have any special skills, just that they're concentrated in one of the most dysfunctional cities in the country.

Maybe they're part of the problem?

I'm not interested in litigating the merits of VCs, I was commenting positively and not normatively on the peculiarly small ratio of engaged financiers to obvious urban dysfunction in San Francisco.

I don't know the answer to my question. I just observe that it's a factor that sets San Fransisco apart from a lot of other cities. In my opinion it's worth investigating at least.

In my experience, the San Franciscans advocating policies that are clearly misguided (e.g., not prosecuting property crimes) are usually not VCs.

You don't need VC level skills, just a healthy dose of common sense pragmatism, something which SF leadership has consistently lacked for decades now.

Which is why it won't be fixed with a Ruby on Rails app and $10m in venture capital funding in pursuit of a $5b evaluation.

He’s running (for something)

Now is the perfect time for this.

For starters it takes years to sell into government any way. If he writes his first line of code today they might have a sellable product ready in a year. Then getting FEDRAMP accredited and going through procurement cycles probably another year or so.

I think the current administration is likely open to technology-first solutions to reduce friction in government, and the next administration is likely going to have to take a similar approach too.

He didn't say whether he working on a technology solution. That's possible, but I was assuming he was heading towards a more philanthropic approach (which is the ideal end state for a wealthy person).

Maybe! Still a great time though my attitude is pretty much "any time is a great time" for starting something.

> I think the current administration is likely open to technology-first solutions to reduce friction

The facts are they are actively working to introduce more friction, red tape, waste, and dysfunction into the government. Making the government more effective and efficient is the opposite of their goals stated in Project 2025.

Trump and Elon's entire plan is to make government more inefficient to convince people that giving large chunks of public funding to private business to run government is a good idea.

>think the current administration is likely open to technology-first solutions to reduce friction

People really need to stop believing the lies they're using to "justify" their actions in public.

More friction, mistakes, and inefficiencies are the point here. Lookup "Starve the Beast".

They have very openly stated the purpose of this is to destroy government institutions to get back at "the deep state". The deep state = their enemies. It isn't about improving budget. It isn't about improving efficiency. This is just about destroying the government and harming the correct people.

All this also has the added benefit of removing regulation/oversight which is gonna let certain people(Musk, Trump, etc) fleece the government of money/power.

In his bio, "Before getting into tech, I spent 2006 as the finance director for a US Senate campaign in Maryland. In 2005, I graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in political science."

The question can also be posed, why stay in big tech as it's also imploding?

Big tech is not imploding.

True.

It is going to be more of an explosion than an implosion when the "AI" bubble (that big tech is desperately using a smokescreen to hide the fact that they have nothing interesting to offer these days) bursts.

Big tech is not exploding. I see a lot of wishful thinking when it comes to the bubble bursting but it is all just wishful thinking and not actually happening.

I saw the Domu Technology posting the other day and I was thinking, is this a joke? And then I saw that Michael was leaving, and I realized it's not a joke, it definitely checks out.

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