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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

I can't quite put my finger on it, but this announcement gives me bad vibes.

I think a few things:

Wanting to finish school is a negative signal. Also

> Also we know that many students spend a lot of time in Fall or during their final year applying for jobs or internships. Early Decision gives students another option: apply to YC and bet on yourself.

So now YC is an alternative to searching and apply for jobs? I think if you're marginal on trying to find a corporate job or starting something, then you should prob find a corp job. Objectively starting a startup is worse, you work harder, lower odds of success, more stress, less money, etc. You have to be a little crazy and hardheaded to make it work

Finally everything that YC does to increase it's applicant pool so they still maintain exclusivity. If you have 2% acceptance rate, why are you trying to maximize the top of the funnel? You should discourage people to apply.

> Wanting to finish school is a negative signal

No. This sounds like VC trash advice and very bad career advice.

Startup chances of success are <5%, and many of the factors are beyond your control. A degree is still relevant in being able to easily get interviews and secure jobs, in the >95% case that you do not succeed on the first try.

I'd only recommend dropping out if you see mad traction and revenue and you are on a trajectory to be famous enough that people won't care if you don't have a degree. If you're still a "nobody", it's a really, really bad idea.

honest question: do you think that in a job market where it seems to be ridiculously hard to land that junior corporate job maybe starting your own thing is a increasingly valid alternative? I'm not sure this is aligned with the properties that YC is necessarily shopping for (they seem to compete with companies eager to hire the same people) but maybe if you're a newish grad from a lesser-known school? My sample size of one includes someone who did that in the 90's and built a $B+ valued company.

VC investment has rebounded but it's also been extremely concentrated in AI in the last couple of years.

"Starting your own thing" in a vc-backed way (need a big exit, or bust) as a fresh college grad who now has to come up with a thing and sell it to a lot of customers within a couple of years sounds incredibly hard.

Especially when framed as "you won't have to look for a job" - not having the hustle skills to be at the top of the pack in the job-hunt vs your classmates doesn't really give a good signal for your hustle-and-build-and-sell-a-VC-startup alternative.

I have been thoroughly enjoying re-watching HBO's Silicon Valley, appreciating all the little details and sub-plots I missed during my first watching long ago. It's aged so well.

It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.

I love the show and rewatch it often, but if you lived in that world during the show's timeframe you can see it's changed draamtically. It still holds up as the "vision" of what we thought a SW startup looks like, but the reality is these scrappy little altruistic startups are not lead by hands-on tech founders, they're all taking the money today - often from PE - and are already the people from the show we laughed at. Show a member of a YC25 class SV today and they'll think Gavin Belson is a "how-to" tutorial.

I agree, it's gotten much much worse, especially with all the MAGA/Trump/Musk/Thiel boot licking.

It's prime time for Silicon Valley: AI Bubble. Instead of hiring the original actors or artists or writers, it could be ironically AI animated in the style of South Park, with a storyline about infringing on copyright and intellectual property, and putting actors and artists and programmers out of work.

I wonder what kind of company names would Erlich Bachman come up with on ketamine instead of shrooms?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXqkkpnZDgU

I suspect Erlich might have died of an opium overdose at this point.

Exactly the same feeling here, it's such a strange thing to promise a kid they are accepted into a program, but it starts in like 4 years.

As if all of your education (and probably side-projects, life decisions) is meant to lead to YC.

> Also, if you're not in your final year, you can still apply for Early Decision. You'll be able to finish the school year you're currently in,

It's a one-year early decision, like pretty much every other early decision program.

For awhile now I’ve felt like YC has turned into another badge for the type people who are obsessed with prestige. It’s all about checking a box and not about the substance of what they want to do.

This is evident in how disappointed certain people are when they’re rejected from YC. Their startup is merely a vehicle to get into the club.

Better to start our own club then.

All things have a life cycle. Despite what yc wants you to believe, it will come and go. Perhaps it’s becoming a prestige institution in the hopes to increase its longevity.

That being said, belonging to a group is a central component of being a human as we are highly social animals. So it’s not wrong to want to belong to a group and then being sad when you are rejected. It requires a lot of maturity and stoicism to cut your own path. This is somewhat ironic since traditionally founding your own company is considered cutting your own path but I think yc and others have made it much less so. There is a formula now to follow which is why there is now an in group and an out group. Cutting your own path by definition does not include a set formula.

The number of people we are talking about as a percentage of CS like graduates is tiny. They aren’t kids either. It seems like a low risk experiment on both sides.

Asking people without experience, skills and maturity to know what they want in their life to commit to YC way before graduating comes off as simply too much.

Interestingly, this mirrors the kind of thing that has been happening in finance, especially in private equity. Normally, you start out at an investment bank, do two years as an analyst there, learn the basics, then make a choice whether you want to stay in IB or move to PE (or somewhere else).

Eventually, PE started recruiting earlier and earlier to the point where they were hiring college graduates for two years in the future who hadn't even started their IB role. Obviously, these people don't even know what they like doing, and you have no idea if they are any good at their job.

The end result was Jamie Dimon of JPM slamming his fist on the table to knock it off. This has led other banks to follow suit and major PE firms to commit to stop recruiting this early. At least for now.

But it seems that something similar is now happening on the VC side.

It's all about riding that idiotic AI bubble until the huge burst

They just want warm bodies. Why else would they focus on people that don’t have experience?

Neither experience nor hard skills, let alone soft ones.

Something tells me the business is became the product.

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