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Comment by hopelite | Hacker News Reader

FYI; Flock was/is a YC backed company

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

> We are committed to protecting human privacy and mitigating bias in policing with the development of best-in-class technology rooted in ethical design, which unites civilians and public servants in pursuit of a safer, more equitable society.

…and of course they do the exact opposite. All a bunch of bullshit from inception.

Which really makes me sad that no one from YCombinator is speaking up. It’s all about money.

YC seeming like more and more of a joke since AI took off

YC had been funding Flock for six years before LLMs took off.

Given YC's leadership over the past decade or so, I don't think they have anything they'd want to speak up about. This is probably all fine with them.

I used to hold YC in very high regard, but these days I don't think they're materially different from any other investing shop when it comes to values.

Y combinator has funded a significant portion of the most harmful tech companies of this century. They're profoundly amoral, just like you'd expect from a profitable venture capital firm.

On the bright side, they also hire dang, so that's one against 100 million.

And the few that have gone public have done awful

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

Is going public the ultimate goal of every startup?

The goal of the startup doesn’t matter once they take VC funding. The goal of the investors is the exit - either via acquisition or going public.

The most likely outcome is failure, the second most likely outcome is an acquisition. Going public is a distant third

It's surprising to me that investors have been so wrong about combinator IPOs. I wonder if this has been driven my retail, or by the expectation of a small probability of enormous success.

Oklo seems to have recovered thanks to the AI boom and they made a deal with Meta to deliver power fir their data centers. It looks like the best performing YC stock

Most of the bad ones IPOd in 2021, when there was a huge overvaluation of speculative tech companies... Marking performance since IPO is also a bit weird since it's kind of arbitrary date in the firm's history.

They have collectively had a return of -49% when the S&P 500 have had a return of 58%. It shows that all of the value went to the VCs and the public markets were the “bigger fools”.

To be honest, I have personally funded almost all of the most harmful companies that are around today, too.

But that's because I funded pretty much all the companies via my investment in an index fund.

YC pretty much takes something like an index fund approach to startups: they finance a lot of them. So naturally they would also have a significant portion of what you deem to be harmful ones.

What part of buying index funds of public shares in a company (aside from direct investment, IPO or private placement which are not hallmarks of index funds) funds the company?

Thieves steal because they know a fence will take the goods of their hands. The fence will take the goods of their hands, because they know they can sell them on.

People buy into IPOs partially because they know a lively secondary market exists, where they can offload the shares later. Index funds are part of that secondary market.

Just to be clear, I don't think investors in IPOs are thieves. I'm just saying that you can legitimately say that the secondary market financies companies just as much as the primary market does. Perhaps a better example might be farmers selling to food factories selling to retailers selling to me. I never hand money directly to the farmers, but you can still say with a straight face that my purchase of bacon funds the pig farm.

No money reaches a company when you purchase shares on the secondary market. Unlike a purchase of bacon, where some amount of that money is passed along to the farmers.

This is extremely disappointing. Absolutely turned off applying for or working for any YC companies now.

It's also interesting Garry Tan (YC Partner) has a lot of comments for the masses when it's on a one sided platform like X. But, will never engage here. Oh the irony.

He seems to enjoy spreading factually misguided "statistics" [0] about how Flock is "solving crime". OK buddy.

I mean, just look at how he enagages with those replies. If that's at the helm of YC? WTF.

[0] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1963256544524640456

He and the entire tech ecosystem is in a bubble where being as right wing as possible is currency. Literally middle of the road liberal pg is basically a communist compared to this ecosystem now. It’s extremely short sighted on their part as the dialectic is guaranteed to flip back the other way. Much better to hold your own genuine beliefs than to kowtow to whatever is popular at the time

When did the US even “flip the other way”

The “left” view points of the US currently seem to be similar to Reagan. The furthest left I’ve seen the US go in my lifetime is about David Cameron or Boris Johnson levels of “left”.

Bernie Sanders was nearly the Democratic candidate for president and is still the most popular politician in American politics. However, this countries politics is completely and totally captured by moneyed interests. Our political leadership is openly corrupt and has been for decades. And of course about every decade the US commits another atrocity against some sovereign nation or the other. It does feel a bit hopeless at times

VC firms are behind the police state and the break down in world order in general.

YC is not the good guy in this world.

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