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Comment by notyourwork | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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