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Comment by kshri24 | Hacker News Reader

YC needs to go back to how it was. Choosing those who know what they are doing, and have been in the game for long and not blindly choose those who have graduated from tier-1 institutions. University degrees mean nothing at the end of the day.

And please stop investing in slop/wrappers. They do not solve World's problems.

I feel there has been complacency set into investing in general where investors are chasing quick money (first crypto and now AI slop) over solving hard/grueling problems that take a long time to fix but have huge returns down the line.

And we have a lot of tough problems that still need solving. AI won't magically fix that, despite being a great tool.

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Yeah, used to be that a lot of companies in the batches made more or less sense, or you could at least see how they'd made sense if they managed to successfully reach their vision, even if it many times was a bit wishy-washy.

YC since then seems to have moved into a "spray and pray" approach where the ideas don't matter at all, they're 150% in on the "We invest in founders" idea now, almost too much, although I know that's always been a thing they've thought about. But all the batches since some years ago are just so uninspired and seem to be quick cash grabs, or obviously acquisition targets, rather than "solve a problem you experience yourself" which seemed to be much more popular (and realistic) before.

>choose those who have graduated from tier-1 institutions. University degrees mean nothing at the end of the day.

It means everything for YC's model.

YC does not care about the software.

They care about the founders.

YC's model and ecosystem is explicitly designed to be a who's who club of interconnected founders that are very, very encouraged to """rely""" on each other when building their companies.

YC uses a lot of double speak regarding this ecosystem, but if you explained the concept to a layman on the street they'd tell you exactly what this concept is in just a very few, very blunt words.

Elite-class founders and lots of cheap, imported, or "passionate" labor.

Let's get real here folks.

yes obvious but this is not a secret, its the whole point of yc

yc is explicitly an imitation of harvard , right down to calling people 'alumni'

this is how to find supertalent. much like american idol it works well but not for everyone

It starts from the top

Agreed.

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