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Comment by theobeers | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that YC appears rotten to the core at this point, it’s almost impossible to sustain a criticism of the accelerator because they make so many little investments. No matter what you accuse them of, they’ll dismiss it by saying you’re cherry-picking. I have to admit, it’s a brilliant strategy to avoid any kind of accountability.

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No, it's not impossible. All you have to do is make a case. Here, by the numbers, the case being made is a 3.9% failure rate, less than half of which is scandalous, all of which appear to boil down to "YC should have known better than to invest in these particular founders". Make a better case! If they're "rotten to the core", that should be easy.

I don't think the number of investments they make is your real hurdle here. I think it's that you'll have to confront people familiar with the status quo ante of YC.

Mr. Ptacek, a) I have no affiliation with OP, and b) do you know what my actual position is (not presupposing that you care)? It's that I don't know anyone who has been inspired by anything that YC has funded in a very long time. The supermajority of these startups that don't make headlines for being scams is, in a way, even sadder.

I also think it's pointless to howl at the sky about how depressing this is. It's just the current reality of SV. I'm not going to pretend that what a16z is funding is any better (or worse).

I genuinely don't understand what you find depressing about it. That's what I'm saying. It's not hard to make a case for why it is; you just have to actually do it, unlike what this page is trying to do.

(And, side note, a16z is definitely not the status quo ante of YC.)

What am I supposed to say to that? If you think the argument that you believe I’m trying to make (which I couldn’t guess if you put a gun to my head) would be easy to make, and that I’m just not doing so, then you’d be better off engaging in discourse with an imaginary but more competent interlocutor.

You said "it’s almost impossible to sustain a criticism of the accelerator because they make so many little investments." I responded, no, it isn't. You claim YC is "rotten to the core", so it should be easy to make some colorable critical argument. You're reacting as if that's a baffling request, which, you have a right to be baffled, but your bafflement works against your original argument.

Nobody's reading this but you and me at this point, so we might as well call it here.

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