For background: Dave believes in companies with straightforward revenue strategies with measurable traction that could hockey-stick but haven't yet. He believes in a lage and talented mentor pool to find the design, data, and/or distribution problems standing in the way of accelerated customer/user growth to add the value needed to get to the next level. He looks for companies that could exit 20mm-500mm but wants MORE exits rather than larger ones. Kind of the opposite of how YC seeks to grow it's portfolio through a few huge winners.

THEN he believes in doubling down when the signs of that "next leveling" emerge.

I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding of 500 Startups on HN so I wanted to try to get that out of the way. In my opinion there is room for 500 and YC to both grow without getting in each other's way, perhaps actually helping each other on the few companies they agree strongly on.