Is Y Combinator the next Aum Shinrikyo?

Next up: Is your job the next Aum Shinrikyo?

Zealous focus on charismatic leadership to whom inner-circle members display unquestioning commitment?

"Yes, Mr. CEO, the numbers all add up. I'll have those reports for you in a moment."

Members required to relocate in order to increase dependency on the group?

"No telecommuting for you!"

Preoccupation with bringing in new members?

"We're hiring! Tell all your friends! You get a bonus for bringing in new people!"

Group receives constant messages to let go of material aspirations ("Success is not about the money"), yet the tone of the group overall is a preoccupation with making money?

"Budgets are tight this year, so you won't be getting that raise you thought you would. But don't worry, it's not about the money, and we'll make it up to you at the holiday party! Keep up the good work, and don't let those sales numbers slip."

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged?

"I can't have you questioning my authority like that..."

Mind-numbing techniques like debilitating work schedules used to suppress functions of pre-frontal cortex in order to decrease cognitive resistance to the group ethos?

"Mandatory overtime for everyone!"

The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel?

"You! Button that collar, and I want to see cufflinks tomorrow!"

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its members, and especially its leader, who is seen as being on some sort of special "mission" which only he and the group see the true significance of?

"We're miles ahead of the competition."

Pervasive and persistent "us-vs.-them" mentality where "them" consists of people who "just don't get it"?

"Bury the competition!"

Leadership leverages shame to induce feelings of guilt and encourages others to do so as well in order to manipulate residual self-images of members?

"Everybody else in the division is counting on you!"

Members' subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group?

"Honey, I haven't seen you in weeks! You're spending all day at the office, and then just go to sleep as soon as you come home."

Members must submit their individual schedules to moderated group activities they feel pressure to engange in?

"You must be in by 8:00 AM each day."

Members are strongly encouraged to live and/or socialize mostly/only with other group members, with implication that doing so is an unspoken prerequisite for advancement in group?

"I'd like to see you at our Friday afternoon happy-hour"

Pervasive doomsday scenarios with grave repurcussions for failure to comply with implications?

"If we don't hit the numbers this quarter, management is threatening to kill the whole project."

Leader claims to have contact with superior beings who are inaccessible to "normal" people?

"The other day I called my friends at McKinsey..."

Don't feed the trolls.

But they're so amusing!

Oh hell, I've got startup to work on, that's more fun anyways.

Amen, dfranke.

So sorry. Next forum: "YCombinator is super-awesome and infallible!" Commentary anticipated to range from "LOL" to "LoLoLoLoL".

It is, actually, pretty difficult to judge whether a group is a (destructive) cult or not only by what the leader or its members are saying or how the group is working. The border is pretty blurry. I learned it in hard way (by tring to save a friend from one).

A good test (though not perfect) is to look at the output of the group---is the group producing outcome that contribute to the society at large? Are the people came out of the group taking important roles in the society? Many cults claim they will do that, but fail to deliver that.

Well, that's hard to say - many cults actually make associations with successful people and then claim that their success is based on the influence/teachings of the cult. I'm sure some people think scientology is a cult (it is in the process of being declared criminal in some EU member states) and Sky Dayton seems to be doing ok. And of course, the trickiest part is that the group always claims that its output is beneficial and if you don't understand how it is, well then that's why you need the group to explain it to you.

Yes, that's why I said it's not perfect. The thing is, to some people, the cult's methodology works for their success (since many mind-control techniques are not evil by themselves, and can be used to improve one's life if used wisely).

You have to look at not only those successful cases, but also the rest of cases---if the group has contributed to the success of a few celebrities, but not for the 99.9% of other members, then the success cases are likely to be by chance rather than the real result of the cult.

A better test may be simply: does the belief/practice lead to health and happiness for the practitioners, and those they affect and interact with?

Unfortunately, you can make people subjectively happy by mind-control techniques. Being healthy is also difficult to define (to some extent).

So then how do you distinguish that? Like does YCombinator method make people succeed? Or is it good at identifying likely future successes and convincing them to associate with YCombinator? Or both? How do you gage the effect either way? In other words, does YC make the successes, or is it better at systematically finding them and associating with them?

You can't draw a concrete line, and it may take time. However, if, say, a few years later, 30% of YC companies succeeds big and 50% of them are producing good results (not necessarily in their startup, but by taking important roles in other companies), then people can hardly say YC is a destructive cult.

Depends on how you look at it. Most web 2.0 innovations are just reiterations of low-yield activities designed to encourage phatic communication at the cost of personal and corporate productivity. Who knows what effect that will have on, say, our national economy?

Time will tell. Meantime, all you can do is to watch the concrete numbers. Note that the line between destructive cults and other groups are not only blurry, but some cults may morph into a normal group over time, or vice versa.

If you really suspect a certain group is a cult and want to do something about it in a short span, watch a concrete prediction the group makes (somehow lots of cult leaders often makes them, e.g. the world will end by year 20XX). Then compare the outcome. Don't be destructed by what the member of the groups says, or how the group is organized and managed. Look for the objective evidence.

This is so dumb. It wouldn't work to have a cult of startup founders. Cult members tend to be passive people who need someone to tell them what to do. But if you funded startups started by people like that, they'd all go off and immediately fail.

I think the author has firmly placed his tongue in his cheek.

It's often hard to tell trolls from nuts. But in this case the signs point to nut: a large number of really long posts; lots of exclamation points; tinfoil hat stuff:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52085

Hmm. Where did the post go...?

Never mind. I just realised what "showdead" meant and now feel very silly.

He's just having fun trolling (saying something he doesn't necessarily believe to get a rise out of people).

The best way to get him to stop is to ask him to stop trolling.

This is actually hilarious. I could go through and point out how many of these things are wrong due to outsider perspective, but I wouldn't want to degrade the humor quality of the post.

I felt this was in fun as well. It applies to me, I laughed, I upvoted. Now I'll close ycom and go back to my project :)

Seconded

Stockpiling large quantities of biological and chemical weapons? Er... doubt it.

How do you know for sure though? None of these groups ever started out by communicating their ultimate intent at first. Aum started as a humble local yoga club.

See, if you'd just left it at the original post, without trying to defend it, it would have been funny. Now you just look sad.

Never mind. Being turned down isn't the end of the world; there's no reason you can't start up without YC funding.

It is possible to percieve very many things as cult-like, especially if you try to imagine how people will look at them in, say, 200 years (e.g. fashion, university, jobs, using drugs, not using drugs, being a sportsfan, being a nerd, following societal norms, constantly quoting the big lebowski, etc. etc.). Play along by looking at people's lives and beliefs throughout history, and try to work out who were the least culty.

The conclusion I came to is that it it generally best to work things out for yourself, and rarely bad to question your assumptions.

"Leader espouses a "means justifies the ends" creed? Super-check"

In general this is kind of funny, but I'm honestly not sure what you're referring to in the point above.

Plus you have an itso in point 12.

OK, as posted by someone who joined 4 days ago this is most likely a troll, but still, that was probably the most entertaining thing I've read on ycnews!

(cue /. humour tagline: "It's funny. Laugh.")

This reminded me of my uncle's dog. You should have seen it chase its tail. when I first saw it, it was very funny. But then it quickly became the saddest thing I ever saw. It would chase its tail for hours till it became exhausted. My uncle explained that it was imagining its tail to be some snake that caught on to it. The dog had imagination, except it was paranoid. It died a few months later exhausted, bitter and lonely.

Someone should report you to the ASPCA for neglecting your lonely dog. Shame on you!

I've read a few of your emotional crackpot rants and they all say a lot more about you than YC or this site. You got some issues, Stan.

Obvious troll is obvious. But getting better at least. Nice rhetorical schtick . . . I used to use this one to "prove" that America had all the traits of a fascist dictatorship.

Is this one of the guys from Uncov? (Which, if you haven't seen it, is pretty hilarious for about 45 minutes and then . . . kind of pathetic.)

Nothing wrong with a benevolent cult.

+50% rate of success?

Check.

In fairness, they're nowhere near 50% success yet. Only a few startups have actually "succeeded" by PG's definition (i.e. gotten rich). That's largely because most of their fundees haven't had time to get there yet.

They do have enough horses still in the race and running strong that I wouldn't bet against them, but their success rate right now is a something around 5% right?

Success being defined as ... what exactly? By whom?

No.

Simple, dogmatic answers to rhetorical questions? Check!

>Simple, dogmatic answers to rhetorical questions?

Yes.

Edit: delete as in this is spam

>> Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged?

Don't forget we're planning to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Chinpokomon.

I hate people.