Ask HN: How does Y Combinator deal with conflict of interests?

9 pointsmattiss2 comments

Suppose you submit an idea that might compete (indirectly) with an existing YCombinator venture.

What happens then?

It already happens. If you fund as many companies as we do it's unavoidable you'll end up with some overlap. Even if you tried not to accept competing companies, you'd still get overlap because startups' ideas morph so much. So the way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we don't talk to one about what the other's doing.

In practice it turns out not to be as big a problem as one might think, because most big markets have room for several slightly different solutions, and it's unlikely that two startups would end up doing precisely the same thing.

It would be interesting to see two groups get accepted with absolutely identical ideas and see how different they finally end up.

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