How to Start a Startup: Fall 2014

That sounds more like a difference caused by economic and cultural circumstances than whether you've met a rockstar in person.

If Country X is unable to produce viable startups, it's probably because it doesn't have the economic and cultural infrastructure to support startups yet, not because Peter Thiel has never graced that country with a royal visit.

> every successful person they've ever known hasn't followed what they call the "American" startup way.

Of course they haven't. The "American startup way" is optimized for the specific economic and cultural circumstances that are only found in certain parts of the United States. Some aspects of it may be generalizable, but most of it isn't. Following it to the letter in any other country will probably earn you nothing but ridicule and bankruptcy.

One of the perceived privileges of the elite is their very access to opportunity, and being there is to provide that access.

Not being there is to observe the access, which is the addition of transparency that never existed before, but fundamentally the access hasn't been granted.

If you're already in a tough place without access to these kinds of opportunity, this is just going to underline and bold that some more.

I say bugger that for a game of soldiers. No, you don't have to meet one of the 'legends' before you can succeed. That sort of thinking is false, poisonous and destructive. In almost all cases, the first step on the road to success is understanding that life is not a zero-sum game.

(This is something that online education misses entirely and will largely never be able to replicate.)

But it is possible that YC now has crunched enough data and has enough people in the alumni network that they can abandon the batch model and get the same kind of quality without having to use the batch model.

The 'late' applications were a hint in this direction, if they get rid of the batch model entirely they will have potentially a huge benefit both in load (batches will create temporary overload) and in total throughput.

So instead of having two 'strokes' per year they'd be moving at an ever accelerating pace until they run at the maximum rate at which viable applicants can apply and be processed.

So the YC course would talk to people about advantages of not going into YC? Hm.

YC is composed of equal parts capital, smarts and process. That's not taking into account the connections or the seal of approval, those are results not inputs! You could claim they are inputs now but it wasn't always like that.

> It's the connections and seal of approval, which are scarce by definition.

Connections are not scarce at all. You - and anybody else - have the power to reach out to those that you want to reach. Assuming you play at 6 degrees for a bit you'll find a link to whoever you want to reach. What makes the difference is that once YC gives you that coveted 'seal of approval' (and that's also not that scarce, vast numbers of start-ups have received it) that some people will throw money at you.

But that's a curse and a blessing at the same time, for many of those recipients will receive the 'curse' and only a few will eventually see it as a blessing. But all of them agree: the experience alone was well worth it.

Now I'm not a YC alumnus, nor will I ever be one but I think that if a very large number of people that go through a program think it is worth it then that has my vote.

The seal of approval is something that VCs that do not wish to do their own vetting have come up with, they have basically outsourced their vetting to YC because YC does so much better a job of this than they could ever do by themselves that they might as well try to get in on the feeding frenzy aka demo day.

And YC has forever been expanding the size of their batches based on capacity available for processing. So the scarcity element would seem to be under control and reducing.

> And now the Stanford -> Funded pipeline is even stronger, which means that everyone else is slightly (imperceptibly) more an outsider fuckhead employee on 0.04%.

On the contrary, all the material will be made available, so you too can benefit from this.

Stanford is merely a convenient vehicle.

> I don't begrudge YC, really.

I'll take your word for it. But it seems as if you do hold some kind of grudge and a pretty deep one.

> It's a brilliantly run business and it's probably done a lot of good for the world.

So why all this negativity then? It's like walking around on a square attempting to insult random people for either being successful, connected, part of some perceived secret cabal or some other figment of the imagination. That's a strange line to walk.

> It's just fun to snark about these things because, honestly, most of the people "out there" (the ones who actually think protesting Google Buses makes some kind of sense) are going to react more harshly than I do. I just make fun of shit.

Well, it's good to have that on the table then because I honestly believed that you were serious in the way you present yourself. You're obviously a pretty smart fellow, the bit that I did not understand is if you're so jealous of all this why are you hurting your personal rep at this level. But if you're just 'making fun of shit' then that explains things sufficiently for me, I tried to make sense of it. My mistake.

If you want to avoid being removed from your own startup, don't seek VC until you have enough negotiating leverage that you can keep a majority of board seats. It's that simple.

If your startup fails, there will be a large number of other startups, giant tech companies, etc. that are willing to hire you, as long as you demonstrate you learned something. It happened to me after my first startup, it happened to you, it's just you squandered the opportunity to recover your savings and repair your reputation within Google.

If the VCs are putting personal pressure on you to make the wrong decisions and they don't have a board majority, then listen carefully to them, and if they're still wrong on reflection, gently explain to them what the right decision is, why it is so, and then say that you appreciate their advice but will make the right decision regardless. If they do have a board majority, then listen carefully to them, understand what they're saying, point out whatever information they're missing when they gave you that advice, and ask if they would still like you to make that decision, or would they prefer that you go make this other decision that incorporates all the information that both of you have?

VCs - and anyone else - do not have any power over you other than what you give them. If working with them means making untenable concessions, don't work with them.