Thank You, Y Combinator | Hacker News Reader

Thank You, Y Combinator

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35 pointsrvcamo20 comments

As a Techstars graduate, to say "the 2nd best accelerator might as well be the worse" is an inconsiderate hyperbole. Especially if your only perspective is Y Combinator.

Relocating to SF is awesome if that fits your bill or your originating city has no idea what technology means. But for others, SF is not everything. That was the primary reason we opted for Techstars. We like Austin's cost of living, quality of life, seasonal climate, no state income tax, family & friends, and the list goes on.

Exactly...unnecessary statement and makes the writer look amateur. There are plenty of great accelerators out there that aren't YC. Sure, YC is the "Harvard of Accelerators" but there are plenty of other great colleges out there with successful alumni.

YC doesn't require you to relocate to SFBA. It requires you to be present for the very limited duration of the program. There are YC companies in Austin.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It's a bold statement, but it's my personal opinion and I stand by it. You're free to disagree, but we would have never even considered another accelerator in our position.

> we would have never even considered another accelerator in our position.

Judging by your blog entry your resources were extremely strained; are you saying if YCombinator wouldn't have accepted you that you wouldn't have pursued any other accelerators even if it would have helped or possibly saved your business if it got bad enough? Seems like a short-sighted statement in my opinion.

What if you want to start another company in 3 years, don't get accepted to YCombinator and decide to apply elsewhere? They may read this and use it as a deciding factor.

1. No I would have delivered pizzas, done consulting, or tried to raise money from individual angels. I would have done whatever it took to keep the company alive, but I can promise we would have never even considered another accelerator.

2. I will never apply to another accelerator.

Fair enough

They may read this and use it as a deciding factor.

Alternatively, they may have already graduated high school.

> Alternatively, they may have already graduated high school.

I personally wouldn't care but I've talked to a handful of VCs in my time that were very into their firm that would take any slight against them or their firm as some egregious, unrecoverable thing. Very unreasonable people at times hence my comment.

It makes you sound insecure. You don't have to rip other people's work to legitimize your own. That's just childish.

I believe YC is the best as well, but I still respect what the others are doing.

But... you've got no experience with any other accelerators on which to base that opinion. Uninformed and unrepentantly incendiary is not a great combination.

I'm not saying you're wrong for feeling this way about YC. You aren't. Everyone has opinions they haven't bothered to verify with data, some of which might rub other people the right way. The trick is remembering that they're probably not worth sharing to a large audience, or stridently defending.

You are entitled to that opinion. I agree that Y Combinator is the best, especially for those that are really hungry to win and can make the most out of its unstructured program. YC gives you access to the best.

However, I don't believe accelerators #2-10 are the worst in the world. Which I also think is a disingenuous statement. To others.. things like location, industry relevance, program structure, etc. is a better fit for them or their team. I have friends that have gone through YC and failed miserably. I friends that have gone through TS and have succeeded greatly, by YC standards.

Does the market have too many accelerators that offer little-to-no value? Yes.

There's a difference between making a bold statement and making a statement based solely on confirmation bias.

Wow, I see someone who might be my age.

Off topic, but since I tried to subscribe for your product after reading this article... This message should not exist in 2015: http://i.imgur.com/NioopWo.png ("The Password Can Only Contain Letters And Numbers!")

Now most of your users are maybe not going to care, but what's the reason behind this? It means I can't use my Dashlane auto-generated password on your platform, which in the end means I didn't subscribe...

It's 2015 that's really unacceptable. Since they're still starting up I'd chalk it up to pushing something out as quickly as possible without maybe understanding their technical decisions fully which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's certainly something that they will have to change in the near future.

Happy to explain, please shoot me an email: andrew@kuhcoon.com thanks!

It would be great if you could explain it here. I'm very interested myself as I'm sure many others are.

Why explain if you can just accept arbitrary passwords, pass them through a hash function and feed its output (in hex format) into your exisitng password handling blackbox, whatever that wonder may be.

I'm just the lowly CEO, I'll see if I can get our CTO to jump in and explain later. :)

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