I’ve applied not less than 7 times to YC. Rejected every time.
Some of our customers are multi billion dollar companies.
We are profitable, growing and got accepted by their direct competitor.
I still believe YC influence is amazing and I have nothing but respect for all the people involved in the program but I like to remind fellows entrepreneurs that any accelerator is just a tool.
If you want to build something, no amount of rejection will stop you.
Getting backing can be hard, even if your idea is amazing. Often amazing ideas just seem to slip through the cracks. There are plenty of stories of startups that felt like giving up after 99 VC meetings, only to get funding at the 100th one and go on to success.
It's a tough slog, and it takes the founders away from doing the actual work they love, but don't give up. If your idea is good, keep ploughing onwards. I've given up way too easily in the past. It was only once I saw other companies recreate the same idea many years later and then be valued at billions of dollars that I really realized the value of the original idea and the opportunities I'd missed by not dragging myself out of bed to another fundraising meeting.
Also potentially interesting is how YC changed the VC market. [0] is an essay from PG that talks about how VC funding used to work. [1] is a short essay that starts to get at why YC is different. (These should be read with a grain of salt, since PG is the founder of YC)
TLDR is that YC was the first firm to fund a lot of small companies, as opposed to a medium amount of medium sized companies. Similar to what Square did for payments by offering credit card readers to individuals, YC offered funding to super small companies where previously it was not available.
The impact of this on the world is up for interpretation, but at least one positive result is a lower barrier of entry for entrepreneurship.
I am far from an expert so if this is inaccurate feel free to correct me.
I was under the impression that the small amount offered was the realization that it didn't take a lot of money to get a startup off the ground. So I thought Paul was one of the first to capitalize on it. This would seem to let him go for both quality and volume.
I was fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall the first couple of years of YC. A handful of incredible people, but honestly JL seemed to me to be the glue that held it all together.
This thread is somewhat depressing. Depressing because the very nature of YC and HN at its best is optimism. A belief in the ability to build and not just a respect for those who do but a genuine desire to support those trying. Maybe not succeeding, but trying to create something in a world so set on making that difficult. It that always morally perfect: no. Does that always work: no. But, at its best, YC operates more like a university than a venture fund.
Jessica, PG, Geoff, PB, Michael, Jared, Sama and all the other partners have all done very very well by creating/working on YC, but there is a particular underlying ethos of support. Of just a human connection with founders who build. HN in its earliest days had that too, but I don't see any of that on this thread.
The article has a certain ambivalence about the nature of startups themselves (and perhaps, under that, capitalism itself), but Y Combinator has had a profoundly positive effect on my life personally, the lives of hundreds of people I know, the startup and venture ecosystem, and -- whether or not this is "changing the world" -- the economy more broadly.
There are people here who are shitting on the companies YC has helped, in their earliest stages, push forward. Would some of them have succeeded without YC, absolutely. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that no other small collection of people in history has been instrumental to creating so much enterprise value from scratch -- and thus economic wellbeing more broadly (with, maybe, the exception of Sequoia) other than a few founders of the very biggest tech companies (which YC companies will eventually join the ranks of).
Maybe, you say, that's all just signaling or selection effects. Perhaps you don't learn anything at Harvard or YC; it's just about getting in. Maybe. But when that list includes Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase, Gitlab, Dropbox, PagerDuty, Stripe, Instacart, Brex, Cruise, Faire, Reddit, Zapier, Gusto, Rippling, Flexport, Segment, Checkr, Webflow, Lob, Opeansea, Sift, Astranis, Twitch, Ironclad, just to mention the ones I can pull off the top of my head, I think it says something about the method, the process, and the support mattering.
And look I'm a founder who didn't succeed with the company I built during YC but that has more to do with my NOT listening to and focusing on the lessons that the partners were trying to impart than any failure on their part.
Now, I'm not without criticisms and suggestions but damn if I'm not rooting for YC and every company in every batch at Alumni Demo Day.
The thing is that people didn't lose interest in startups. Startups lost interest in people. I am still interested startups that do things differently, accelerators that enables startup that otherwise wouldn't happen or other things that are, well, interesting. But those are few and far between these days.
I also fundamentally disagree with the idea that you have to like something because of its process even if you dislike the outcome. Ironically I think that was what put YC apart in the first place. Every other incubator would talk about their fancy offices, lawyers and contacts but then wouldn't produce many notable startups. And by that measure YC probably never would have happened, or at least didn't deserve support.
It's something I think about whenever there is a development with some really popular company. That if the company had adopted the mindset of those rooting for it it probably wouldn't have been successful in the first place.
On the first line what do you mean by "The thing is that people didn't lose interest in startups. Startups lost interest in people." Or what, differently, do you want startups to do? (I"m genuinely asking, I'm curious!). I'm all for things like longer exercise windows, insourcing, etc, but I also think that startups, generally, have a much more inclusive brand of capitalism than most normal companies.
As for the rest, I'm not sure I follow the argument. I do not agree with the notion that every company that succeeds but has gone through YC would have succeeded without YC. I also don't agree with the notion that only companies that are going to succeed either way go through YC either. Empirically the latter is more easily falsifiable but I think both are false.
While I don't completely disagree with the sentiment here, I agree more with the GP suggesting that YC started with great intentions (let's give makers a little money and support and minimal bullshit and see what they make) and that HN as a community has improved many peoples lives (mine included). But yes, it evolved into something different.
My question is what solution are you advocating? Abolish YC? Outlaw starting businesses? I don't see your solution.
Look, im general I’m quite sympathetic to the argument that wealth inequity is both morally/ethically bad (which I think you’re saying) and bad economically for growth and prosperity (which I don’t read you as saying). I also think that many societies have problems with wealth inequity overall, and few have successfully cultivated innovation in the last decade or two as successfully has the US (partially driven, yes, by YC).
To me the solution to the problem isn’t the front-end, that is attacking YC and startups and entrepreneurship. Rather, I would generally support deep and effective estate taxes, wealth taxes if they could be found to be effective, attacks on tax avoidance behavior, etc. (e.g. I don’t have solutions, but I’m disgusted by the behaviors and advantages reported on by ProPublica recently here https://www.propublica.org/article/the-great-inheritors-how-... but I also think there are great fortunes in the UK, France, Germany, the Nordics, so not sure anyone has quite figured it out).
At the same time, I think that economic growth is the central and defining anti-poverty tool in history. Other countries envy our ability to grow the pie even as we have challenges in fairly distributing that pie. I’d rather find solutions to the problems of distribution without attacking growth.
On OpenSea, I’m not following the argument exactly. I assume you think all art, particularly mass market art is a sort of mass delusional petite bourgeoisie / opioid of the masses pursuit foisted on them by a conspiratorial monied class? Or, more likely, it’s just all a big, experimental community of purists and artists and hucksters and beyond alike that are trying something new and interesting and potentially quite generative and innovative. I have no idea if in five years OpenSea will be huge or dead or somewhere in-between but I’d admire that they have built, created, strove.
On Airbnb, I have quite a bit more ambivalence but overall my vision of the world has a lot more density and urbanism. It’s good for people, it’s good for the environment, etc. If I had a magic wand in, say, San Francisco, the city would have housing for 3-4 times as many people, a much much more robust public transit system, etc, and the problems of gentrification would be addressed primarily through a massive uptick in housing stock and density not by the relatively limited effects of (the practically banned in SF) Airbnb.
AirBnB is an interesting case. On its face it seems socially rational, given that many rooms are unused or heavily under-used, to match them with people who want rooms in that location. The problem is, of course, that it increases rental profiteering, and that it caters to rich international tourists, not residents.
Is there a way to enjoy the benefits of AirBnB without those pathologies? Governments, either locally or nationally, could issue AirBnB rental licenses, limit the supply to prevent gross gentrification, and tax the income and use it to subsidise housing costs elsewhere in the affected locations.
> The problem is, of course, that it increases rental profiteering, and that it caters to rich international tourists, not residents.
If I have a property, I can choose to let someone stay at my property for money. AirBnB facilitates this. This makes my property valuable as a result. The homeowners benefit as do people who need a place to stay. This is progress and occurs any time anyone creates a product or technology that creates value. What pathologies? Homes rightly appreciating in value due to a new revenue stream opened up for homeowners?
You seem to believe that all market transactions are socially beneficial, whereas I do not. A market transaction might benefit the rational utility of transacting parties despite incurring yet greater harms on third parties. I, like most people, am not a value monist who believes rational utility is the only good, and if we take this yet larger perspective then a very wide range of market transactions create net social harms.
'Renting' in its essence does not involve doing anything: it does not mine resources, manufacture use objects, or provide a service. Rich people buy up scarce assets and then charge a fee for their use. The return has no correlate in any socially useful activity - it is 'profiteering'. AirBnb means it is often more profitable to buy properties and rent them to rich international tourists rather than to locals. This creates the further, perverse effect of pricing out residents from their own cities. Given than I am a democrat and think societies should be run by and for the people, I think this is obviously remiss.
>'Renting' in its essence does not involve doing anything: it does not mine resources, manufacture use objects, or provide a service. Rich people buy up scarce assets and then charge a fee for their use.
So if someone doesn't have enough accumulated capital or credit to buy a property to live in, tough luck. You can't legally rent from someone. I guess rely on charity or sleep on the streets? Seems unreasonable.
What a strange way of conversing with people. I never suggested that and you must know that I don't think it, so why say it? It shows bad faith.
I think that ceteris paribus the lower housing rents are the better. How to help bring that about is an interesting policy question. I suspect that socialisation is the best option, but increasing the stock and rent controls could work.
If we return to the specific case of AirBnb and my original suggestion, the aim would be twofold:
1. Limit AirBnb rentals to reorientate the housing stock away from rich international tourists to locals.
2. Tax AirBnb rentals to subsidise local housing.
I would point out that Barcelona has already done (1).
We don’t live in a world where success is measured by money. No decent people think that way, and even most Silicon Valley people you’d consider “indecent” don’t think that way. Most people look at money-obsession and conspicuous displays of wealth as crass and lame, which is entirely appropriate.
That said, money is a focus for companies as it is a measure of resources and scale. Without money, a company can’t survive or grow, and with it, it can do more of its “solving problems” work for more people.
I really don’t see any truly successful people or companies focusing on money beyond that.
We have no way to know if the other general recieved the message, we can only know that the block chain has committed it.
This is the same as a forum or a blog post. We can make a post, but we don't know if the our other party read it.
If the "enemy" army cut off internet access to one general after it responds to attack, even if a message is committed into a block chain, only one general is attacking at first light.
Measuring simply by how well those who have it worst is a much better metric. A world where all people have it terrible is a bad world. A world where everyone has it at least okay is a much better world.
There are downsides to inequality, but a metric that counts "everyone is miserable" as a success is an awful metric.
No, because 'well' is then relative to what the 'haves' think it should be for those who have it worst. Which will result in a very large underclass who are deemed to have it 'well' and a small upperclass who have it 'amazing'.
The alternative is not a world where people have it terrible, it could also be a world where everybody has it good and to strive every day to make it better still.
Note that you are likely in the top 10% of wealth on this planet at the moment and we're talking about those 90% further down, a very large fraction of which doesn't even qualify for 'sufficient' under the current system.
So, your alternative would be better than what we have today, but your reading of my comment is incomplete.
> No, because 'well' is then relative to what the 'haves' think it should be for those who have it worst.
No, my metric is chosen over yours because mine is not relative. I don't care how well the worst off had it compared to other people. I care how well off they are. This means that in order to make the world better, the only option is to improve the lives of the worst off.
> Note that you are likely in the top 10% of wealth on this planet at the moment and we're talking about those 90% further down, a very large fraction of which doesn't even qualify for 'sufficient' under the current system.
Hence the focus solely on making them better off. Doesn't matter how well off Elon Musk is if it doesn't improve the lives of those in need.
> but your reading of my comment is incomplete.
Your comment was one sentence. I read the whole thing. If you meant something else, you gotta say it.
That's a hugely flawed north star. We've had inequality as long as we have had surplus. The more surplus, the more inequality.
But I'd rather live today than in hunter gatherer times, even though they were materially more equal.
"Why not modern life with less inequality?" Well because growing the pie and splitting the pie are competing drivers. If Elon musk weren't already obscenely wealthy, he wouldn't have been able to execute against space x. I'd rather live in a world where Musk is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars than in one where we didn't have Space X.
Jesus said we'll always have poor people. So you're not wrong.
It doesn't have to be a solvable problem to be the best way to measure success.
Your working definitions of "best" and "worst" still seem to be about net worth. If money isn't the measure of success, the delta probably wouldn't be net worth delta.
That's exactly why it got its budget in the first place: to show up the Russians (who had shown up the Americans by launching first 'Sputnik' and then Gagarin), not necessarily to do something useful in space. But no matter how they got their budget, I'm happy they did.
Space X is a bad, fan boy example. my life is greatly improved by the internet, by ubiquitous electricity, satellite communications, etc. the current form of many of these things was driven by a type of capitalism that is inseparable from inequality
I mean I would also like to live in a world where everyone gave it their 100% for the betterment of all humanity. The reality though is that if we set those incentives naively, nearly all past examples have led to way less output then using monetary (capitalistic) incentives.
what's the best way for the world to be more selfless and productive without that being a pipe dream?
The cynicism in this thread is simply astounding. The people of HN has had a negative impact on my view of the world and my own internal optimism. It’s hard to find even the smallest light of hope here. “Can do” attitude is outdated and is replaced by “Pull everyone else down”.
You're as much HN as anyone else here. Don't fall prey to the notice-dislike bias! It leads to an exceedingly negative false feeling of generality, in which the world seems dominated by whatever counts as the worst to you. In reality, it's a statistical distribution and you choose what to focus on.
I once tried to argue that most YC founders don't spend their time on HN. It got a surprising amount of blowback. With people like this here, it seemed entirely obvious that no founder would want to.
But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on.
Many YC founders I know read HN, but far fewer comment. On this article, for example, two other founders have commented. YC founders on any given thread are (generally) few.
> But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on.
yes.
My personal attitude is that unless it’s grossly unfair _and_ largely upvoted, there’s not much need to jump to YC’s defense. Those two conditions are rarely met in one comment.
The site actually serves myriad business purposes and plenty of good comments/discussion happens here, though you do need to try harder to ignore the noise than was once true.
I mean Dropbox and Stripe are cool companies but they hardly "changed the world", they made their founders and their inventors very rich though. AirBnB has been more impactful for sure, but I dont know if the total impact is a positive one, it seems to me they are like the other "gig economy" companies which like to privatize the earnings and socialize the nasty generated externalities.
People need to leave this site every once in a while and check out the actual world, it is a healthy vaccine against undue self-aggrandizement.
I mean just because you don't see it as having changed the world doesn't mean it hasn't. I've worked at companies that couldn't use stripe / existed before it was a thing and accepting payments was/is a difficult problem subject to all the regulation from multiple countries and building and maintaining it yourself is a total crapshoot.
Starting a business and accepting money with stripe is super simple comparatively.
A lot of world changing happens behind the scenes and isn't necessarily super flashy. They lowered the barrier to entry making it much easier for anyone building new things to get their customers paying which is world changing for people involved in doing business and business has always been a huge part of humanity whether you like it or not.
I wonder how many things exist because one person somewhere was able to integrate stripe over a few hours and start making money versus needing a team to maintain a payments system.
If those founders hadn't changed the world, they wouldn't be rich.
Sure, Dropbox and Stripe aren't dismantling apartheid or eradicating polio, but these products do solve real problems and make life a little bit more bearable for millions of people.
We should give credit where credit's due and acknowledge this impact.
I know you're just trying to make a point, but in all seriousness what you're saying could be true.
If your CRUD apps are used by tens of thousands of people to make life slightly better - or even if the money you make from your CRUD apps allows your wife and kids to live a free life and not have to worry about making ends meet - you could potentially be making a far greater impact than even someone who devotes their life to volunteering.
Y Combinator managed to convince startups that would have been founded anyway to give up expensive equity to them. I'm not sure they would have failed without YC.
Put another way, if you take a piece of every startup on the planet, can you claim influence if some of those startups eventually succeed?
Airbnb was basically dead before they got into YC. They very likely would have quit, as they were heavily in personal debt and couldn’t find anyone to invest in them.
Reddit was pretty much PG’s idea, or at least an idea he helped Steve and Alexis come up with.
Stripe is hard to imagine getting started if PC hadn’t already had an exit with an earlier YC-funded startup.
I could go on and on, but the point is clearly false.
This is similar to the idea that it doesn't matter where you go to college - because the things that get you into top X schools are the same traits that correlate with success afterward. This paper is a study that makes that argument: https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322 (disclaimer - I only read the abstract)
Also - in fairness to YC - there are a staggering number of companies that are started every year. I don't have the stats but I would guess that YC outperforms the totality of the startup market.
Some of our customers are multi billion dollar companies.
We are profitable, growing and got accepted by their direct competitor.
I still believe YC influence is amazing and I have nothing but respect for all the people involved in the program but I like to remind fellows entrepreneurs that any accelerator is just a tool.
If you want to build something, no amount of rejection will stop you.
Happy 2022!!