It's a risky investment strategy to put so much emphasis on AI startups. Not only do you have the already volatile nature of early-stage software companies (which YC is of course used to), but this is a bet on whether machine learning, chiefly LLMs, are going to continue to outperform other technologies and become sustainable to run.
There's no question in my mind that 'Open'AI is subsidizing the vast majority of LLM research and use today. If the efficacy of LLaMA and its derivatives actually start to approach GPT4+ in any meaningful way, there is quickly going to be a shortage of suitable compute that will completely dwarf the now-subsided Bitcoin mining craze. Plus, untainted training data is going to be harder to find amongst the text contaminated with mountains of early LLM drivel.
As a technology expert, I couldn't in all honesty say that I would want to have money in the YC fund right now. But if it pays off, it could be the biggest software windfall since social networking took off at the beginning of the 2010s.
Friendly reminder: the strategy here is to invest in the founders, not the ideas. So great founders right now create AI startups. So either AI solves problems or they arent great founders.
That's exactly right. When people see YC funding a lot of AI startups, a lot of them think it must be because YC has some thesis about AI.
Actually, it says something much deeper about the world than whatever YC's partners' opinions are. YC funds founders, not ideas, so the reason that so many companies in S23 are AI startups is that that's what founders want to work on right now. It's an emergent phenomenon, like stock prices in the market.
One thing that's interesting is that there have been many hype cycles between 2006 and now (chatbots, several waves of crypto, VR, online-to-offline, etc). YC funded a few companies in each of those hype cycles but never anything like the current %.
I would argue that just because they want to work on AI while it has a lot of hype, might not be a good thing. Folks should do what they are passionate about and interested in, not just raise money to turn a fume from the karat and greatest buzzword technology. Will they leave AI if the tides change?
I'm working on an idea that I'm submitting to YC this year. AI is revolutionizing the field I'm most passionate about, I feel like it would be a waste if I didn't even try to make a contribution at what's possibly the last time we get to make a significant contribution in this way.
I was hyped about Bitcoin when it came out, but the only truly revolutionary thing that happened after Bitcoin in that field was Ethereum, and there really wasn't anything to be hyped about besides that in the decade since even though people kept hyping it.
This hype is so different, it's as powerful as web 2.0 was. I felt like I missed out on building something epic then, and now I get another shot so I'm not gonna miss it. I bet there's thousands of people who feel this way.
while there is certainly merit to the idea that they invest in founders over ideas, its scope is more to founders within an idea rather than wholly.
your statement fails to consider the possibility that the pool of applicants to YC are not great and the demographic of such founders are bad founders who are easily swayed by hype into fragile and failing topics such as "AI" and crypto.
in the situation where the applicant pool of ideas is in fact incredibly diverse, then it supports the thesis even moreso because it would show YC went with "AI" founders over other founders, regardless of their quality as potential business owners.
Jared made the comparison to S06 and it might be interesting to note that was the worst performing class in YC history in terms of percentage outcomes for each company. 73% of those companies are dead, 9% are still alive, and 18% got exits[1]. Although YC almost certainly cares more about money than percentage outcomes and one of those exits was Zynga buying OMGPop, so YC probably views that class as a success. Seems like they are taking on more risk for greater upside.
S06 was also the --first batch-- (Edit: I was mistaken, S05 was the first batch, but the rest still stands), well before YC was the "hit maker" its known as today, so it's not surprising that class didn't do as well as subsequent ones. The acceptance rate for startups into YC now is miniscule compared to what it was in 2006.
>so it's not surprising that class didn't do as well as subsequent ones
But it also didn't do as well as the previous ones. I don't know when exactly YC got that "hit maker" reputation you are talking about, but S06 is an outlier regardless. The class directly before and directly after had failure rates of 29% and 38% compared to S06's 73%. The only classes coming close to the failure rates of S06 were in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.
Haven't done the math on this, but those early batches were so small - S06 only had 11 companies - so I think that statistically it's probably not that significant in any case, especially since there are huge grades of "success" even within the 3 categories of "alive", "dead", or "exit" on ycdb.co.
For example, in S06 there was one big exit (OMGpop), one company still alive and very well known today (Scribd), and one what I'd call "failure with an exit" - Xobni sold for a relatively low 60 million to Yahoo and was then shutdown.
Compare that with the batch directly after that, W07, which had 13 companies. Of those 13, it had one smash hit (Twitch) and one other relatively big success (Weebly). While it may have a lot fewer overall "dead" markers than S06, a lot of its exits look like acqui-hires or "OK buy our IP before we die" type exits. Better than an outright "dead" score I guess, but from the perspective of a VC like YC it hardly makes any difference. Point being I think it's a stretch to say there were really much significance in the "success difference" between S06 and W07 despite the differences in dead counts (with the possible exception that Twitch ended up being such a home run, but those are so rare they average 1 or fewer per batch anyway).
The underlying assumptions in this post don't really make sense for an organization like YC.
It's probably a good idea for YC to have some thesis about which technologies will be big, and "AI" is probably a good bet. The entire point of investing in so many AI startups is that I'm quite sure YC expects the vast, vast majority to fail (for various definitions of "fail"). But I think most people believe that there will be very few winners in the AI space (like pretty much all the other tech spaces over the past 20 years), so the biggest fears of someone like a YC is not getting in in those one or two AI companies that made it big.
Concentration and diversification are fundamentally opposed in risk management.
It’s ludicrous to suggest that somehow YC is “immune” to the risks that are associated with concentration of investment in one area.
I don’t buy the “we pick founders not technology” argument.
Rubbish. It’s a hype bubble. You’re seeing that as emergent behaviour because it gets funding; there’s no amount of hand waving that makes any of the risks in the parent comment either a) wrong, or b) YC somehow magically exempt from.
Are you seriously suggesting that YC just doesn’t do risk management or cross-startup risk analysis?
If this was NFTs, what would the winning strategy have been? Strike when the iron is hot and hype is at the maximum and hope to get some exits or subsequent rounds asap, or draw it out. From a portfolio perspective, it's just one batch, might as well go all in and maximally capitalize on hype, no?
Sure, and the faster you did that the more you would have made. I don't think AI is equivalent, the emperor has some clothes on here, they're just not quite as nice as he's been led to belive, but the same principle applies. Move fast, break stuff, sell while the cat's still in the bag.
These gigantic valuations for AI startups are only there because the startups aren't choosing to exit yet - big demand, low supply. Whilst acknowledging my lack of a crystal ball, I would imagine that once the few biggest companies have had their fill of acquiring AI startups for billions at a time, the remaining startups won't be so desirable any longer.
YC needs to make sure they actually have a market to sell these startups to before their valuation starts dropping again. Predicting that requires a certain kind of intuition, whereas 'traditional' software startups have a more predictable lifecycle. I'm not the 'hype type' myself - I don't really trust stocks without intrinsic value behind them :)
I'm really curious to know why my root comment saying 'this investment strategy is very risky and would make me nervous' has loads of upvotes, but my parent comment here - which I think has broadly the same message phrased in a different way - has three downvotes. Please enlighten me :)
> It's a risky investment strategy to put so much emphasis on AI startups.
At some level, YC is a marketplace for VCs. One'd think that this over-emphasis (it was crypto, b2b SaaS, mobile app startups before this) is YC working as it is supposed to be? http://paulgraham.com/herd.html / https://archive.is/vkzMd
Hype cycles have downsides no one is arguing about, but they don’t seem avoidable so I try to focus on the fact a bunch of people are going to get subsidized long enough to pivot to something durable and positive.
Even after you strip off the 80% “and then LangChain connects to a different API” stuff, this technology is still massive and it’s here to stay.
Tuning up a bunch of bright founders on some really highly leveraged ways of looking at problems? At some VC’s expense?
I mean, not "no matter which time frame you look at." Look at the drop in May 2021, from which the rate didn't recover until 2022. Similar situation for October 2018 - June 2019.
On the other hand, there's probably some sort of reasonable business model or two that will come out of the AI/LLM boom. So casting a wide net and hoping your accelerator will catch one of them is a decent play.
Quite possibly; I'm not sure why calls would be better than straight-up buying the stock, but I am certain that Nvidia is going to have a pretty good time of the LLM hype.
Nvidia seem to me to have been consistently competent in improving their product lines. Perhaps my only criticism would be of their artificial hampering of some of their products, which they do in order to appease certain PC gamers by excluding the gaming market from usual supply/demand effects. This has the knock-on effect of severely reducing the compatibility of the hardware with Linux, which of course is by far the most sensible option for cloud computing hosts right now.
> Perhaps my only criticism would be of their artificial hampering of some of their products, which they do in order to appease certain PC gamers by excluding the gaming market from usual supply/demand effects
Can you elaborate what you mean by this? I thought Nvidia is outpricing their PC gamer customers because of their focus on AI?
I’m curious how they have hampered their products in your opinion.
My reading of the saga is that the cryptocurrency mining bubble was causing huge demands for Nvidia GPUs as parallel processors (with ASICS for mining only starting to appear at this point). This meant that GPUs were being priced-out of the market for most PC gamers, as it was always profitable for cryptocurrency miners to buy more of them.
Nvidia introduced a lock on 'non-professional' cards which prevented alternative firmware from being loaded on them, effectively splitting the market into two, one for 'gamers' and the other for 'miners'. That lock interferes with the open source driver for Linux, Nouveau, meaning that normal things like CUDA (and not least running games!) couldn't be done on Linux without a labyrinthine network of proprietary drivers that, for instance, couldn't be updated automatically.
It seems as if Nvidia succeeded, because from my passive awareness of the PC gaming world, people seem very happy with their new GPUs. But for those using Linux for servers, at home or for AI research, it has been an ongoing nightmare.
Nvidia is specifically not on the LLM train - almost all possible forms of AI can use parallel compute chips to great effect. Their own AI products like DLSS have nothing to do with LLMs
I do not believe this is correct. Sure you can run llama or something locally on a cpu or your Apple arm but it’s not even close to the speed of running on a Nvidia card.
Do you think nvidias trillion dollar valuation is because entire governments are buying Nvidia cards to run stable diffusion?!
> We've now tried every point on the spectrum: fully remote, hybrid and fully in-person. So now we don't have to worry if we're being luddites: in-person YC just really is the best.
How was this determined to be best?
(Obviously, they haven't controlled for variables like the switch to 4 smaller batches, and the high percentage of startups all doing one exciting thing (AI). And do they realize the costs. And is it best for some people, and not for others.)
A lot of the comments in here are about the debate on whether companies should be remote or in-person.
That's an important debate but orthogonal to what I wrote. The YC batch is not a company. It doesn't really have a close analogue, but if you forced me to choose, I'd say that doing YC is more similar to going to college than working at a company. And as all we all know, while many companies are staying fully remote, hardly any university is.
Having now done this back-to-back, I can tell you exactly the ways in which in-person YC turned out to be better than remote YC.
1). Most founders in remote YC didn't make strong connections with their batchmates. When I ask founders from remote batches "how many founders in your batch are you still close with?", they typically give an answer that's 0-3. When I ask founders from in-person batches the same question, it's 10+.
2). When YC really works, it's because it not only conveys some factual advice, but changes the way founders think and behave.
When founders go through in-person batches, they're usually significantly different by the end of the batch - tougher, savvier, and more formidable. Whatever causes that did not translate well to zoom.
3). In-person YC is simply more fun. YC has always been in part about being fun experience, because startups need to be fun or they'd be too difficult and demoralizing. Zoom is very effective for communicating information, but no one has fun at Zoom parties.
> YC is more similar to going to college than working at a company.
The 3 ways you mentioned are also critical for a successful company.
1. Strong connections: you want to make strong connections in your company. That is what your network is and those connections help you in countless ways like referrals, job search or mentorships.
2. A company with "tougher, savvier, and more formidable" employees can wipe the competition against a company who doesn't have this kind of workforce. If zoom didn't work for YC to foster this, then why do you think it will do the trick for companies?
3. More fun - I really prefer a workplace which is fun than the one which is not. A fun workplace also helps with stronger connections with colleagues (#1).
My actual experience also aligns with these observations. In-person workplaces really produced stronger connections, more fun and better/stronger teams. Fully remote companies simply never had that level of camaraderie.
I've come to the same conclusion - having thoroughly enjoyed remote work for the first ~year of Covid, I realized it was a net negative on many long-term aspects I valued.
I do believe remote work can "work" - so can four day work weeks (probably even three day) and many other arrangements. Companies and individuals can do it and not go bankrupt.
But I think to reach your fullest potential as a team/company/unit, you simply need to spend a lot of time together. If you don't want to reach your full potential, then that's a choice you can make.
Whereas in any thread about WFH it seems that 95% of HN has concluded that remote just really is the best. Case close. No further study needed. The only reason to think otherwise is corporate greed.
I suspect that people in both the main "sides" have decided what they'd prefer, either for their own individual interests, or some gut feel about what's better for the organization. And people feel threatened by moves against what they've decided.
(Disclosure: I'm pro-WFH overall, or, ideally, my own version of hybrid. I can see some benefits to some uses of in-person. I can also see WFH problems that still need creative solutions. I'm also aware that, in dialogue around this, some other people might not be playing the same game of nuance and problem-solving.)
Asking me to come into the office extends my workday by three or four hours, and when I’m at the office and not collaborating it’s just a stream of distractions; constant motion in my peripheral vision, people on calls, it’s a busy place!
From my perspective WFH saves me so much time, money, and stress that I’d be insane to not insist on it. Why would I read a study that doesn’t take my perspective into account?
WFH saves me tens of thousands a year. Any conversation that ignores the financial impact of return to office from my point of view is worthless.
Pre-covid, and this WFH/RTO conversation, the focus was on hating the open office floor plan, which does suck, I agree ... The most repeated anecdote was how you're coding, in zen, and someone taps you on the shoulder or starts talking, and the entire day is lost. Thus, the alternative was to have your own office, like at Stack Overflow.
I don’t know much about YC but I do know it isn’t a regular working environment. It’s a lot more intense and hands-on, qualities which indeed tend to be better in-person.
It’s also for only 11 weeks. Other companies probably want to be always be intense and hands-on and have the YC atmosphere, but that’s actually a terrible way to manage a company, a recipe for getting everyone to burnout and quit, and even if people stay after awhile the intensity will cool off.
I don’t doubt YC is better in-person, but also that your typical boring company is better remote.
I can believe that seeking advice from angels works better in person, but it’s not evidence that writing code works better in person than on the Maker’s Schedule.
YC doesn't exactly need to do double-blinded controlled studies to come to some conclusions.
I'm sure they get lots of feedback from the companies in a batch, not to mention the partners' own assessments of how things work. It seems entirely reasonable to me then, after they did have different sessions with different configurations, to point to particular points and say "in-person just worked way better".
Is this a serious question? For one thing, every founder will obviously know whether they are in-person or not, so it's not even possible to do a single-blind study.
I think it's always going to be an emotional/tribal thing. Some people are wired more socially and get value from the bustle and serendipity of an office, some people prefer to be more alone in their comfort zone.
What do you have in mind for a quantitative assessment?
You can make an argument in the other direction too - prove that WFH is better than RTO, or else we should return to the default that modern society has worked in for the massive majority of our history. There is not reliable data on either side - some of the most important things are also incredibly hard to measure. Will company X do better choosing C++ or Rust? Static or dynamic typing? These questions aren't easily answerable with a study.
I'm certain CEOs of FAANG are looking at stats to make these decisions. And what many WFH diehards miss is that your (or my) individual productivity is irrelevant, because all that matters is the output of the company as a whole. I can work really efficiently on the wrong thing and/or not spend time helping others in a way that my overall output for the company, not myself, is worse vs. in-office.
I am not surprised by that. Fully remote zoom based interaction only works for those who work in a silo and do not need much social interaction to get their job done. Some like a mid-senior software engineer. But many other roles really need social interactions and in-person time.
I have family members in SV who have started their own startup. Talking to them, "founder" seems to be a roll which needs a lot of social interactions and they are constantly networking. Right from raising money to making the first hires to finding the first customers. So no wonder YC batch finds in-person to be the best experience.
I did YC in w23 which was a hybrid batch (talks and office hours on zoom with weekly SF events). Speaking for myself, most of the value was in the in-person events and not the zoom talks. Talking to alumni from the fully remote batches, it's clear that they missed out on a big part of the YC experience.
They are not saying it is best in all circumstances. They are strictly saying it is best for a small startup. IE. it is best for the short term, sloppy business of getting a tech startup off the ground. This makes some sense to me as everything is less structured in a startup and remote work really does better when there is more structure in place and quality is more important.
To put it another way... In-person is best for the business in the short term and detrimental to their long term but it is a sacrifice startups make as they have no long term without the short term success so just punt all the long term stuff until they've made it that far.
It was determined the same way FAANG, Banks, and others have determined in-person is best: "haha, the economy is slowing, get back to the office you F*(&# losers".
Absolutely breathtaking level of cynicism from executive class that as soon as interest rates went up, hiring market cooled, and the power balance between workers & bosses swung back their way, suddenly in-office was "most productive".
100% vibes and "because we say so / we can get away with it".
I can’t speak for YC or FAANG management but as a regular software engineer I totally get where they’re coming from. I worked at a FAANG company through and after covid, the difference in teams productivity was noticeable. Not in the remote working favour.
I understand some people are more productive at home but I’m yet to see a _team_ that is more productive being remote. I lack the experience working in remote-first companies like gitlab though.
Depends on the project type and part of the lifecycle. Also depends on the team composition and office structure.
In my career I've generally been on teams spread across 3 continents and sit in open floorplan offices surrounded by other loud teams. So I commute into the office to be collocated with at-best 1/3 of my team, surrounded by unrelated noise.
In some ideal state where we were 100% in the same city, sat in a dedicated pod area without so much commotion & distraction, in-office might be great. I've never experienced this.
Even in that ideal state, it may likely turn out ideal team productivity happens at 3-4 days in-office, as there's time for coordination and then time for deep quiet work.
The top-down, C-suite level dictates are not based on what's most productive.
Oh, I've seen a team get completely obliterated by moving back to in person, even though everyone really did live in the same city and with reasonable commutes.
This was a startup, that had one big problem: a CEO that believed he was better than any and all of his workers at what the workers did. He also believed that collaboration was important, as through discussion, everyone would agree that he was right all along. You can imagine how unhealthy someone like that can be.
In a remote world, dealing with problem people is easier. The amount of acting one has to perform lowers. The lower visibility also allows people to self organize: Ignore coworker A as much as necessary, yet pair all day with coworker B, who is useful. Is someone very loud, or getting into other people's business? Being far from each other can help!
It didn't take 8 weeks in-office for all the coping that people were doing to become clear to everyone in the company. A CEO that was manageable via short interactions became an unavoidable thorn into the company's side, as remoteness covered their weaknesses. An open office didn't help matters. Everyone that wasn't a founder knew this was all untenable and quit.
So a team can definitely be far more productive being remote, as remoteness mandates far less gelling. Local conflict often has explosive results. People you dislike become far more tolerable. And really, every company ends up getting people like that, and sometimes chooses them over those that are team builders: I've seen my fair share of horrible managers that cost a company money in supposedly high performance, well known companies, and I have yet to see one getting a Pip out of it.
Sure. I have neither proper data nor a solution that would satisfy everyone. I left my comment only to show a dissenting voice in the HN engineering crowd. Someone reading HN might be under the impression WFH is universal choice of engineers. It’s not, some of us hate remote work.
I dunno, this thread seems to be a bunch of RTO hardos & CEO apologists. It does feel like some have begun to enjoy the taste of boots now that the job market has turned, but thats just my opinion.
I imagine the actual reason is the complete opposite of everything you said except for 'vibes'.
Just cause you can't imagine why anyone would care about being in person doesn't mean the only remaining reason is a greedy powertrip. You're just not being sufficiently imaginative.
Sure for a bootcamp or intensive project or whatever, in-person can have benefits.
For juniors and mentorship and whatever, sure helps there too.
But the lingering question is...
Why is it that everyone was super cool with hybrid & remote, even past COVID danger, but as soon as FAANG had massive layoffs we went from 2days to 3days to majority back in office at many tech companies?
And the east coast bank/fund/finance tech companies quickly dragged everyone else back to the office as soon as we all stopped quitting for FAANG jobs?
I can think of plenty of decent reasons that might be true? For instance perhaps over time a fully remote company, unless it employs mostly a certain type of very driven self motivated person, slows down and loses any semblance of a culture the longer it works remotely? That was certainly my experience.
Or perhaps all the managers, typically fairly extroverted people, get more depressed over time the longer their daily social interactions are just on video calls.
Or perhaps over time it's found that new hires do worse and worse without an office to bond with others in and a culture to absorb.
Etc. No shortage of plausible reasons.
Perhaps these companies were remote for a while because a lot of people were loud and annoying about it, and now a lot of them are quietly backpedaling to avoid offending the people who love it while reclaiming the benefits of an office?
Perhaps! I don't know. You'd have to ask them. One thing is for sure: there are a lot of plausible reasons besides 'evil'.
Zero Interest Rate Policy. Describes the US Federal Reserve interest rates for much of the last 20 years or so. Since interest rate to borrow is near zero, investing in very marginal businesses can be profitable.
On this thread - there's a VC guy I follow on twitter who otherwise sounds like a decent guy, but as the tech job market was collapsing ~9 months ago was literally posting "suits suits suits".
Aka - the old Wall St saying that when the economy turns and labor loses power, casual Fridays go out the window and everyone is back to wearing suits.
So I do think that the debate is all kayfabe. There is no data.
They really see remote/hybrid as just an accommodation like allowing jeans, paying for your lunch, or having yoga classes on site... and look forward to cutting it at any time of their choosing, when they can get away with it.
It’s easier to make blanket rules than do performance mgmt for managers.
If data shows some % of the company has been completely slacking off with WFH (or over employed etc) you could either hold mgmt accountable (but how? Fire all VPs for letting that happen? Fire all line managers?) or just make blanket policies…
That line of management of management is allowing incompetence to fester.
My spouse is at a shop that keeps ratcheting up the RTO days “because people aren’t abiding by the current RTO days”.
This of course is idiotic because the shirkers don’t get punished and everyone ends up worst off. In fact the people already complying are worst effected.
If you can’t count on managers to enforce rules then why have managers or rules?
I agree your question is relevant, but the problem is do directors want to acknowledge that the level below them is incompetent at performance mgmt at a small granularity? Because what does that say about them?
We all quit our jobs, and my co-founders moved to from Atlanta to SF for the summer, we rented a big house as a live/work space, and drove together to Mountain View the required few times a week. We went to a lot of optional things together like additional office hours, parties, meetups, together and in person.
That level of commitment and pretty much daily face to face working time is powerful.
It's not possible for everyone given circumstances, and its not sustainable forever. But that means that the teams that can and do opt into a summer like this are very committed to their idea.
So it's not hard to imagine it's "better" to relocate for a stretch of something hard like getting a business off the ground than doing it all fully distributed.
This. People underestimate physical proximity while doing challenging things together. This has been a core human glue for millenia. One of the reasons I still recommend people to go to university. There is simply no substitute for this.
YC would have me leave my family behind for an extended period of time. The unspoken YC mantra is that startups are for the young, relatively well off, and unattached. The fact that many accelerators globally follow the YC template means that this particular type of route to learning and launching are closed to many people.
So yeah, it isn’t possible for many, if not most people. I’m not a fan of the model.
I mean, we all make choices and sacrifices. Having a family is a serious commitment. There's a limited amount of time in everyone's day, you can't commit yourself to everything, and I think it's reasonable that starting a startup a la YC requires a lot of commitment (that's their model and principles, there's plenty of other opportunities out there). Being an astronaut is closed off to a lot of people because they didn't fully commit themselves to it, that's just how it goes.
> Having a family is a serious commitment. There's a limited amount of time in everyone's day, you can't commit yourself to everything
Comparing “move to another city (or country) for three months” with “there is a limited amount of time in everyone’s day” is a rather disingenuous way to frame the discussion. You make it sound like it _must_ be a zero-sum game when it doesn’t have to be.
The YC (and by extension, all YC-like) model comes across more as a system of selection and control for a specific demographic that has little to do with potential for success.
I mean, if everyone's copying them, it's hard to argue that they haven't hit on something that works better than the known alternatives.
Have people tried remote accelerators? If they're viable and competitive then they should have no problem flourishing, especially given the apparent number of WFH diehards. Honestly I wouldn't bet on it.
What if you want to be an actor, or a comic, or a filmmaker? You basically have to move to LA or NY. There are lots of opportunities that require very large commitments. You can think of your commitments, hobbies, routines, each on average occupying a certain percentage of your day. Having a kid is a huge one. Doing a hustle growth startup is another. Is it really reasonable to try and do both at the same time? One or both will suffer.
> it's hard to argue that they haven't hit on something that works better than the known alternatives.
Does it work better though? Barring some statistical outliers such as unicorns, VC backed startups from accelerators don’t measurably do better at all for the founders.
> What if you want to be an actor, or a comic, or a filmmaker? You basically have to move to LA or NY.
So, actors only work in […checks notes…] LA or NY?
This kind of egregious reductionism as support for the idea that a startup can only be successful if you dedicate your entire life to it to the exclusion of literally everything else (family, hobbies, “routines” - whatever that may mean) is not giving me the feeling that you are interested in a meaningful discussion, this is more like reddit point-scoring, which is not interesting, so I’m leaving it at this.
What is the meaningful distinction between "many accelerators globally follow the YC template" and "everyone's copying them"?
Does it work better though? Barring some statistical outliers such as unicorns, VC backed startups from accelerators don’t measurably do better at all for the founders.
Ok, then what's the problem? Just don't do it, easy. You started this off by lamenting that they ask for too much of a commitment, now you're saying that they don't really add value. I'm not sure what argument you're driving at.
"Egregious reductionism"? Who's point-scoring again? That sentiment about e.g. Hollywood is pretty widespread conventional wisdom. Can you make it elsewhere, sure, but that's beside the point. My point is that there are certain jobs and opportunities that require a lot of commitment and giving up of other things, and that closes them off to a lot of people, but that's ok. You've avoided making any argument against that by nitpicking and shifting your argument.
Nobody is stopping anybody from living a family life in the suburbs and starting a VC backed startup in their spare time. Be a rebel, buck the trend, prove 'em wrong! But maybe understand that there may be some truth to the idea that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage in an already tough environment, and that getting a bunch of people together in the same room and grinding actually does have value, it's not just toxic YC bro culture or whatever.
exclusion of literally everything else (family, hobbies, “routines” - whatever that may mean)
Routines are things like brushing your teeth, showering, sleeping; eating may even be considered a routine. You have a very real time budget you have to balance. You seem unwilling to accept this. Go ahead, do it all, I wish you luck!
> You make it sound like it _must_ be a zero-sum game when it doesn’t have to be.
The core hypothesis is that the startup team should be working in person to be more effective. If one doesn't agree with that, they have a great market opportunity - start "YC, but fully remote". YC is not going to compete there it seems.
Right, look at conferences, MBA programs, etc. There are/were "remote" options but they essentially have no value, it was just a placeholder we tried. Some kinds of work can be remote of course. But learning and networking only really works in person.
It’s harder to do because we aren’t used to it but I attended a really well done Zoom mixer in 2021 that was absolutely amazing and didn’t great job. It almost felt like I was in person honestly.
People aren’t used to changing their norms so quickly. This is what the real issue is
I can see in person being "Better" for the novelty factor of people moving out to SF. But if they're doing 4 autonomous groups anyways, having groups spread out in different places would be an interesting experiment.
I do wonder what percent of YC companies force moves to SF. If a bunch of those people are moving anyways, running a batch in some other city (hell, Seattle or NY is surely filled with decent stuff) would be interesting. And on the YC-side, moving out somewhere for 3 months might give them their own novelty bonus as well.
In person is better because the latent bid for tech workers has gone down, and now they feel comfortable demanding we all come back to the office. It's as simple as that.
Since you don't seem to be getting the point, let me break it down to you - you seem to realize that a marriage needs regular in-person interaction to make it work. Also, co-founding a company is another relationship where regular in-person interaction is needed to make it work. YC data seems to indicate that.
I will never, and I repeat, never, return to working in an office. My quality of life since going fully remote is through the roof, and my employer is every bit as happy with my work now as they ever were.
Is that the same for cofounders of companies though (because that's what YC is for, not for employees necessarily)? Seems like being in the same hacker house or area is quite useful to them in a way which wouldn't be for regular employees. I'd work remotely as an employee too but I'd much rather work in person with my cofounders.
I’m a huge fan of remote first companies, but when Jared speaks, I listen. I’d love to know more of any specific lessons learned or observations made that lead to this conclusion
YC is a one-trick-pony. If you have a simple product, it can guide you to get users, investors and to scale it up.
But don’t expect anything else. It would not help, if you are outside of that scenario. It easily can screw you, by using any product ideas that you’ve refined and sharing these freely with a relevant startup in the batch.
Yes. Took the idea, website, etc, down to the name. Planted on a team of “founders”, who grabbed 10M from VCs. They took it to some place in Texas to die.
Was pretty annoying to watch, because it was quite clear that the idea was too early to try productizing YC-style at the time. It was essentially “code understanding” with early transformers, buck in 2017. But YC tried turning this into a product, while it was time to do foundational research.
YC application, interview and then noticed a company in that batch popping out with what took half a year to distill on the product side of the project.
Again, the lesson - it is important to understand that YC is specializing on a particular way of bringing up a startup.
That doesn't really mean anything, speaking as someone who also interviewed for YC recently. It could just be a confluence of ideas, or that your product isn't really that unique. It doesn't mean they're "stealing" ideas, and even if they are, so what? It's gonna happen as soon as you go to market, so you're gonna have to deal with it sometime. More likely, though, is that no one will actually give a shit about your product and you have to beg them to care, which is what YC themselves say.
Possible. But batches are relatively small. When you see a copycat appearing in the same batch of your interview (and interview was a not a direct reject, there were follow up calls).
There is a difference between “an idea” versus investment of a few months of prototyping and market research that goes into distilling an approach to a product.
You can simply multiply going salary of the professional that us doing it onto the time spent. And then get a rough estimate of the value of that IP.
When a startup goes to a VC there is inevitably a transfer of that IP to the VC. And the transfer is unidirectional, until a partner invests their capital and time.
Huh? The founders created these companies. YC just convinced these founders to give away a big share of their companies for almost nothing, in return for cult lulz. Accelerators are exploitative.
> It's a beautiful space with an incredible history - it's where the US built battleships for WWI and WWII.
Pretty sure this plays fast and loose with the history of American naval warfare. The only battleship built in San Francisco, that I can think of, is the 19th-century relic USS Ohio.
I don’t think, strictly speaking, that the US built any battleships _for_ WW2. It built a few _during_ WW2, but they’d have been ordered before the US joined the war. The last battleship ever built anywhere in the world was commissioned in 1946; WW2 was very much the moment that people realised “wait, these aren’t actually very useful anymore”.
This is off topic, but it’s crazy to me that the current incarnation of Twitter still seems to be the communication platform of choice for a good portion of the tech community. Presumably Jared still considers it to be the best way to share this information despite the fact that the app is so user hostile. Even using nitter to bypass these restrictions, we’re still breaking a paragraph into separate posts, as if sharing text longer than a sentence on the intent is a something we need to handle in a piecemeal fashion.
At a time when I can use ML algorithms to create beautiful images from a simple description, Twitter feels positively prehistoric. And yet the people investing in the bleeding edge continue using smoke signals to reach their audience. It’s remarkable.
The "tedious recipe blogs that require so much scrolling" usually first start with an emotional story about how the dish reminds the author of their childhood, which is included (presumably) to milk SEO and also annoy readers, followed by a recipe with maybe one photo.
This is a recipe with short (but not one-liners) yet helpful instructions, including images of how the cooking process would work.
Only available for those paying. And since paying means you get a badge and thus grouped together with cryptobros and rightwing nutjobs and gave Musk money, few people pay for it even when they might have wanted to.
People like to complain about X's (née Twitter) format, but isn't it possible that X is a good medium _because_ of the restrictions put on the format? Each paragraph needs to make a salient point in 280 characters or less. Personally, I like the direct prose that results from this restriction.
Twitter is an anti-democratic platform. No one should be using it, period. Twitter acts as a megaphone for sensationalism, extremism and other click-bait ism's. If there is no alternative, just don't use it.
As for bleeding edge people using it, if someone is still using this platform they lose all credibility with me.
If (you are democrat ) read above post
If (you are not democrat ) Twitter is great!
If (you are female ) Twitter is sexist
If (well you get the picture ) ...
Ok, then suggest some other platform that has the network effects of an existing large audience?
Technology matters far less than network effects. Not saying it doesn't matter at all, but you have to overcome the audiences stickiness to a platform first.
One tweet link to a blog post on the YC blog? Yeah, sure, there will be some drop off bc people don't click out of the app, but most people not on twitter can't even read this content anymore without workarounds.
It's worse than that, Elon reduces the reach / promotion of tweets that contain external links. Except for users following you, it's difficult to reach a wider audience if you include a link.
Twitter did that long before Elon. Most social platforms downrank external links and have for years. That’s why all media startups basically died over the past 6 years.
It’s ridiculous how long a character limit based on text messaging has persisted on that platform and also helped ruin human communication across the globe. It’s just one of those weird butterfly effect moments that aliens would shake their heads at.
On one hand, this suggestion stands in opposition to HN rules (link to source) but on the other is more reasonable as linking nitter provides viewer with more information, as an addition to single post that non-registered Twitter users would be able to see.
Considering HN is a YC thing, the useful feedback at this point might be that X isn't the best outlet to reach audiences anymore, and maybe they should post it somewhere else.
It is like suggesting that the link on a paywalled article be changed to an archive link without the paywall. That isn't the way HN has decided to operate.
Instead, users get taught to visit the comments first and upvote a comment with that link.
> Before covid, founders often asked us to run YC remotely so that they would't have to move to SF to participate. We never did…[we feel justified in our decision]
Completely ignoring the founders who still have to move, apparently?
And not the most elegant display of the power dynamic between investors and founders, to put it mildly. Note that this self selects for people able and willing to jump through hoops for their investors.
It's just 3 months. Before cellphones went mainstream, most people used to travel and simply disappear from their families for years. This need to be in constant communication with everyone back home is a phenomenon that just started in the 2000s
I mean, if one thinks this is going to filter out a lot of otherwise great founders, then they have a great opportunity - start "YC, but fully remote".
COVID having forced you to be remote is not enough to validate this constant preaching from SV leadership (and only leadership - no one without millions in equity ever lobbies for this) that nothing can replace in person.
The fact that Paul Graham compares it to communism is fitting for so many reasons.
I often highlight that every claim of +X% "productivity" with RTO is based on an implicit assumption that the commute is uncompensated, and that employees will eat all the costs (man-hours, fuel) of coming into the office.... At least for a few quarters, until angry people leave for closer or better-paying jobs.
So we've got (A) a misleading "productivity" metric sometimes being used to rationalize (B) one-sided policies which are (C) not sustainable in the long term anyway.
I've always wondered how modern cities would look if employers had to bear partial responsibility for the commute. Would we see a lot more mixed housing around the place? Would transit be much better?
IMO that's not really about commute-costs as much as about bargaining-power, labor relations, and competitive markets.
Commute costs are kind of like inflation: In the very long term it's balanced by wages... but there's a lot of living that happens at shorter timescales. The longer before the situation is renegotiated, the more time one side has to exploit the imbalance.
First week? Had a fever, didn't go in.
Second week? Went in 2 days. Had too much shit to do to worry about office crap.
Third week? Also 2 days. There were less than 10% of the desks filled on both days I went.
Going real smooth. And I guarantee you that every single person who is actually going into the office is counting commute time against their working hours.
Without commenting on all the complex dynamics of WFH vs the office, I can say that I, personally, enjoy working in the office more. I am an individual contributor software engineer, without millions in equity in anything.
Wow, even the bleeding edge, move fast and break things, disruptive crowd has reaffirmed one tradition: "in-person is the best." I think this settles it. WFH is less productive.
No, it only reaffirms, if anything, that fast moving startups benefit from in-person relationship, guidance and communication with peers more than they would over Teams.
Not really. It doesn't tell us anything except the opinion of a partner. Has S23 resulted in more successful startups, happier founders, higher valuations than W19, S20, W20, S21, W21, S22, and W22? There's no elaboration.
> For some problems? 15 minutes with a whiteboard. There’s no good e-replacement.
People say this, but FigJam or even Microsoft Whiteboard work fantastically for this if you've equipped your team with the right hardware. I often sit down with people and noodle through problems on an iPad (and for me at least the Pencil is required) with FigJam in a low-friction manner.
I really disagree. Figjam is mildly ok, though I suppose if my company had been willing to give the team better tools it might have worked better? I still think there’s something irreplaceable about standing around the board in person to discuss/draw. Even the hovering pencil/cursor stuff just doesn’t work as well, IMO, as standing there and pointing at things/connections.
I’m certainly not going to make my team move to my city and rent an office for those meetings, but getting together a few times a year can allow for solving some tough/intractable problems much more easily/efficiently.
> Figjam is mildly ok, though I suppose if my company had been willing to give the team better tools it might have worked better?
I think FigJam is pretty bad with a mouse and keyboard, honestly. It wasn't until I started using it with an iPad that it made sense to me and it wasn't until I got other people doing it that it was actually any good at all. It also suffers if you have the sort of group that needs a facilitator for these kinds of processes--I had a PM who had formerly been at Figma and their process for trying to get people to use it at the new job hurt me physically.
(The funny thing is, while I do like FigJam I don't like Figma at all; I am an Illustrator man and will be until I blow away like dust in the wind.)
> I’m certainly not going to make my team move to my city and rent an office for those meetings, but getting together a few times a year can allow for solving some tough/intractable problems much more easily/efficiently.
I agree with this, FWIW, but not for the problem-solving aspect at a whiteboard. I use it for the sticky, annoying people-y problems where you do lose something over a teleconference connection when dealing with most people. (Some folks I've worked with, like me, have an on-camera background and can project effectively over teleconferences; most can't.)
So the secret to working effectively is passive aggressive nonverbal cues and interrupting people frequently who may be busy doing something else and weren’t expecting an impromptu meeting?
Has the physical world discovered how to replay past conversations where important decisions were made? Has it become socially acceptable to have long silences of 5-10 minutes while people formulate thoughtful replies in a conversation?
I’ve literally never seen a meeting grind to a halt like that. Instead, meetings are full of half-baked ideas, and I sometimes notice show-stoppers hours later when it’s quiet.
Maybe not in the middle of a meeting but Amazon commonly has the first half of a meeting (I've experienced as long as 20 mins) to read a document by the host altogether silently before starting. People commonly would add comments during this time.
At google, doc reading is done before the meeting along with comments/replies, but during a design review, the host will go through each comment and then open a live discussion if needed.
Both of these formats allow for productive meetings but it does require a culture to support it and people to write down their thoughts ahead of the meeting and share it around.
those don't convey nonverbal communication, and they are so unstructured that they interrupt too frequently
there's something positive about setting time on the calendar and then sitting down with someone (or a group of people) to talk about a specific subject that we've all prepared for. yes, you can do that with Zoom, but then you miss the ability to speak simultaneously and the body language / nonverbal.
not everything should be a meeting, but not everything should be IM / phone calls either. being able to mix and match is what makes in-person somewhat positive (even if I personally prefer a hybrid model)
It reads fine to me. Is it really all that technical? It’s just a variable. People with basic math skills with figure out what this means easily. Even if it was technical, the author is also working in a technical space, so technical speak seems par for the course.
