Are Y Combinator startups less Ambitious?

This is a rather unfounded claim without any data. Seems like a troll post.

Yeah, certainly this is a troll post. I have been analyzing certain posts on various sites ever since I read that article by Paul. This one certainly doesn't have any base or any analytical data to question Y Combinator startups. This guy surely looks forward to pull unnecessary attention to his post.

Sounds like a reasonable question, with a perfectly logical explanation. A reasonable (if misguided) question.

Huge companies with huge success are very uncommon - that's why we can list them off the top of our heads. YC invests in a lot of companies, but not many in terms of the total number of startups in the world. So lets say that out of 10,000 startups, 1 gets huge (Google, Facebook, etc), 9 get big (Digg-sized). That's 1 in 1000. YC has invested in ~80 startups (call it 100 for easy math sake), which is 1% of the "market". 100 tries at 1 in 10,000 isn't great. Even if you say that YC companies are 10x more likely to succeed (not unreasonable given the training, motivation, selection bias, etc), 100 shots at 1 in 1,000 still isn't that good.

Becoming huge requires a lot of things - including luck and timing. No matter how much value YC adds, it can't add those two things. What it can do is increase 1) the odds of success and 2) the expected value of that success (0.1% chance of $1B, 99.9% chance of $0 isn't very appealing).

I think pg's goal isn't to create billionaires (although he wouldn't mind). His goal is to help smart hackers solve "the money problem" so they can have the freedom to pursue other productive pursuits they wish. Look at what he, rtm, and tlb have done since they sold Viaweb (Arc, YC, HN, Harvard prof, awesome homemade robots). None of that would have been done if they were working at Google for $110K/yr.

Trying to solve "the money problem" in a couple years shows an excess of ambition, especially since programmers earn decent coin in the corporate world.

So last month you had sex with your girlfriend 9 times. Where's the baby?

Same argument. No lack of ambition. Just give it time.

YC startups are like Moroccan restaurants. it is a four course meal and i takes 4 hours to eat diner. they start small, but by the time they serve the entree you have been prepared enough to know how to eat it right. (EDIT: plus throw in the belly dancers) If you have been following the YC startups you will surely get that what you see at launch is not what you get 9 months later. Just take a look at justin.tv. certainly when it launched you could be like wtf is them dudes thinking. why would i want to watch his life live when i got my own to worry about. off course a few months later you when they launch the live video streaming platform, you say "oops, i did not see that one coming" then they assault you every week with new features including mobile streaming then you are like "ok these guys saw something n months ago that i am just seeing now".

I think you might be mistaking a lack of blockbuster success (so far) for a lack of ambition. Sometimes success is what makes the company or person look ambitious after the fact.

If Google had not succeeded, it would be easy to say that they lacked ambition - they just tried a me-too search engine when Yahoo! and AltaVista were the titans. But Google caught fire and now, we all think they were audacious and ambitious to try what they did.

Ambition alone does not guarantee success: sort of a necessary-but-not-sufficient ingredient.

i won't say the startup are less ambitious because i think almost all of them wants to reach the level of success of google/facebook , but then it is all about your idea/product, team, execution, timing, funding, luck, mentoring, etc.

Also YCombinator is a king-maker but not every king can have huge empire and not everyone can become Alexander, though everyone would like to become one, but then they all have some kind of limitations which is sometimes is out of your control.

It's early yet. There are many YC companies building their business, and right on schedule for where they want to go. A large business takes several years to build. Some YC founders opted to go the faster path and sell early. They're not wrong for doing so. They're richer than the rest of us now, and have fat jobs at Google, Facebook, Conde Nast, etc. In a couple of years, they'll all be vested, and have a ton of cash. They can shoot for bigger success, or they can lounge around eating bon bons all day.

I'd say the level of ambition and the level of success is quite high with current YC companies. It's interesting how your assumption seems based on the notion that having YC backing makes success automatic, and all these guys need to do is be more ambitious and stick with it longer and they could all build the next Google, or even Digg. As pchristensen pointed out, the math doesn't back this idea at all. YC is a great benefit--it brings additional media, a lot of great guidance, and a lot of peers that you can lean on and ask for help from--but it's not going to make building a business magically easy, if you just have enough ambition.

There's plenty of me to go around.

[Sorry!]

Today's billion-dollar markets are not tomorrow's billion-dollar markets. Building a better Digg or Facebook today won't help you kill those companies. First, it would need to be an order of magnitude better to convince anyone to switch. Second, your innovation would need to be hard to duplicate. You might stand a chance if you found some way of positioning a startup for people who don't currently use the existing services, but that's a hard problem.

Predicting tomorrow's big markets is a harder problem. The existing big companies go after the big predictable opportunities with vigour and vast resources, leaving us to chase the unpredictable opportunities. Thus, we can't consciously chase the billion-dollar opportunities because we can only guess at their nature.

Saying that YC companies are less ambitious is like saying that an 18 yr old lacks ambition because he wants to go to college instead of trying to get a job as the CEO of IBM.

You go to YC to learn and to meet people. Generally our ideas aren't world shaking, but there is a reason for that. We're generally young and still trying to learn and gain experience. You wouldn't expect a YC startup to be a magic AI that can solve the world's problems. If you can do that...why would you need to go to YC? There is a different between a lack of ambition and a desire to learn.

YouTube is the only company in recent memory that got huge in the lifespan of the oldest YC companies. Many companies can grow beyond what you initially see, so I would call your estimate of 3 potential huge companies a lowball.

Ambition can and does expand with time, so you have to give it time. Microsoft is a classic example. It started off with an interpreter for BASIC. No one could have said within 20 years later that company would reach the very top of the IT industry.

When I started out, my first objective was to put food on the table, be self-sufficient. I have grown a bit more ambitious since ... :-)