I find it almost impossible to not see them as related. Take a look at [0]. Long-term this could be a good decision, I believe early-stage investing really is different to late-stage investment, but of course the moment to make this decision makes it evident there are other factors at play that influence this.
Hmm, that does make sense. The other comment here said that this kind of change is almost impossible to happen is such as short amount of time, which makes sense. Maybe they were already planning for a change in strategy by the new CEO, and this just happened to be an appropriate time to get done with the change already.
edit: Oh well the other commenter was the new CEO LOL, not used to reading usernames. I guess that adds a bit of bias but I believe it's a true statement.
I don't think the timing is random considering the climate. I have a feeling these seventeen will land softly compared to 99.9% of those caught up in recent layoffs.
"current down turn in risk assets" is almost as wonderful a phrase as "17 team members were impacted". The fact is that SIVB shares are now worth $0, and that many VCs and LPs were surely holding those can't be a total coincidence with today's "changes".
Sorry to everyone who lost their jobs. It can feel like the end of the world and your worth. But I’ve seen throughout my career people land somewhere better. Someone once wise told me the most important saying in the world is “this too shall pass,” which applies to all things, good and bad.
I mean... not even, right? A "livelihood" is one's ability to make money in their career, not specific to an individual job. Surely these highly qualified people will find work elsewhere.
So it's really not worth getting dramatic about. It's sad, but such is life. I wish the best of luck to these folks, but I doubt they're in mourning. I'm sure the YC leadership is helping them figure out next steps as we speak.
Things like this are almost always traumatic regardless. We wrap ourselves and our identity in our jobs, especially ambitious and successful and highly qualified people. While objectively you’re right, it is still unnerving and unpleasant to have to find a new job and learn your contribution and value to the company was worth less than others. It’s also not the best job market for tech focused folk. I think it’s ok to feel sympathy for someone laid off.
The question is whether all families can sustain healthy and dignified livelihoods. And the answer is in fact they cannot.
By definition, a capitalist economy has a hard dependency on labor surplus. Remember when the Federal Reserve literally said they were raising interest rates to increase unemployment? That's why.
They couldn’t in Soviet Russia either. I also don’t consider livelihood synonymous with dignity. If you’re going to advocate, I’d fall on the UBI side before I fall on the “meaningless command economy labor for the sake of laboring”
where did this come from? The person you are responding to didn't say anything about Soviet workers. Also, having recently visited Cuba, while workers in a Communist society may not worry about layoffs, they still need second jobs in the black market to earn a living wage. I'm far from an expert in the Soviet Union but it seems crazy to use this as an excuse to shill the USSR
Heard a story on NPR about someone who recently went home to Cuba from Spain. Said that in the past people in Cuba would ask him to bring electronics (stuff they couldn't get in Cuba), but this time when he asked family back in Cuba what they wanted him to bring they said "Food". When he got there he picked up a hitch hiker on the drive from Havana to his home town (in the past this was very common and very safe). The woman advised him that really shouldn't pick up hitch hikers because they tend to rob you. She was a healthcare professional of some sort and said she had to do several side jobs just to survive.
I worked with a guy who came up as an engineer in the Soviet Union. Back around 2014 he was laid off from a US tech company that had moved him over from Russia. He couldn't wrap his head around it. Said that in the Soviet Union there was no such thing as a layoff. If they needed to shut down some program they'd move you to another one. The whole layoff was just extremely disorienting for him - especially since the company had moved him over here only a few years prior.
Exactly, the state spent a lot of money (and/or resources) to train an engineer it would be best to keep him/her working as much as possible. Here we lay highly trained engineers off and they could be idle for several months. Lots of disadvantages to central planning, but realizing that it's expensive to keep highly educated resources idle they would try to maximize their usage.
" highly educated engineers were paid like 100 rubles/mo, which is slightly above minimum wage."
I think it's kind of hard to quantify based on salary alone in a system like that. People in more prestige positions like engineers & scientists had access to things that others might not have: a better apartment, better schools for their kids, shops that had a better supply of goods.
That’s true. They gave the platitudes as millions starved while Stalin exported food and established the gulags and lay waste to civil society. Yay!
The religion bit is really off kilter, unless you think the impermanence of all things is merely a religious idea and not a fundamental aspect of all reality. After all impermanence didn’t apply in Soviet Russia? Oh yeah, it too passed. Guess not.
All modern societies implement brutal exercises in primitive accumulation. Capitalist nations just exported their brutality to the 3rd world. Was that noble of them? I'm not seeing your point. (See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_ca...)
"Impermanence" is not a religious concept, but the vagaries in these platitudes are. Nobody in a capitalist society can rationalize layoffs. The best we can do is rationalize not thinking about them, which is the purpose actually served by the platitudes. Religion does the same.
Well since by and large you weren't allowed to not work in the Soviet Union being "laid off" normally meant you were being shipped off to a labor camp or being executed.
Lets not pretend they didn't have millions in the gulags....
Unless you’re rich, you’re not allowed to not work in America either. Go ahead and try, you won’t last long. Even social support programs come with work requirements in some places [1].
Let’s not pretend America doesn’t currently imprison over two million people [2]. That’s where you end up if you’re poor and unlucky enough in America (being homeless is also criminalized in many places [3]).
> A dismissed worker shall receive a severance indemnity equal to the average monthly wage.
[...]
> In case of restructuring or liquidation of the enterprise, the worker while seeking employment, retains his or her average monthly wage for up to three months, taking into account the severance indemnity.
It shows that you have never lived in soviet union and happily eat communist fairy tales.
Soviet Workers were exploited and underpaid by state, there was no private property and almost no private sector.
Soviet Union employed highly educated PhD rocket scientists and paid everyone minimum wage, because there was no alternative.
Literally every scientist family had to grow their own potatoes and veggies at home/dachas in order to survive.
Can you imagine Harvard dean growing potatoes just to survive in cold winter months?
Cars were not available, you had to wait for 7 years to be allocated a slot to purchase a vehicle.
Almost no selection of consumer products, everything was DIY, because the only good thing Soviet State was capable of - is building tanks and rockets (that are currently being destroyed by Ukraine Armed Forces)
Also wanted to add: never forget that “the law of averages” is our friend when this happens. It ensures that there is always a good chance to lend somewhere if one keeps trying (submitting applications and giving interviews).
Is "impacted" the euphemism of the 2020's? In the past I've seen "affected", but maybe that's passé now. So hard to keep up with all the progress in our language ...
I’m not sure why YC is an example of something that has scaled well. There’s so many companies now in each batch with 95%+ never amounting to much success. It’s not clear how the scale is helping anyone.
I will say that large % of the batches turn out to still be good companies later, sometimes much later. The journey of being a founder sets people up to do a lot more: YC alums are often great C-level executives at other fast growing startups, and/or just because their first startup doesn't work doesn't mean they don't go on to create great companies later.
The key thing about networks is Metcalfe's law: the power of a network is the square of its nodes. This is also what makes the Internet more and more valuable over time.
Those things together mean scale increases value for founders, and what we've learned is those effects are most potent early.
"indirectly bailed out" is not "bailed out". The US economy as a whole was "bailed out" by not having a cascading effect of bank failures, does that mean you were "bailed out" too? Are we just devaluing the term entirely?
Imagine thinking that billionaires actually bought SVB stock or held cash in there. Protip: their capital is tied up in dozens of companies, which were, indeed, bailed out.
> it has been given out for others to use, so again no, they were not bailed out
Uh, that's what wealthy people do -- they give money to other people to make them even more money. This was so transparently a billionaire bailout (Gary Tan & David Sacks were literally on a press tour), I fail to understand how people are so mesmerized by the shell game here.
...that's not what "bailout" means, a "bailout" can only happen before a bank collapses; SVB already collapsed, it cannot be bailed out, definitionally.
It's not a shell game, it's a fundamentally different situation where real people who are not billionaires are directly and immediately effected.
Further, there is not financial assistance in the form of "free money"; at best what will happen are loans to cover the difference between the available liquidity and the withdraws. The assets SVB once had will, upon maturity, pay for those loans with interest, and only then will investors be given a chance to recoup some of their investment.
I'm frankly fascinated by the abject cynicism by way of ignorance people think they can get away with on the Internet. Unreal...
> real people who are not billionaires are directly and immediately effected
Hard disagree on this. Startups die literally every day, not to mention that we just had tens of thousands of layoffs by big tech companies. In my view, this was a targeted bailout, meant to primarily protect the investment (into startups) of many Silicon Valley investment firms.
> only then will investors be given a chance to recoup some of their investment.
You're still harping on this "investors" thing, which is not even remotely related to my point. You can call me ignorant all day, but my point has zero to do with folks that bought SVB stock, and I'm not fully convinced you actually grasp that.
These aren't "startups that die" they're "businesses that did absolutely nothing wrong that die". Americans do not want to live in a world where a business can die through picking the wrong bank, full stop. Just because the investors in those startups don't get fleeced by a bank doesn't mean they're "bailed out".
And "startup" here is not "craps shoot on if it exists in a week" it's "a substantial percentage of businesses with VC backing in a general California geographic area but also across the country."
And yes, your point is flat wrong because you don't understand that a bailout is exclusive to investors in the direct company receiving financial support, which does not apply to the already failed SVB, nor does it apply to any depositors who are not receiving any additional money at all, just regaining access to their already existent funds.
You are misusing the word, so of course your point isn't making sense with the real definition of the term. I am convinced you don't actually grasp that.
> because you don't understand that a bailout is exclusive to investors in the direct company receiving financial support
Yeah, it's clear at this point that not only are you trying to play an annoying little semantic game, but to make things worse, you also have no material domain knowledge. For reference, a bailout explicitly does not serve investors, but rather immediate business counterparties.
From the second source: "A bailout occurs when the government
makes payments (including loans, loan guarantees, cash, and other types of
consideration) to a liquidity-constrained private agent in order to enable that
agent to pay its creditors and counterparties, when the agent is not entitled
to those payments under a statutory scheme."
> From the second source: "A bailout occurs when the government makes payments (including loans, loan guarantees, cash, and other types of consideration) to a liquidity-constrained private agent in order to enable that agent to pay its creditors and counterparties, when the agent is not entitled to those payments under a statutory scheme."
So literally not what happened, got it.
Of course you don't feel burdened by the meaning of words, but now at least anyone reading this will be aware that you don't know what "bailout" means, and that what happened in 2008 is nothing at all like what is happening now, and that was my goal. Mission accomplished.
Frankly David, you should know better. You've benefitted massively from these VCs already in your life, and at certain parts you would have been devastated to suddenly lose access to the very funds you're now advocating people be robbed of, but you clearly lack the ability to empathize with folks who want to travel a similar path to you.
Weirdly making things personal is often an indication of losing, not winning, an argument. Either way, I should know better than to get into debates with brand new anon accounts on HN. Cheers.
I am not VC but I think this is kinda apparent from the get go.
In early stage you are betting on and nurturing a small team with a full-of-hope business plan. They need relatively small bits of help that can go a along way. So both "who you are chosing among" and "how you are helping them" is very specific.
With bigger companies, the team and the business plan is more proven and they need help navigating size and scaling their offering - a very different set of people you are chosing from and what they need from you.
Id guess that YC has a much greater competitive moat in the former. It's much "easier" to do late stage investing - a few big transactions instead of many many small ones, and everyone's working with the same information.
Very few places have the infrastructure to deal with large volumes of start-ups + a lead flow of small companies trying to join YC, so there's no acquisition costs. Add to that, YC's experience with small start-ups compounds - they can probably predict start-up success way better than competitors at this point. That's almost certainly not true for late stage investing.
I would think having seed stage investments would offer additional late stage moat. My first thought was that the current down round later stage environment is squeezing a ton of common equity founders/execs. Its tough to be both founder friendly and investing at later stage prices that leave many startup execs low in equity/motivation.
A bunch of possibly clever, technically adept people hang out here even if they work for a bank or something equally dull. Some small percentage of them have a latest idea and also decide to explore pursuing it. Where to go?
Everyone here knows YC is one place. What else have you got? Anyone got a list? How do you find out about the people involved, like on a scale of x to y how shonky are they? etc.
I would guess taking over the slashdot space with some incremental improvement to that formula has created one hell of a pipeline that competitors struggle to match. Hence paying @dang full time here and whatever other costs there are associated.
> is so different that the success of YC in early stages doesn't translate
that's not a claim made in the article. It just said the late state was different enough to be a distraction from their core mission of being an early stage investor. A company with just an idea and 2 founders and nothing more is obviously very different from a company with many employees, a revenue stream and a long list of customers. It should be obvious how different that is.
It costs a lot more to invest in a late stage startup than an early stage one.
In the current economic climate they probably can't afford (or just don't want to risk) to invest large sums, while on the contrary can "take advantage" of early stage startups which will struggle more to get funding.
Well, for one, I imagine the "network" provided by YC is less valuable to late stage companies than it is to early stage, so YC probably found they were not able to bring as much value.
Second, the amount of capital needed to invest in later stages is much higher, and with companies delaying IPO, they would be tying up capital for much longer than they probably expected originally.
I have no insight into YC, this is just my guess as to how it is different.
My pithy observation - Early stage investors are fantastic at extrapolating from minimal data points. Late stage investors are fantastic at extrapolating from many noisy data points. They screw up because the methods for each of their extrapolation functions are entirely different, so much so that they manifest as cultural differences in investment firms.
More upside on the table if you get in early. It’s probably just not an efficient use of their time since the returns from gettin in early are so outsized.
Not privy to special information w.r.t. this change, but I can think of a few:
1. Breaking focus / competing on multiple fronts. Lots of firms specialize in A-stage or later. By investing in seed and later rather than just seed, the later stage firms see you as a "competitor" for, rather than a "supplier" of, early stage startups. You have that many more competitive relationships rather than cooperative ones.
2. LP fundraising. LPs have to make choices as to who to fund, especially in this economy. Later stage vetting, returns, etc are different than early stage. May not be worth the heavy lift of competing for LPs.
3. Specialization. Once you get into later stages, you get firms that specialize by industry vertical. Not just business (marketplace, fintech, hardware) but even within software (SaaS, dev tools, consumer, enterprise, etc). Might make it harder to make deals. You now have a multi-front problem where each potential counter-bidder for the deal lead has hyper specialization to the startup, whereas YC is a generalist by nature.
4. Competition for deal terms. Most of the time, the deal lead sets the terms. If you can't aggressively bid to lead deals, they may not get the best economy for each of the deals since the lead may have other priorities. This may produce less optimal returns vs just putting more money into seed.
5. Partner / investor preference. VCs compete for partners / investors. If partners in the late stage at YC are limited to only YC companies vs the whole late-stage market (or have other limitations), it may not work for them vs going to a firm with less terms.
Ultimately as a generalist investor, pre-seed/seed/A-and-later are very different markets. With interest rates this high and everyone being more picky, it becomes harder to outperform unless you can operate in that market independently. I suspect YC looked at a model for their returns and came to this conclusion.
All of Y Combinator startups try follow the same playbook: successfull exit, or successful IPO. YCombinator benefits from both.
Since most YCombinator startups never see any profit, late stage investment becomes a risky proposition since even "top YCombinator startups" lose billions of dollars a year, for years, with no path to profitability or recouping investments.
There's virtually no similarity between the two. They are completely different games.
Early stage investing – low cost, high risk of failure, high multiple return, you'll need to make a lot of bets so can cast a wide net, longer term (could be up to a decade or more before you see returns), no established business, so you are betting entirely on the founders.
Late stage investing – high cost, low risk of failure, low multiple return, you can only make a small number of bets so have to be more selective, shorter term, company already has a well-established business, and your decision will primarily be based on how well it is doing.
In an already difficult economic climate, it's heartbreaking to hear that these individuals will be impacted by this change in strategy. I hope that YC will do their best to support these team members during this transition.
That's great (from my sofa's PoV)! If your mission is to fund youngsters and we know the story about that bank from the Silicon valley so this is the best way to save some resources.
Does this also mean YC is killing off their YC Continuity Programs:
>> Series A Program: Help founders achieve the best possible outcome when raising a Series A via year-round workshops, fundraising guides and 1:1 support.
>> Post-A Program: Batches for YC startups immediately after their Series A to share best practices for growth: managing a board, building a team, key metrics for a Series B and more.
>> YC Growth Program: Graduate school for startups. We bring together cohorts of CEOs of rapidly growing YC companies to focus on the challenges of company building: the changing role of a CEO at scale, setting strategies and success metrics for the organization, hiring and managing great leaders, and more.
Sorry - the link in that thread is to a tweet, not the article the tweet links, which is what I wanted to link - that article indicates the partners leading the fund (and program) left YC.
I haven't heard specifics about those programs but with the partners leading gone it seems difficult to imagine them continuing - fair point though, no solid news.
Already linked to a source that shows the references to the programs are gone in my original comment; though that page is still there.
Also, might be wrong, but “theinformation.com” as a source is insta ban as a result of it being a “hard walled” content; hard walled meaning it’s not possible to access the content via alternative means. If you have a source that’s not blocked, feel free to provide it, otherwise just see this as promoting a source that’s ban on HN.
Here’s all the dead submissions, though you likely have to have “show dead” turned on from your profile settings:
Oof, I don't lurk here during work nearly as much as I used to - missed the memo about it being a banned source, do you have a link for that? In the past that source has unpaywalled articles specifically for HN readers so I'm saddened (but not really surprised) they decided to go for the full cashgrab.
Not really sure what you want here - the evidence of those programs being affiliated with YC has been scrubbed from the public web, do you not believe in Occam's Razor or are you waiting to find a quote delivered straight from Garry Tan's mouth on the question before you accept the likely conclusion from all evidence?
edit: either way, I don't have a second source - that article from theinformation is the only active story I've found that specifically names the partners leaving.
Oh, got it! Thank you for scrounging that up I was specifically looking for mention of that site, no wonder I didn't find it. Makes a ton of sense in general and it's lame we no longer get a special exception to their wall.
We comment on bans when people ask us! In this case, yes, it's banned because it's hardwalled, by which I mean there are no obvious workarounds. If that changes (including if they wanted to go back to the way we did it before - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35146525), we'll happily unban them since their articles tend to be good.
theinformation.com was de-walling (?) certain articles for HN when they would make HN's front page and we would specifically ask them. I thought it was a nice fit, but they eventually stopped responding to our emails. I never learned if that was a decision on their part or just churn inside the org (e.g. the person we originally arranged that with left).
You have to stop and think about what it really means. "Impacted" just means something happened. You have to do the legwork to get to "called into a meeting and fired."
Sometimes it's not for the company but for the person who was laid off.
To mean that the person was laid off but it wasn't their fault. It's their position that was impacted. Somehow.
Result the same but sentiment might be dulled a little. Not blaming the person but blaming external conditions that resulted in someone being made redundant.
Distancing. It lets people who make these decisions portray themselves as the helpless victims of the way things are, rather than people who have made choices that have led to this.
"The market says that we need to downsize" sounds a lot better than "an investment analyst says I go, or you go".
A number of reasons already discussed, but in person it has the “benefit” of slowing down (drawing out) bad news. It’s like string betting in poker, but it’s also a way of showing dominion over time (by burying the lede and making someone anxious.)
I actually believe he put out a 10/10 example of how this should be done. We all know what he meant, he was concise and then reminded you of the mission and that this is all about the mission.
If you’re laying people off, say it straight and with a backbone. The language is passive, weak and makes it sound like a mere consequence of a slight breeze upon a dainty leaf causing it to gently fall from a tree.
17 people lost their jobs. Likely many of those have families to feed, houses to uphold and bills to pay. In this economy, the same will likely happen to many of us and a statement like the above would feel like a punch to the gut.
The uppercut that follows is:
> we want to acknowledge and express our appreciation for their substantial contributions.
Saying you want to acknowledge and express something is not the same thing as acknowledging and expressing something. A statement would struggle to get more generic than this.
They're not quite the same, those two terms have taken on different meanings. "Fired" has come to mean "for cause", and "laid off" has come to mean "not for cause".
A furloughed employee has the expectation that employment can resume with the company, while a laid off employee does not. This is important for tax and other legal considerations.
This very much depends on where you are. For example in the UK a lay off technically means being told to stay at home because there isn't enough work [1], although it's often used these days to mean "fired without cause", i.e. the American usage of lay off has become more common and it has simultaneously became common to use the term "furlough" to describe layoffs during the pandemic.
My hunch is that the evolution was driven by executives, probably in the 70s and 80s, that didn’t want to say they were firing people in order to make more money.
In other words the same dynamic that now leads to ‘impacted’.
In the UK they have the term "redundancy" (as in "your position has been made redundant"). Can't see that term catching on in the US but it does cover the use of "laid off" to mean "the company chose to eliminate the position I worked in rather than choosing to get rid of me as a person", and thus may carry less stigma.
Some members of my family (back in the day) used to be laid off from positions seasonally, and were then rehired the next year.
I suspect that in its early versions, it referred more to the notion that "we won't have any more work until the spring, so we'll see you then."
I don't know its etymology or when it might have been coopted by employers who didn't intend to rehire, but I suspect its intent is to signal that there's no ill will between the employer and the employee, and that it WOULD rehire those impacted persons in the future.
I'm not as sure that it means anything so specific now.
Manufacturing can still work like this (and maybe other industries?). You're laid off every now and then, if work slows down, but with the expectation (possibly contractually—many of these have unions) that you'll be brought back when work picks back up. AFAIK they can collect unemployment during the lay-off, so it's better than being kept on with much-reduced hours.
It’s the opposite: they started out distinct, but then, by the euphemism treadmill, became used interchangeably.
And if you go back even further it meant something even milder, like furloughed or terminated with the intent to rehire when expected business picks up.
It depends on the listener's relationship with the person in question.
If you're on the receiving end, then that model and the act done to you are irrelevant.
If someone is applying for a job and they tell you "I was fired from my last job" vs "I was laid off from my last job", that changes your perspective on them.
Having terms that distinguish whether or not it's "for cause" are a useful language feature.
Depends on the circumstances. I associate “fired” with a negative reason (e.g. performance, theft, harassment). “Laid-off” doesn’t carry the same connotation.
I think of it more like the protagonist (or antagonist, one could argue) of a movie holding on to the hand of someone (employee) about to fall off of a cliff (the descent, ultimately, to poverty and homelessness) just to make the metaphor as vivid as possible.
Playing around at the online etymology dictionary, it appears dismiss is the oldest—early 15th century. Sack and fire are from the 19th century, and laid off in this sense isn’t until the 1960s. Terminate, as in dismiss from a job, is first attested in 1973.
Fired still semi-exists. Let go seems to show up for insufficient performance, e.g. semi-amicable “it’s not working out”. Fired shows up when somebody really screwed up, e.g. laws were broken or products failed.
Fifteen years ago I remember my last employer saying in a division meeting that they had "reallocated a number of roles to the mobility pool". A round of confused "what's that then" from more or less all present forced them to be less euphemistic.
When there's a PR person involved, truth goes away, double-speak comes in. Even in the case of YC, which in general is way better than most other organizations.
That is a reasonable argument if one assumes that this is an unconscious choice, however, passive voice has become the standard with these types of press releases. It is a conscious, intentional choice.
Passive voice is a tool. It’s perfectly valid and grammatical. The problem is the abuse of it to misrepresent one’s agency or responsibility, but there’s nothing wrong with the sentence, “I was hit by a car on the way to work.”
The issue with corporate passive is that business language is not only ugly but serves evil purposes. In person, it exists to slow down bad news so you can read and manipulate people (“string betting”) and, on paper, its raison d’etre is to project authority to which one has no actual right.
Exactly the point - passive, weak, blameless terms makes it nebulous on what has happened. Just say you want you need to say - you're the captain of the ship.
Oh c'mon, there's no way this is it. If they hadn't been laid off there wouldn't be an external announcement. You don't post something like this merely to announce that you're retraining some employees.
They were 100% laid off. The wording is intentional and standard for the industry.
You aren't "impacted" by changing roles or retraining, you're impacted by losing your job.
"we want to acknowledge and express our appreciation for their substantial contributions" translates to "these people will no longer be contributing as they are laid off effective immediately".
There was one circulating where the newspaper headline stated that "A man with no active warrants was shot by police." Which is just about the most nefarious way to say "an innocent man was shot by police".
Isn’t it different? IANAL but having an active warrant issued for you doesn’t really have anything to do with you being guilty or innocent. It just means the police must conduct you to the juge, either because you’re a suspect or (in some countries) a witness.
"A man with no active warrants issued" also perfectly describes every single one of the 9/11 hijackers, but that wouldn't equate out to "innocent" either.
Careful. Presence or absence of warrants has almost nothing to do with getting shot.
Assuming you have no warrants out for your arrest, should you charge at a police officer with a knife or gun drawn while yelling that you were about to kill them, and then ignore any commands they issued, what would you expect to happen?
That one I actually understand. Calling somebody innocent is a very strong and contextual / scoped statement, and ultimately that's what the courts take their time to do (and even they I think kinda stop shy? I don't know if acquitted is the same as innocent. I feel it's more "not proven guilty").
In the US, what happens a if a newspaper calls someone innocent, who is then proven guilty?
That was a super high horse you rapidly jumped on, but where I'm going is, it may not be a risk reputable journalism takes lightly.
"No outstanding warrants" will have been true at the time whatever is uncovered later. "They shot a presumed innocent" is probably safe but meaningless. "They shot an innocent person" - what happens if the person is then found super guilty? And innocent of what - what if somebody says "they were clearly in the video driving without their seatbelt" or "they had expired license plate"? USA has a lovely constitution yes, but also a nicely profitable legal industry.
Put the moral notion aside: In the USA, I don't think it's an easy risk to take, and clearly newspapers agree.
Those don't mean the same thing at all, and the headline is weird for any possible set of facts.
The average mass shooter has no active warrants, but most people would consider it correct for the police to shoot him to end his killing spree. The average wanted fugitive, on the other hand is usually arrested without any shooting.
I read the article linked in another comment, and the headline I would give it is "Police kill man while raiding wrong house".
Newspapers also need to be careful to not spout facts about a potential crime that doesn’t have a guilty verdict. They’d have to throw an allegedly or something in there to write it as you described which I don’t know would read as well. The way they wrote it let them put the facts first (woman hit by pepper ball shot by police) and then hedge the intent with an “appeared to.”
That example seems fine to me. There is clear attribution ("by an officer"), and the "appeared to be aiming" could be to emphasize that the officer was not just generally shooting into crowd, but targeting individuals.
There isn't even a need for a public blog post about this change in business strategy. This reads fine as an internal email, but I've never worked at a company that publicly referenced their layoffs.
I think this is just a matter of opinion. When something severe happens it's natural to not use the most harsh term to describe the event. It doesn't seems like something malicious.
When describing a death many people will say "they are no longer with us" instead of describing the circumstance of death. When talking about traumatic events we as a society have a natural propensity to not use triggering words. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that unless it's hiding information. As described above no one is hiding anything because we all understand what happened.
Death is inevitable, unexpected, unplanned, usually caused by things beyond human control. Layoffs are a planned thing explicitly done by one human to another in order to increase corporate profits.
Do you have some data to back that up? I'm not sure if a small percentage of employees are so expensive as to be the tipping point for a company to go out of business.
Employees are one of or the most expensive part of doing business for many. I guess you could google Gross vs Net margins in various companies or industries as an example (maybe here[1]). But layoffs aren't merely firing people, they are "firing people and not re-hiring for their positions or work." So it's often closing out on entire product strategies, such as the case here with YC.
> Employees are one of or the most expensive part of doing business for many
Not debating that. I'm debating:
> Layoffs are often a choice between letting a small percentage go or causing the entire company to go out of business
Show me a company that MUST let go a SMALL PERCENTAGE of its workforce in order to not go out of business. Meaning a company which is hanging by a thread and that thread is (again) a small percentage of the workforce. Because if a small percentage of the workforce is expensive enough to provide you with the runway you need to continue doing business, that runway is short enough that the company will cease to exist anyway, so the point is moot.
Layoffs are a consequence of business decisions by a specific corporate entity.
If someone died in a mining accident and their employer sent their partner a letter saying “It appears they’re no longer with us”, that would not be well-received (to say the least). Euphemisms are only appropriate in the right circumstances.
I'm willing to accept this for a company that has verifiable issues that are not just accounting fuckeries (aka owners pulling cash out of the company by having a 2nd company that nominally owns the office building, patent licenses, overseas shell companies): consistent losses, lack of cash, you get the idea.
But for companies pulling in profits to the tune of millions if not billions of dollars in profit?! Their leadership should be terminated before even the lowest performing employee instead of getting paid bonuses for ruining the lives of thousands of people who made their bonuses possible by putting in the work.
Perhaps you could argue over the use of "impacted", but the use of passive voice is pretty objective. "We impacted 17 roles today" or perhaps "I impacted 17 roles today" is, well, it's still pretty bad, but at least it takes some responsibility.
I agree with you, but I think a passive voice is used correctly in that sentence you are referencing. It puts the emphasis on the impacted employees and then goes on to speak to their contributions. This takes away the company for a moment from the conversation to discuss the "impacted teammates". They were using an active voice up till that point.
When someone is accidental, blameless or unexpected, like someone suddenly dying, it's entirely natural to use something like "passed away". Not the case when someone is directly responsible - "X was murdered by Y" is quite common, I believe?
Please don't compare death with layoffs. One if an inevitable but tragic part of life the other is an inevitable but tragic part of keeping the shareholders happy.
I think the whole notion of companies doing things "for the shareholders" is vastly overblown. Doesn't it make perfect sense on its own that YC realized the late-stage game was not working out, and that they were not going to be able to use those people effectively on other work?
> I think the whole notion of companies doing things "for the shareholders" is vastly overblown.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and I don't share yours. Everything makes sense with the proper framing. My guess is that this has more to do with perception than with actual business needs. I can try as well: Doesn't it make perfect sense that in the current context it's very easy to justify cutting costs which if done during normal times would signal trouble/mismanagement?
“They are no longer with us” is widely understood and very unlikely to be ambiguous. If you said “they were impacted” I would lodge the same complaint.
HR might have an issue about disclosing private personal information about their embarrassing medical digestive system disorders, and implying they were fired for being full of shit.
> When describing a death many people will say "they are no longer with us"
Fussell describes (in Class) this kind of talking-around situations as a "low" marker (in a class-signaling sense). The "high" version is to just plainly state "X died" or "X is dead". Similar for describing things like pregnancy.
Not sure what significance this has for corporate communication, and I'm also not sure how true it is (though all the things he described that I do know about were remarkably accurate) but, well, there's that I guess. Regardless, I'm not sure that kind of avoidant language is natural (though possibly it is, and it has to be trained out to get the more-direct "high" version—but I suspect either preference is mainly a socialization thing).
To be fair, that's usually accurate - unlike someone getting fired because of their own performance, layoffs are usually untargeted, and include people that were great at their jobs.
And let's face it, getting fired is a huge stigma, so it's totally understandable that someone would phrase it like that, as the victim of the situation
It's hard to blame anyone for using the "soft" terms about their own situation, since firing tends to be a very sensitive topic. It's not hard to blame companies for using those same terms, since it comes off as "MBA-ish" and sleazy.
While those examples do use the passive voice, the passive is not the real problem. "These events impacted seventeen of our teammates" is the active voice, and it is no more forthright. "Mistakes were made by Bob, Sean, and Susan, who have been fired" is (if accurate) quite clear about assigning blame while using the passive. It's true that some people overuse the passive, and for those people noticing and considering whether to rephrase can produce better writing, but insisting on forgoing the passive entirely probably won't. If we want to prevent evasive writing, we should look for and call out evasive writing, whatever voice is used.
Right, the active construction does grammatically require we put something there, where in the passive we get to omit it, which is why the passive is sometimes used for evasion. But if you're interested in whether someone is being evasive, just... look at whether they're actually assigning agency appropriately. Grammatical form doesn't answer that.
I knew an ex co-worker who grew up in another country whose manager, in a "sync up meeting", told him that he was "impacted" and he didn't need to continue work on his current sprint. He came out of the meeting with a smile, had no idea what this meant, and he showed up the next day.
Why is it the corporation's fault though? We live in a society and governance structure which encourages corporations to consider revenue over everything else. Why would they act differently? What should Google do? Sorry I understand the human cost of layoffs. But it is a reflection of what this society values. If you want corporations to consider the human cost, you need to make it feature in their financials. Or the government should offer better protection to unemployed people.
What you're talking about linguistically is the difference between passive voice ("I was laid off") vs active voice ("YC fired me"). It is a pervasive technique and a form of blame-shifting. Whenver you see a headline, ask yourself which voice is being used and why. It is a key part of media literacy.
This comment comes across as a silly nitpick given the sober content of the post, but I think it is completely fair given Paul Graham's many writings and tweets on the virtues of writing clearly and his hatred of what I call corporatese.
You would imagine he read it at some point. You would also imagine his CEO would have internalised Paul Graham's most important piece of advice about communication (writing clearly).
I have no inside information on this one, but YC has been around for 18 years, and pg left the president role 9 years ago. It's been about half of YC's life that he's been out of the day-to-day stuff. It's absolutely not obvious that he'd be reading each announcement that goes out (I'd be surprised at such).
I don’t think it comes across as a silly nitpick, and I’ve read very little PG has written. It’s useful to identify how phrasing and framing of communication can be used to manipulate how that communication is received, regardless of who is communicating. And I think the same observation would have been made if this were a post about any other organization.
It is laudable that this observation was very close to the top when I clicked to see the comments. I’d be surprised if this critique gets buried by HN moderation, and cautiously hopeful it won’t get buried by folks biased to defend YC &co.
But the exact same language from any other source would be examined exactly the same way, and for very good reason.
Assuming legal signed off on the basic message, I'm guessing it's out of a sense of 'politeness' in a delicate situation. Consider how someone might publicly communicate a relationship breakdown with language like "we're parting ways" or "we have made the decision to end our marriage." Sometimes you get plain, direct language but people might infer acrimony from it.
My sense is that in the particular case of layoffs, companies are hesitant to actually use the phrase "laid off" because it triggers a sense of implicit shame in those affected. There is definitely an unspoken assumption that folks who get laid off are underperformers, and the extent to which we talk about how untrue that is (see: LinkedIn) shows how pervasive the assumption is.
You probably know what YC is.
We were recently doing late-stage investing, but we're mostly giving up on that now.
We're firing 17 people who were involved in late-stage investing.
You won't notice their disappearance.
Oh they flagged my post. Does that mean no one can see it anymore? Anyway I was curious how GPT expands your four brutally raw sentences into a press release (everything it made is fake including a fake quote):
Y Combinator Announces Changes in Late-Stage Investing and Workforce
Mountain View, CA - Y Combinator, the renowned startup accelerator, announced today that it will be shifting its focus away from late-stage investing. As part of this strategic pivot, the company will be letting go of 17 employees who were involved in late-stage investing.
This decision comes after a thorough review of YC's investment strategy and long-term goals. While late-stage investing has been a successful part of the company's portfolio, YC has decided to double down on its core mission of helping early-stage startups grow and succeed.
"We are grateful for the contributions of our late-stage investing team, but we believe that this change will allow us to better serve our early-stage companies and continue to drive innovation in the startup ecosystem," said YC President, Sam Altman.
The 17 affected employees have been notified and will be provided with severance packages and support during their transition. YC remains committed to its mission of supporting and investing in the most promising startups and looks forward to continuing to work with entrepreneurs from all over the world.
For more information, please contact Y Combinator's media relations team at press@ycombinator.com.
Not sure who "they" is but HN users flagged your post. We can only guess why users flag things, but my guess is that they've gotten tired of generic LLM posts. The bar that such a comment has to clear in order to be interesting is getting increasingly high.
So where is the bailout for these impacted people? Wasn't it just recently that YC posted a plea to bailout so that people wouldn't be fired? And then they don't do one themselves?
I'm not necessarily pro-bailout but there's a clear distinction between job losses due to money trapped in a failed institution versus job losses due to a business deciding to eliminate those jobs.
You mean like a fund where corps like YC pay into on the regular and then people who are laid off get back some of their salary for a portion of time? It would be like insurance but for being unemployed, just like we have insurance for your bank failing.
Depositors received a benefit beyond previously promised insurance and benefits. Calling it a bailout or not is based on one's personal biases or semantics.
> Depositors received a benefit beyond previously promised insurance and benefits.
?? The FDIC has always made all depositors whole. They have never stuck to the 250k I don't know why people have the impression they are doing something different then they have always done in this case; I just it's just extreme ignorance?
As I have already pointed out to you elsewhere, this is a falsehood. The FDIC is not permitted to pay out beyond the $250,000 except if a "systemic risk exception" is made.
If you click on random banks in receivership, you can see the dividend payments made to depositors above $250,000.
They usually manage to facilitate a bank takeover which does that, or sacrifices only some portion of uninsured brokered deposits, but there are certainly plenty of cases where that is not the case.
I mean if the company is pivoting and closing the entire division because they no longer need to, eg, make film cameras or make buggy whips, why would you keep anybody from there around? You don't need their expertise any longer. Even if they were the best at their job, if you're not doing those things any more, what would you keep them around for?
Any company where the execs and decision makers are so far removed from the people they're judging, where they won't even truly understand or care what the person does, let alone who they are.
Google and Twitter and two very recent large companies that have done just that.
Only if you're not fluent in corporatease. Whenever I see an e-mail entitled "Changes in [some organization]", I assume that one or more of the following is true:
1. The leader is leaving.
2. People are getting laid off.
3. They're exiting a line of business.
4. They sold the company.
Haha, same here, whenever I see some random meeting called "[whatever] chat" being scheduled, like "Engineering chat" or "Quick eng all-hands", you know it's
1. Someone's leaving or is getting fired from the department
2. More people are getting fired
The point is that this, along with "*changes" is always bad news. :D
I don't think that'd be accurate - YC is exiting the business of late-stage investing, and that's the main news. It sounds like they had 17 people who were working on that part of the company who they laid off as part of this transition, but given the major role that YC Continuity played, it's significant news that they're no longer doing that.
I don't know of a title edit that would satisfy everyone, and pretty much any of the standard edits we'd make would generate accusations that we were censoring or whatever to protect YC, so in this case I think we probably need to go by the default.
Just so that it is clear: How does YC define "late stage"?
I ask because the opening line is: "YC is known primarily as a place where very early founders create something from nothing"
Does this mean that, going forward, startups that start with something need not apply? For example, a product and, say, one or many customers? Some revenue?
Or does YC want to focus on the "something from nothing" category?
561 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] thread[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35114009
edit: Oh well the other commenter was the new CEO LOL, not used to reading usernames. I guess that adds a bit of bias but I believe it's a true statement.
Can you explain how that would not be the case here? Not understanding how this timing is “coincidental”, it doesn’t appear to be that way at all.
Other firms already have a good grasp of late stage and it'd be a battle for YC to improve over this.
Maybe YC can return to late stage later when the environment changes.
So it's really not worth getting dramatic about. It's sad, but such is life. I wish the best of luck to these folks, but I doubt they're in mourning. I'm sure the YC leadership is helping them figure out next steps as we speak.
not reddit!
By definition, a capitalist economy has a hard dependency on labor surplus. Remember when the Federal Reserve literally said they were raising interest rates to increase unemployment? That's why.
This story is about 17 people being fired. I'm not sure what rants about capitalism have to do with that.
Why lay off people, when state can afford to keep them on minimum wage? and reap the benefit of their work (rockets, weapons, tanks, nukes, etc)
" highly educated engineers were paid like 100 rubles/mo, which is slightly above minimum wage."
I think it's kind of hard to quantify based on salary alone in a system like that. People in more prestige positions like engineers & scientists had access to things that others might not have: a better apartment, better schools for their kids, shops that had a better supply of goods.
The religion bit is really off kilter, unless you think the impermanence of all things is merely a religious idea and not a fundamental aspect of all reality. After all impermanence didn’t apply in Soviet Russia? Oh yeah, it too passed. Guess not.
"Impermanence" is not a religious concept, but the vagaries in these platitudes are. Nobody in a capitalist society can rationalize layoffs. The best we can do is rationalize not thinking about them, which is the purpose actually served by the platitudes. Religion does the same.
An actually scientific perspective would be far more useful and actionable. There is a good book on this topic: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Engels_...
Lets not pretend they didn't have millions in the gulags....
Let’s not pretend America doesn’t currently imprison over two million people [2]. That’s where you end up if you’re poor and unlucky enough in America (being homeless is also criminalized in many places [3]).
[1] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/health-policy-center/pr...
[2] https://www.prisonstudies.org/country/united-states-america
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeseq/2022/01/01/how-the-us-...
> A dismissed worker shall receive a severance indemnity equal to the average monthly wage.
[...]
> In case of restructuring or liquidation of the enterprise, the worker while seeking employment, retains his or her average monthly wage for up to three months, taking into account the severance indemnity.
Soviet Workers were exploited and underpaid by state, there was no private property and almost no private sector.
Soviet Union employed highly educated PhD rocket scientists and paid everyone minimum wage, because there was no alternative.
Literally every scientist family had to grow their own potatoes and veggies at home/dachas in order to survive.
Can you imagine Harvard dean growing potatoes just to survive in cold winter months?
Cars were not available, you had to wait for 7 years to be allocated a slot to purchase a vehicle.
Almost no selection of consumer products, everything was DIY, because the only good thing Soviet State was capable of - is building tanks and rockets (that are currently being destroyed by Ukraine Armed Forces)
Your comment is a laundry list of fun talking points, but I couldn't care less. This debate concerns families having reliable material sustenance.
"Capitalist West is bad, communism good" (C)
> Unfortunately, this means we will no longer need some of the roles
> Seventeen of our teammates are impacted
Scaling is an iterative process :)
The key thing about networks is Metcalfe's law: the power of a network is the square of its nodes. This is also what makes the Internet more and more valuable over time.
Those things together mean scale increases value for founders, and what we've learned is those effects are most potent early.
Uh, that's what wealthy people do -- they give money to other people to make them even more money. This was so transparently a billionaire bailout (Gary Tan & David Sacks were literally on a press tour), I fail to understand how people are so mesmerized by the shell game here.
It's not a shell game, it's a fundamentally different situation where real people who are not billionaires are directly and immediately effected.
Further, there is not financial assistance in the form of "free money"; at best what will happen are loans to cover the difference between the available liquidity and the withdraws. The assets SVB once had will, upon maturity, pay for those loans with interest, and only then will investors be given a chance to recoup some of their investment.
I'm frankly fascinated by the abject cynicism by way of ignorance people think they can get away with on the Internet. Unreal...
Hard disagree on this. Startups die literally every day, not to mention that we just had tens of thousands of layoffs by big tech companies. In my view, this was a targeted bailout, meant to primarily protect the investment (into startups) of many Silicon Valley investment firms.
> only then will investors be given a chance to recoup some of their investment.
You're still harping on this "investors" thing, which is not even remotely related to my point. You can call me ignorant all day, but my point has zero to do with folks that bought SVB stock, and I'm not fully convinced you actually grasp that.
And "startup" here is not "craps shoot on if it exists in a week" it's "a substantial percentage of businesses with VC backing in a general California geographic area but also across the country."
And yes, your point is flat wrong because you don't understand that a bailout is exclusive to investors in the direct company receiving financial support, which does not apply to the already failed SVB, nor does it apply to any depositors who are not receiving any additional money at all, just regaining access to their already existent funds.
You are misusing the word, so of course your point isn't making sense with the real definition of the term. I am convinced you don't actually grasp that.
Yeah, it's clear at this point that not only are you trying to play an annoying little semantic game, but to make things worse, you also have no material domain knowledge. For reference, a bailout explicitly does not serve investors, but rather immediate business counterparties.
From the second source: "A bailout occurs when the government makes payments (including loans, loan guarantees, cash, and other types of consideration) to a liquidity-constrained private agent in order to enable that agent to pay its creditors and counterparties, when the agent is not entitled to those payments under a statutory scheme."
Further reading: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/bailout and https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
So literally not what happened, got it.
Of course you don't feel burdened by the meaning of words, but now at least anyone reading this will be aware that you don't know what "bailout" means, and that what happened in 2008 is nothing at all like what is happening now, and that was my goal. Mission accomplished.
Frankly David, you should know better. You've benefitted massively from these VCs already in your life, and at certain parts you would have been devastated to suddenly lose access to the very funds you're now advocating people be robbed of, but you clearly lack the ability to empathize with folks who want to travel a similar path to you.
Weirdly making things personal is often an indication of losing, not winning, an argument. Either way, I should know better than to get into debates with brand new anon accounts on HN. Cheers.
You're typing your responses on a computer bought with money from investors that ended up with you. Do better.
guys maybe they were impacted in a good way tho?
Kind of like when people say someone "passed away" to mean they died
In early stage you are betting on and nurturing a small team with a full-of-hope business plan. They need relatively small bits of help that can go a along way. So both "who you are chosing among" and "how you are helping them" is very specific.
With bigger companies, the team and the business plan is more proven and they need help navigating size and scaling their offering - a very different set of people you are chosing from and what they need from you.
I am sure there's a lot of additional nuance.
The things are obviously different. Why YC thought they might be synergic and where that went wrong is a separate question. I have no idea.
I guess don't apply to them for seed funding for your next big idea if you don't like the way it makes them look.
Very few places have the infrastructure to deal with large volumes of start-ups + a lead flow of small companies trying to join YC, so there's no acquisition costs. Add to that, YC's experience with small start-ups compounds - they can probably predict start-up success way better than competitors at this point. That's almost certainly not true for late stage investing.
Everyone here knows YC is one place. What else have you got? Anyone got a list? How do you find out about the people involved, like on a scale of x to y how shonky are they? etc.
I would guess taking over the slashdot space with some incremental improvement to that formula has created one hell of a pipeline that competitors struggle to match. Hence paying @dang full time here and whatever other costs there are associated.
that's not a claim made in the article. It just said the late state was different enough to be a distraction from their core mission of being an early stage investor. A company with just an idea and 2 founders and nothing more is obviously very different from a company with many employees, a revenue stream and a long list of customers. It should be obvious how different that is.
In the current economic climate they probably can't afford (or just don't want to risk) to invest large sums, while on the contrary can "take advantage" of early stage startups which will struggle more to get funding.
It requires due diligence and knowing how to invest instead of throwing darts and celebrating the occasional bullseye as proof of your acumen.
Second, the amount of capital needed to invest in later stages is much higher, and with companies delaying IPO, they would be tying up capital for much longer than they probably expected originally.
I have no insight into YC, this is just my guess as to how it is different.
1. Breaking focus / competing on multiple fronts. Lots of firms specialize in A-stage or later. By investing in seed and later rather than just seed, the later stage firms see you as a "competitor" for, rather than a "supplier" of, early stage startups. You have that many more competitive relationships rather than cooperative ones.
2. LP fundraising. LPs have to make choices as to who to fund, especially in this economy. Later stage vetting, returns, etc are different than early stage. May not be worth the heavy lift of competing for LPs.
3. Specialization. Once you get into later stages, you get firms that specialize by industry vertical. Not just business (marketplace, fintech, hardware) but even within software (SaaS, dev tools, consumer, enterprise, etc). Might make it harder to make deals. You now have a multi-front problem where each potential counter-bidder for the deal lead has hyper specialization to the startup, whereas YC is a generalist by nature.
4. Competition for deal terms. Most of the time, the deal lead sets the terms. If you can't aggressively bid to lead deals, they may not get the best economy for each of the deals since the lead may have other priorities. This may produce less optimal returns vs just putting more money into seed.
5. Partner / investor preference. VCs compete for partners / investors. If partners in the late stage at YC are limited to only YC companies vs the whole late-stage market (or have other limitations), it may not work for them vs going to a firm with less terms.
Ultimately as a generalist investor, pre-seed/seed/A-and-later are very different markets. With interest rates this high and everyone being more picky, it becomes harder to outperform unless you can operate in that market independently. I suspect YC looked at a model for their returns and came to this conclusion.
Since most YCombinator startups never see any profit, late stage investment becomes a risky proposition since even "top YCombinator startups" lose billions of dollars a year, for years, with no path to profitability or recouping investments.
Focus. Much easier to have the entire company focused on one thing.
Specialisation of labour. Become experts, make sure nobody catches you.
When you start diluting your goal you trade off focus and specialisation, potentially reducing your advantages.
Now I’m wondering how to apply that to myself. The answer seems obvious but I like being a generalist.
Early stage investing – low cost, high risk of failure, high multiple return, you'll need to make a lot of bets so can cast a wide net, longer term (could be up to a decade or more before you see returns), no established business, so you are betting entirely on the founders.
Late stage investing – high cost, low risk of failure, low multiple return, you can only make a small number of bets so have to be more selective, shorter term, company already has a well-established business, and your decision will primarily be based on how well it is doing.
>> Series A Program: Help founders achieve the best possible outcome when raising a Series A via year-round workshops, fundraising guides and 1:1 support.
>> Post-A Program: Batches for YC startups immediately after their Series A to share best practices for growth: managing a board, building a team, key metrics for a Series B and more.
>> YC Growth Program: Graduate school for startups. We bring together cohorts of CEOs of rapidly growing YC companies to focus on the challenges of company building: the changing role of a CEO at scale, setting strategies and success metrics for the organization, hiring and managing great leaders, and more.
Source:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20220812233728/https://www.ycomb...
_____
EDIT: Related comment from Garry on the topic:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35143443
Also, the continuity program page (provided info for all 3 programs) is completely gone: https://www.ycombinator.com/continuity
I haven't heard specifics about those programs but with the partners leading gone it seems difficult to imagine them continuing - fair point though, no solid news.
Also, might be wrong, but “theinformation.com” as a source is insta ban as a result of it being a “hard walled” content; hard walled meaning it’s not possible to access the content via alternative means. If you have a source that’s not blocked, feel free to provide it, otherwise just see this as promoting a source that’s ban on HN.
Here’s all the dead submissions, though you likely have to have “show dead” turned on from your profile settings:
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=theinformation.com
Not really sure what you want here - the evidence of those programs being affiliated with YC has been scrubbed from the public web, do you not believe in Occam's Razor or are you waiting to find a quote delivered straight from Garry Tan's mouth on the question before you accept the likely conclusion from all evidence?
edit: either way, I don't have a second source - that article from theinformation is the only active story I've found that specifically names the partners leaving.
Here’s a comment from dang, the only official HN mod, related to “hardwalled” submissions:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074950
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35143443
The later stages there's plenty of YC companies out there that can help (WeFunder, Mercury, Brex, Clerky, Stripe, LSTE, etc).
Never allow corporations to speak in passive, weak, blameless terms.
Use direct, honest, language, and force them to do the same.
"Seventeen of our teammates are impacted today." - > "We laid off 17 employees today"
"I was impacted by layoffs" -> "Google laid me off" etc
Turns out, it says: "reduce the size of our team by 7%", which also isn't as specific as the OP is suggesting.
HOWEVER, they then go on to spend more than half of their post explaining how the impacted staff is supported, and YES, that did make me feel better.
To mean that the person was laid off but it wasn't their fault. It's their position that was impacted. Somehow.
Result the same but sentiment might be dulled a little. Not blaming the person but blaming external conditions that resulted in someone being made redundant.
"The market says that we need to downsize" sounds a lot better than "an investment analyst says I go, or you go".
Edit: however, a pr release with language other than what’s written on the linked page can be a liability.
If you’re laying people off, say it straight and with a backbone. The language is passive, weak and makes it sound like a mere consequence of a slight breeze upon a dainty leaf causing it to gently fall from a tree.
17 people lost their jobs. Likely many of those have families to feed, houses to uphold and bills to pay. In this economy, the same will likely happen to many of us and a statement like the above would feel like a punch to the gut.
The uppercut that follows is:
> we want to acknowledge and express our appreciation for their substantial contributions.
Saying you want to acknowledge and express something is not the same thing as acknowledging and expressing something. A statement would struggle to get more generic than this.
[1]https://www.gov.uk/lay-offs-short-timeworking
In other words the same dynamic that now leads to ‘impacted’.
I suspect that in its early versions, it referred more to the notion that "we won't have any more work until the spring, so we'll see you then."
I don't know its etymology or when it might have been coopted by employers who didn't intend to rehire, but I suspect its intent is to signal that there's no ill will between the employer and the employee, and that it WOULD rehire those impacted persons in the future.
I'm not as sure that it means anything so specific now.
And if you go back even further it meant something even milder, like furloughed or terminated with the intent to rehire when expected business picks up.
Employers sure have a vested interest in making you believe otherwise, tho.
Regardless of how you want to word it, or how you perceive it to play out socially, it does not diminish the act.
If you're on the receiving end, then that model and the act done to you are irrelevant.
If someone is applying for a job and they tell you "I was fired from my last job" vs "I was laid off from my last job", that changes your perspective on them.
Having terms that distinguish whether or not it's "for cause" are a useful language feature.
I'll be curious to see what comes next.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(novel)
“Today we are announcing that 10% of our company is being shit canned”.
Impacted still implies some causal connection, so the next level of doublespeak must avoid that, then. John was affine to the event.
"Promoted to Vice President of Looking for a New Job"
I always wondered if that was focus grouped or something. It was definitely the running joke for a while.
“Laid off” usually means that the company shut down a group of roles, and the individuals happened to be in those roles and so lost their jobs.
“Fired” usually means that the individual was intentionally let go because of behavior / competence / etc. of the individual, not the group.
It depends on if someone wants to believe the truth, or believe something else. Most want to believe something else.
The issue with corporate passive is that business language is not only ugly but serves evil purposes. In person, it exists to slow down bad news so you can read and manipulate people (“string betting”) and, on paper, its raison d’etre is to project authority to which one has no actual right.
You aren't "impacted" by changing roles or retraining, you're impacted by losing your job.
"we want to acknowledge and express our appreciation for their substantial contributions" translates to "these people will no longer be contributing as they are laid off effective immediately".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/past_exonerative
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...
"The truth is that my colleague Giorgio Chiellini suffered the physical result of a bite"
A well-known example from the NYT:
> A reporter was hit by a pepper ball on live television by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her
https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2020/new-york-times-twe...
Edit: I guess this is this story: https://www.actionnews5.com/story/35967817/officers-kill-man...
Assuming you have no warrants out for your arrest, should you charge at a police officer with a knife or gun drawn while yelling that you were about to kill them, and then ignore any commands they issued, what would you expect to happen?
Most modern countries consider this a fundamental right.
That was a super high horse you rapidly jumped on, but where I'm going is, it may not be a risk reputable journalism takes lightly.
"No outstanding warrants" will have been true at the time whatever is uncovered later. "They shot a presumed innocent" is probably safe but meaningless. "They shot an innocent person" - what happens if the person is then found super guilty? And innocent of what - what if somebody says "they were clearly in the video driving without their seatbelt" or "they had expired license plate"? USA has a lovely constitution yes, but also a nicely profitable legal industry.
Put the moral notion aside: In the USA, I don't think it's an easy risk to take, and clearly newspapers agree.
The average mass shooter has no active warrants, but most people would consider it correct for the police to shoot him to end his killing spree. The average wanted fugitive, on the other hand is usually arrested without any shooting.
I read the article linked in another comment, and the headline I would give it is "Police kill man while raiding wrong house".
"I am sorry I was kicked out of the World Cup final but I was not sorry I headbutted him".
"My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer is when I kicked the hooligan"
According to some people.
When describing a death many people will say "they are no longer with us" instead of describing the circumstance of death. When talking about traumatic events we as a society have a natural propensity to not use triggering words. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that unless it's hiding information. As described above no one is hiding anything because we all understand what happened.
[1]: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
Not debating that. I'm debating:
> Layoffs are often a choice between letting a small percentage go or causing the entire company to go out of business
Show me a company that MUST let go a SMALL PERCENTAGE of its workforce in order to not go out of business. Meaning a company which is hanging by a thread and that thread is (again) a small percentage of the workforce. Because if a small percentage of the workforce is expensive enough to provide you with the runway you need to continue doing business, that runway is short enough that the company will cease to exist anyway, so the point is moot.
If someone died in a mining accident and their employer sent their partner a letter saying “It appears they’re no longer with us”, that would not be well-received (to say the least). Euphemisms are only appropriate in the right circumstances.
But for companies pulling in profits to the tune of millions if not billions of dollars in profit?! Their leadership should be terminated before even the lowest performing employee instead of getting paid bonuses for ruining the lives of thousands of people who made their bonuses possible by putting in the work.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and I don't share yours. Everything makes sense with the proper framing. My guess is that this has more to do with perception than with actual business needs. I can try as well: Doesn't it make perfect sense that in the current context it's very easy to justify cutting costs which if done during normal times would signal trouble/mismanagement?
No it seems like weaselicious to me.
https://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/what-is-fecal-impa...
Fussell describes (in Class) this kind of talking-around situations as a "low" marker (in a class-signaling sense). The "high" version is to just plainly state "X died" or "X is dead". Similar for describing things like pregnancy.
Not sure what significance this has for corporate communication, and I'm also not sure how true it is (though all the things he described that I do know about were remarkably accurate) but, well, there's that I guess. Regardless, I'm not sure that kind of avoidant language is natural (though possibly it is, and it has to be trained out to get the more-direct "high" version—but I suspect either preference is mainly a socialization thing).
And let's face it, getting fired is a huge stigma, so it's totally understandable that someone would phrase it like that, as the victim of the situation
Edit: re-reading TFA, they don’t attribute the layoffs to “these events” so I’ll amend this as being a response directly to the parent comment.
See also https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=passive for much related amusement.
It is laudable that this observation was very close to the top when I clicked to see the comments. I’d be surprised if this critique gets buried by HN moderation, and cautiously hopeful it won’t get buried by folks biased to defend YC &co.
But the exact same language from any other source would be examined exactly the same way, and for very good reason.
Does anyone know why do they do this, though? Is it to de-risk potential lawsuits or do they believe people prefer that way ("sounds professional")?
You fired someone? You're to blame. Someone was impacted? Sounds more like an act of nature. Nobody is to blame!
And yet, when they don't they tend to be excoriated for being harsh and cruel.
So whaddya do?
Y Combinator Announces Changes in Late-Stage Investing and Workforce
Mountain View, CA - Y Combinator, the renowned startup accelerator, announced today that it will be shifting its focus away from late-stage investing. As part of this strategic pivot, the company will be letting go of 17 employees who were involved in late-stage investing.
This decision comes after a thorough review of YC's investment strategy and long-term goals. While late-stage investing has been a successful part of the company's portfolio, YC has decided to double down on its core mission of helping early-stage startups grow and succeed.
"We are grateful for the contributions of our late-stage investing team, but we believe that this change will allow us to better serve our early-stage companies and continue to drive innovation in the startup ecosystem," said YC President, Sam Altman.
The 17 affected employees have been notified and will be provided with severance packages and support during their transition. YC remains committed to its mission of supporting and investing in the most promising startups and looks forward to continuing to work with entrepreneurs from all over the world.
For more information, please contact Y Combinator's media relations team at press@ycombinator.com.
###
Not sure who "they" is but HN users flagged your post. We can only guess why users flag things, but my guess is that they've gotten tired of generic LLM posts. The bar that such a comment has to clear in order to be interesting is getting increasingly high.
No, that never happened where did you see that?
> So where is the bailout for these impacted people?
Unemployment exists and I'd bet a lot they got severance pay.
He's referring to this: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/urgent-sign-the-petition-no...
?? The FDIC has always made all depositors whole. They have never stuck to the 250k I don't know why people have the impression they are doing something different then they have always done in this case; I just it's just extreme ignorance?
As I have already pointed out to you elsewhere, this is a falsehood. The FDIC is not permitted to pay out beyond the $250,000 except if a "systemic risk exception" is made.
If you click on random banks in receivership, you can see the dividend payments made to depositors above $250,000.
E.g. https://closedbanks.fdic.gov/dividends/bankfind/Dividendinde...
Sunrise Bank of Arizona depositors received 91.747% of their uninsured amounts. This is a typical outcome.
Then you can find other banks, like Enloe State Bank
https://closedbanks.fdic.gov/dividends/bankfind/Dividendinde...
where the total paid was 39.662%.
> I just it's just extreme ignorance?
You should really educate yourself before you claim others are exhibiting "extreme ignorance."
They usually manage to facilitate a bank takeover which does that, or sacrifices only some portion of uninsured brokered deposits, but there are certainly plenty of cases where that is not the case.
Not unexpected from vc circles, frankly, with rumors that larger LPs weren't impressed by Tan and interest was lukewarm.
Any YC team members care to comment?
What companies layoff their best people?
(I say as someone who has been laidoff)
As noted, there are many reasons why layoffs may occur, however, the stigma of being laid off exists.
Hence stigma.
Any company where the execs and decision makers are so far removed from the people they're judging, where they won't even truly understand or care what the person does, let alone who they are.
Google and Twitter and two very recent large companies that have done just that.
1. Someone's leaving or is getting fired from the department 2. More people are getting fired
The point is that this, along with "*changes" is always bad news. :D
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I ask because the opening line is: "YC is known primarily as a place where very early founders create something from nothing"
Does this mean that, going forward, startups that start with something need not apply? For example, a product and, say, one or many customers? Some revenue?
Or does YC want to focus on the "something from nothing" category?