I mean I can't speak for that commenter, but I hold any VC backed startup in suspicion for a good amount of time because if they can't reach the size demanded by their investors, which runs the gamut from ambitious-but-achievable all the way to not-in-my-or-your-lifetime, a perfectly profitable modestly sized business is almost bound to be shut down and it's services terminated with little drama, leaving behind potentially useless products, or yet another fucking ZIP file to add to the pile of the things I have yet to open up and sort into other mediums.
To anyone with eyes? Job seekers looking for startups to join, investors looking for places to put money, etc.
I'm sorry if your company got accepted into YC, better luck next time. At least you can hang out with the founders of... 100 AI-assisted Code Editors, 'The first Travel Credit Card for Gen Z', 'Starbucks memberships for restaurants', 'a video first food delivery app, tiktok meets doordash', and 'the operating system for vacation rentals'. Truly a staggering group of talent.
Not going to name names, but so far my favorite has been “AI for [somewhat arcane process]”.
I had no idea how “AI” could possibly be of use, so clicked through out of curiosity. Hilariously, it boiled down to “we occasionally use an LLM to email people for you.”
A) Security is always an afterthought at YC companies - I know from firsthand experience.
B) YC companies are risky to use, obviously we meme about people using IBM for "saftey", but there is an opposite side of that which is going with a seed stage company - it's very risky.
C) Even if you are a happy customer, if you are too niche they will typically abandon you. I've been on the decision making side for this, sometimes your early customers don't fit your new market, so you have to let them down slowly.
Oof just watched a video from the Pear.ai guys and was happy to hear they made it into YC. I don't know much about the project, but they seem like good people.
"What we're doing isn't technically illegal so stop talking about it" isn't generally a phrase used by what I'd call good people, but we'll agree to disagree.
There's a difference between forking to make a OSS project better and forking to create a clone just for the sake of VC funding that doesn't trickle down back to the original code.
Even if it's allowable by the permissive license of the original code, it's not a net positive for OSS.
The beauty of forking/open source is the ability to contribute back to the original project or take over an abandoned project. In this case, the original project Continue.dev isn't abandoned and actually has more traction/commits than the PearAI fork. But what PearAI did not do is a traditional fork. They took the commit history, re-branded everything to PearAI, pushed it up to their own repo, and claimed that the contributors of VSCode & Continue were their own contributors on Twitter.
That's not the spirit of open source. I'm sure the authors of Continue.dev did not intend for their work to be used this way, even if the license is permissive of it.
I'm not sure how to parse this, and one possibility is worse than the other.
Did they go through and alter each commit in the history, making it look as if the committer was talking about brand B instead of brand A at the time they made the commit?
Or did they clone the commit history, and add commits to rebrand, while keeping the historical commits intact?
That's because there's literally no such thing. It's a licensing choice, not a seance. If you don't want people to use your code, license it correctly.
I think the assumption people are making is that the YC selection team are dumb idiots, and don't understand that all the founders of that project did was fork an open source project and ask them for some money.
(I'm not saying this is what happened; I know nothing about this project. I am saying this seems like the assumption the author of the article and some people in this thread are making. I bet that's not what happened, but if YC is actually full of dumb idiots who do zero due diligence whatsoever, then I guess I have to agree with the article's thesis.)
Just from public information my impression is that prestige was never a goal while scaling was in the plans from fairly early on.
Anecdotally, some of the best recent founders I know are opting not to apply, which I think is a bad sign. But their reasons have nothing to do with the scale, competitiveness, or prestige of the program.
IMHO this post misses the fact that YC becoming a prestige institution is itself a sort of failure mode. You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school that will look good on their resume.
It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though.
I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themselves, but I find the whole debacle a bit embarrassing for YC and I know some of my YC batchmates quietly do as well.
YC was a child of its time though, right? Are you asking what could YC have done differently in the context of its history, or are you asking what a new accelerator started today would look like?
I ask because I’m not sure that now is the time for a new startup accelerator to succeed, and we have no way to predict the circumstances that are required for success without couching it in some major changes to externalities.
Great question; the latter, because as you mention, YC was a product of a moment in time and that moment has passed, but during that time horizon, they were very successful (imho).
Edit: YC says "Build something people want." and so I'm going to riff off of that in a bit of a meta way: "Support experiments worth conducting." The accelerator bit comes in once you've reached product market fit and need fuel for the rocket ship, but until then, you're just running an economic science experiment.
It's interesting to consider what the evolution YC 2.0 could be. I do think we're going to be seeing more innovative organizational models that can be facilitated by adept use of AI.
For example, a network organization that hires individuals and small teams. The organization works on various projects and product streams, which which can be spun out as new businesses.
This is a flexible model that allows for many different outcomes and journeys for the people. Less of a startup factory and more of an enterprise garden.
I like the idea of gateways as a system for managing ideas and new business developments. Regular gateways every 6 or 12 months that assess projects for continuation, funding and further development. People can be involved in several projects.
I see this type of organization structure as a kind of 'hyper network'. By using AI to monitor and report on network activity it should be possible to have effective management oversight, direction and communication ... beneficent controlled creative chaos.
completely data driven and pseudonymous. Everyone enters what they are building, traction, progress so far, team etc and internal team votes based on the data progress without looking at founder profile.
make it fair instead of funding the same golden-spoon cliquey gang over and over again.
> You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school
Of course YC would want that (in the short- to mid-term).
The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an accelerator they are in the best position to do that.
The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.
Saw one recently that literally forked VSCode and Cursor and called it a company with some really shady practices. Not even sure what YC was thinking with that one, but it indeed falls into the category of comical vaporware.
How did something like this get funded? They must think there will be a follow through to liquidity event, but no clue how. Maybe YC is playing into the bigger fool theory that someone else will come along and pay more so YC can extricate their equity.
Sure, that would be a theoretical failure mode. But that's not really what's happening right now, is it?
YC doesn't look to have a problem of people joining just to get the stamp on the resume and then "half-assing" it after they get into YC. I think that's something that YC is still quite actively selecting against. As long as they are selecting companies that make it to a series ~C (which most founders will stick around for as long as they are on an good-enough upward-presenting) YC can (partially) liquidate at good enough fund performance.
A high-quality early stage team that self-selects out of follow-up rounds may be a decent outcome for some VCs. This means early liquidity in all of the "positive" events. If the founders were high quality, spinning an acquihire out can still recoup some of the loss.
The challenge would come where the founders are not serious, and instead are viewing YC as a stepping stone to a level up position in a big tech/large firm. While I'm sure everyone has this idea to some extent as a fallback, you need people to be committed to making their business work.
> The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that.
This is completely incorrect. They need liquidity events. Simply getting to follow on funding without ever making it to an exit is a negative outcome for YC.
While an exit (= aquisition, IPO and similar) is obviously always the optimal end-goal, every round of fundraising is a potential liquidity event for all existing stakeholders.
It's very common to have partial liquidation from roughly Series B-C onwards on the side of founders (e.g. wanting to keep up lifestyle with your C-level peers; removing personal financals as stress factor) and earlier investors (e.g. their funds entering the liquidation period of their lifecycle).
> The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an accelerator they are in the best position to do that.
That's really short term thinking.
It might work for a class or two, but eventually VCs will realize that they're getting bad returns from their investments, and YC won't be nearly as attractive as it is today.
For long term success, YC needs to pick companies that will eventually become successful. Particularly the big, standout successes.
> The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.
If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.
> but eventually VCs will realize that they're getting bad returns from their investments
I'm not saying that they are necessarily bad returns. It's just that for many reasons there is a strong opportunity for a disconnect between viable business models and seed-investments. E.g. exit event horizons are currently so long[0] that it becomes hard to correlate exit success to seed-funding (for better or worse).
> If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.
Oh, I don't disagree with you. But from the actions of YCombinator it seem like either:
- They don't see this as a risk to their long-term ROI (due to some factors we are not seeing here)
- They don't have proper means of self-assessing their selection quality and think they are scaling well while they don't
- The situation is not as bad as the article and some of the comments here make it look like, and everything is fine with YC
A very straightforward way that this manifests: when a VC funds a developer tooling company, all their other portfolio companies are strongly encouraged to use it. Built in customers! The test is how much revenue you can actually bring in from outside the VC bubble.
For the uninitiated like myself, PearAi just took the source code of continue.dev (not fork, they copy pasted) and did some clunky work on it. That was their entry to YC.
"did some clunky work on it. That was their entry to YC"
For more context, YC doesn't judge your code, never has. It was never a code quality competition. Orthogonally, they do judge the results (user metrics).
Did they? YC regularly funded competitors. This was always true. Fundamentally, YC is betting on founders. They're optimizing for founders who can move fast enough to find a moat before they die, that's it.
They fund competitors because most YC companies usually pivot out anyway.
for additional uninitiatedness: one of the founders is "Frying Pan", a popular youtuber. There has been previous discussion on the fact that the cost to build software is approaching 0. If that is given, maybe "taste" is all that matters. Funding a ~productless popular youtuber is a great way to test if "taste" and "brand" is better to invest in than tech in the years to come.
> There has been previous discussion on the fact that the cost to build software is approaching 0.
People have been claiming that since COBOL came out (actually, probably before; I bet some people claimed it about _assembler_), so, er, yeah, will believe that one when I see it.
“Taste” is something that’s developed through repetitive exposure to differentiated items in a particular set, combined with extremely high abstract analytical abilities, and that’s something completely different from having marketing or personal branding skills.
I think you’re right that that’s the evaluation happening, but it’s totally misguided. If you’re indexing for differentiating levels of taste I would be very wary of empty vessel young influencers. Taste is built over years and years and imo requires a certain disdain for the crowd. Look at Linus Torvalds as a pinnacle of taste in code for example.
Just looked up the etymology of prestige and it’s interesting.
It comes from Latin praestigium ("delusion, illusion"), then 1500s French prestige meaning “deceit, imposture, illusion”. In the 1800s it started to mean “an illusion as to one's personal merit or importance, a flattering illusion”.
I would have wrongly guessed it originally meant “good reputation” (same as the article author meant it, I assume) and that the association with bullshit/fakery is just a modern twist from people using the word with cynical irony. But bullshit/fakery was in fact the core meaning.
Without being aware of the etymology I've still had a lifetime feeling since childhood that it is very fragile for some reason that is hard to pinpoint or bring into focus very easily.
Really is about the same feeling as when you know something is hype or BS and for that reason more subject to collapse like a house of cards.
The "something" that they see is that they have a 1% chance of success. YC is an investment strategy. They noticed that equity which is 99% sure to be worthless is heavily under priced and bought a ton of it. That bet paid off handsomely.
If your batchmates are seeing embarrassment from who else is at the top of such a funnel I don't think much of their judgment. Investors provide capital, not prestige.
YC pretty openly and deliberately tries to convince prospective and actual Big Tech employees who are curious or on the fence to quit and do a startup already. There's a great Startup School video about this [0]. I think the critics are right about "doing a startup" and chasing an exit having become an equally normal, precedented, socially-supported path as joining a big company and chasing promotions. But I'd be surprised if YC itself would characterize that as failure.
HN is a lot more jaded towards startups and founders’ games these days. Back in late 2019 there was this thread about a pre-YC Garry Tan video where the tone of the discussion was fiercely against working for startups, saying it was better to join FAANG or start your own company instead:
How many times did the author apply and get rejected from YC?
I have heard this sentiment before, from a less successful VC. After comparing them based on track record, it was clear YC is in a league of its own. I want to get advice from people who have built startups before. Looks at YC advisors on YouTube and you'll find they're all very successful.
Look at the partners and advisors at most VCs or accelerator programs, and you won't find that level of experience. You'll get mismanaged and start thinking like an investor instead.
> How many times did the author apply and get rejected from YC?
Author is not wrong.
This “YC is actually a negative signal” sentiment started back in 2018-2019.
The “actual” good entrepreneurs (e.g., the folks you expect from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley) stopped applying to YC a while back.
There are different signaling mechanisms in 2024, which I won’t reveal here, because the “plebs” will turn it into shit, just like they did to YC, leetcode interviews, and FANG ML jobs.
You posting "better" signalling mechanisms (in your opinion) will not be the end of them... People don't do things because you think they're good. They'll find them by looking and copying existing companies' approaches.
You have failed to mention anything except to say approximately "YC sucks and I have something better but I don't want to share"
> You posting "better" signalling mechanisms (in your opinion) will not be the end of them...
Of course it will be the end. You think leetcode mediums are enough to land a FANG job in 2024? No. But in 2015, they were.
The top-tier are always adapting. Always one step ahead of the rest. Formula 1, top 5% dating profiles, mega churches, olympic athletes, cartel drug smugglers, private elementary schools, and elite entrepreneurs, all the same.
Me posting the “secrets” of 2024 make my life more difficult, because I actively use them. Sure, I’ll adapt once the game changes. But I’ll “rest and vest” until then, right?
> You have failed to mention anything except to say approximately "YC sucks and I have something better but I don't want to share"
I am not obligated to help others. Don’t like my attitude? Well then, you’re not going to like the top-tier culture.
Programmer/hacker culture used to have the positive, helpful camaraderie you are looking for. But that shit is long gone. Like I said, adapt.
I don't track these things, but as far back as I can remember, the appeal of YC was the tutelage of experienced founders, availability of office hours, and the atmosphere of being surrounded by like-minded, ambitious people.
Surprised this doesn't mention meticulous.ai, who seem to spam HN with "we're hiring!" each month but i've never heard of anybody using them, nor do LI show any new employees. Hey Gabriel, what's going on?
I thought I was the only one who noticed, I'd much prefer the YC companies do a monthly "here's who's hiring" much like the "who's hiring" instead of individual ones.
I don't think that's really connected to the topic here?
What you are describing here just sounds like one of their portfolio companies taking full advantage of one of the perks that comes with YC? I don't know what the limit on the "We're hiring" posts is for portfolio companies, and I also have a few on the top of my mind that showed up a lot, but having that as "ads" on this website isn't too bad.
With the recent drop of batch quality comes more lifestyle companies and less disruptors. I can't imagine the YC of even 10 years ago funding quite so many zombies 3+ years no product but still holding out for the fabled founding engineer...
A half-decent Schemer in found3rm0de would've built 5 failed MVPs and exactly one unicorn in that timeframe.
I briefly worked for Imbue, and got paid for it, and as far as I know they are still legitimately hiring -- their current team page shows a good number of people who have been hired since I was there -- so I don't think "spams fake hiring ads" is a fair thing to say; they are legitimately hiring people, and paying good money. My impression is that they make the top of the hiring funnel as wide as possible but end up hiring a tiny fraction of the people who start the process.
I interviewed for Meticulous a few years ago, and I'm pretty sure I was almost hired, but it didn't go through because they decided they wanted to go fully in-person in London, and I didn't want that. Gabriel seemed like a good guy, I was given a very believable project demo, Quentin also seems legit, my understanding is the product is difficult currently to roll-out to smaller customers but they have a good number of larger paying customers.
I don't think the continuous hiring posts are anything other than a sign that it doesn't cost them anything and they get good leads every time they do it.
Article's assumption is that a totally incompetent set of startup founders were admitted to YC because it "loses quality in exchange for quantity" (not a direct quote but the gist). And this startup was nothing more than a copy of a different startup.
Maybe it is the prestige game that became a death knell for YC. Because it is "cool" to be accepted to YC, the "cool people" with a coolness factor started applying and tried to game through the evaluation process into acceptance. But these cool people aren't really cut out for doing sweaty, gross, sleeve-pulling work. So they likely fail.
What does Sam do? Refocus the company to drift away from the "cool" tech sector where cool people are looking to make their name cool. And start doing stuff in multiple sectors (that will seem cool in the future!).
What didn't he do? Make the grind of becoming a YC selectee even sweatier and harder. Or change the selection process entirely so that all previous books trying to get you through the system fall flat on their faces.
Do you have to? Doesn't YC have enough capital to spend it on meaningful endeavors instead of silly "moonshots"? How much would be enough before this happens? Genuine questions, no snark.
Counter point: there are so many more accelerators now. It was basically getting into MIT/Stanford in term of opening up big doors. Now you have schools with accelerators right out of undergrads. So, YC has to compete in the space (sort of). It’s still one of the highest prestige (as in validation) you can get EVEN IF YOU FAIL.
I don't agree at all with this post. YC's mission is to help founders start companies and help them build sustainable businesses. Towards that they've made it super simple to get started and funded, and provide guiding principles and support in the form of advice and a strong network to help the startups survive. They were never about prestige -- that came as a byproduct.
Scaling this model is hard, however, and I think they may be running into scaling limits. There just may not be that many fast growing businesses (startups) every year. We won't know until years from now.
I was part of the W12 batch of YC (which was a lot smaller, ~60 companies, back when Paul Graham was still leading YC).
YC funds a lot of companies and has always had super high variance in the companies it funds. Entrepreneurs are a wild bunch of people. There have always been companies where the founders turned out to be BS artists or sociopaths. Companies that folded immediately after the program started. Companies with messy cofounder breakups already brewing at the beginning of the batch. Companies that turned out to be slightly scammy. Some of the founders that were in those companies pivoted and became successful.
Picking on Pear AI (which I don't know anything about) as evidence of YC failing is silly. It's also a super early stage company and you really have no idea what they will do.
The test of YC to me is, can they keep attracting and picking some of the best founders (which you can't really tell for years). And providing the inspiring, warm, but pushy environment that best sets up founders for success, and in turn keeps them coming to YC. I'd apply to YC again in a heartbeat if I were ever starting another company.
What happened is adverse selection due to a stubbornly low valuation that doesn't even try to keep up, in the midst of a growing number of alternatives, worsened by a formal and therefore somewhat gameable process of getting in. The kind of person who really has an idea they are going to pursue regardless that he's actually committed to isn't going to part with his equity at the low prices a YC would offer. Instead what you get is people creating companies explicitly with the intention of applying for VC, which removes an important filter reflecting founder buy-in, and therefore average quality; and there's no way you can really tell one from the other.
I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion.
There’s a tendency in contemporary online culture to want to condemn the whole person. It’s not enough, it seems, to condemn Altman’s self-serving decisions with OpenAI. We also have to pretend he’s a bungling businessman, whose self-inflicted downfall is imminent. The same pattern can be observed with other public figures. It just doesn’t seem to me to beget a workable understanding of reality.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, except that I like reading HN, and I’d like it if this place didn’t descend into the kind of friend-enemy thinking so prevalent on much of the internet.
> I don’t see how any of the evidence martialed in this article proves the conclusion.
Agreed. Making this level clam requires a lot more evidence. It would have been better if the author presented this idea as something like 'YC better watch out, quality does matter' or something like that. Even then they would need to bring in more evidence and outside examples of industries where this trend took hold.
Only punishment and court judgement requires that level of evidence.
Corruption often never gets exposed at all and at best is only revealed through weaker anecdotal evidence or even rumors.
A blurry picture is often better than no picture at all. Form your own opinion about my link above. If it’s actually true, then that post I made is likely the only thing you’ll ever read about it.
The solution to a low volume of information isn't to place extra emphasis on weak data.
A blurry picture is better than none, but this behavior seems like taking a blurry picture, creatively extrapolating it to crystal clarity, and then fervently claiming it is reality.
Confidence and conviction in an arbitrary belief can help an idea compete in an information poor environment, but that doesnt mean it isn't delusional.
To make my comment clearer, the article made many statements like:
> If the main appeal of joining YC isn’t the mentorship but the prestige of being able to write "YC W22" in your Twitter bio and on your company’s landing page
and
> Take Harvard, for instance: the reason they don’t accept a higher percentage of applicants isn’t because they can’t scale—they have the resources to build more facilities or could even switch to remote like YC—but because they choose not to.
These statements are made with no backing evidence for them. They could be right, but without any evidence that they are I just have to take it on faith that they are, which I won't. At least link to another article making the case for these statements.
This is just bad writing and it is a problem with modern journalism and blogging. The author may, or may not, have a great point, but they did nothing to actually argue their point except point out one tweet at the end. Even that was predicated on the many statements before being true. Take away all the unsubstantiated claims in this article and you are left with, at best, a re-tweet and an argument that Dorai is being a little overly defensive and that may indicate something worth looking into.
Yep, ideally OP should formalize their theory into a bet and accept people to bet against them. Say, $5k on OpenAI <insert some horrible outcome> in 10 years. Money could be kept in escrow with a trusted third party.
One of the biggest shocks to me was that YC now invests in war and killing people. Before their closest connecting to killing people was investing in companies that had severe negative effects for society, like Doordash or AirBnb. Now they're helping people make missiles.
There are 40,000 people killed in Gaza by US weapons, in what even Biden called "indiscriminate bombing". YC should not be making cheaper ways for our allies to commit genocide.
If you put it that way, lot of people have been killed by Russia’s weapons in Ukraine. US’s weapons are used to protect civilians there. Think of all the Russia’s missiles shot down, or artillery depots blown up.
Contemporary weapons are also much more precise. That means lower collateral damages. A lot of development efforts are to further enhance on that front.
Weapon development is essential. Of course we should condemn mis- or excessive use of force, especially against civilians.
We can clearly see from how the US aids and abets genocide[0] in Gaza that they make no judgments based on international law, ethics or sound moral values but only based on the geopolitical interests of their ruling elite and their lobbyists regardless of what the majority of the population they rule over thinks in this regard. If you believe for a second that America is helping Ukraine out of the goodness of their hearts or because "it's the right thing to do" then I have a bridge to sell you.
It's a proxy war for them and the US would let happen to Ukraine and Ukrainians that which it lets happen to Gaza and Gazans if it were aligned with their geopolitical interests. US politics couldn't be possibly more machiavellian than it already is.
Until we actually have controls to protect against excessive force, which we patently do not and have never had, building better weapons will always be used against civilians to commit attrocities.
Right now, we ignore the controls we do have. The US is not supposed to provide weapons to anyone violating human rights, which Israel is very obviously doing, as is agreed universally outside the US. But we still provide them with weapons as they are our "allies". While this is the case, de facto any better weapons we build are used to commit "better" crimes against humanity.
YC did not have prestige in their early years (Jessica mentions they had to beg their friends to come to demo days). Yet people were dropping out of Harvard to join. So it seems prestige is not necessary for success and in fact may be a negative signal.
It wasn't. If you told someone you dropped out of Harvard back then they would think you were making an odd choice. That said, it was never very risky since Harvard will take you back if you drop out, but it was at least unusual.
"The issue isn't that PearAI did something illegal—it's that they got funded by YC with nothing more than a codebase copied from another YC-backed company. This shows that (1) YC is willing to fund just about anything, (2) they’re not doing any real due diligence, and (3) they don't particularly care about their existing portfolio companies."
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding on how YC functions. YCombinator was never a test of how good (or unique) your code was. At its core it was a filter of people, people who can work well together and people who can build something useful. That's it. You can read more about this straight from one of the founders [1]. The fact that you used open-source code (within legal bounds) to get their quicker just shows your resourcefulness, something YC actually optimizes for.
More often than not, "good people" tend to be domain experts sometimes really good and unique coders but that, to me, was always a byproduct of the search pattern.
You can obviously disagree with this methodology, but it has worked pretty well.
VC firms are betting on the people. Most early startups are still looking for their market fit. The VC firm is betting that the people are able to identify that market which they'll be able to scale.
yc is a club looking for members. A lot of the members share similar traits/backgrounds which is why there's sorta this "populist" backlash. It's not meritocracy for ideas or viability.
I think the real pain point you're hitting on there is that people feel like they don't get selected when they deserve to be. While there are those who don't deserve it but get selected anyway.
While I often feel this sadness/jealousy myself, and most probably a lot of the rage bait X replies do too (despite not admitting it) - someday they have to wake up and realize that life is/has always been that way.
Despite our collective desire, Tech is not a guaranteed meritocracy either.
I think something people might be missing is the context around this post, which is that the founders are being dragged on twitter, essentially.
Since a lot of you hate the site, I'll summarise briefly: one of the founders did a thread starting with the following post:
"
I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang
We're building PearAI, an open source AI code editor. Think a better Copilot, or open source Cursor. But you've heard this spiel already...
"
One thing not conveyed here is the first line is in unicode bold and the end is littered with emoji spam. Essentially, the post ticked a few rage inducing boxes for a certain kind of tech twitter user. It was rather cringe, reading like a thread from get-rich-quick influencer types while also likely imbueing some readers and quote tweets with a little jealousy they wouldn't openly admit. This was probably the impetus that pushed one or two angry people to poke around their product and find out about the open source code cloning and the fact the founders were overselling (which founder doesn't, I guess...) which lead to a rout of publicly mocking them and YC in general, resulting in blog posts like the OP, I guess.
I personally don't really think one company amongst the whole batch is enough to judge the start of a trend for YC "trading prestige for growth" or whatever. I think the discussion of prestige is in general is an interesting one, I just don't think PearAI is indicative of it more than they themselves just being hucksters which happens in tech in general.
The founders showed hustle, as every founder must. nothing wrong with that in my book.
But they need adult-guidance on communication. You dont go around twitter boasting about your 270K job etc. They need to show grown up hustle (grit, perseverence, etc). Not high-school (mine is bigger than yours) hustle.
I feel like that "270K job" comment was some sort of cultural signal to Zoomer devs on the FAANG leetcode job grind. I'm in my 40s so it just seems both tacky and unimpressive but maybe for folks half my age it's a meaningful signal towards competency?
270k is on the low end and would indicate incompetency if anything if you're older than mid-20s, esp since it's not like he's taking a pay cut to work in a cool or interesting field (coinbase lmao)
The simpler break-down here is that they are crappy con artists and need to be be better at con-artisting. Which is fine, but please let's not pretend it's very different.
Honestly, I hate X/Twitter specifically for this - the click/rage bait cesspool that it has become in the past year after content engagement became monetized.
Every other day, or at least every week, there is a new topic that everyone piles-on rage and hate to - even accounts that have nothing to do with the topic. This is because eyeballs make users money from X - so getting any audience possible, and getting them inflamed enough to engage is the point.
Even worse, the algorithm is gamed such that the latest rage is pushed to every other users eyeballs, resulting in a constant stream of hate in your feed.
Part of the earlier appeal of YC was that it was a batch of approval that, at least imo, was a strong signal to VCs to take a good look at the company and more-likely-than-not invest in.
With larger batches and more lax selection that signal is so weak that YC comapnies are mostly like other companies with some traction.
There is a part in the Netflix culture doc where it talks about how sometimes people do bad things, and Netflix tries to not overcorrect by implementing burdensome policies on the company as a knee-jerk reaction to a single bad actor.
The conclusion (YC's brand has been tarnished because of the lower quality companies in their larger batches who do bad things) doesn't follow from the evidence of this ONE company doing something that people could view as a low integrity move.
This exact situation could have occurred even if they kept their acceptance rates, and cohorts, incredibly small. There can always be bad actors (not saying this company is a bad actor though). I think you wanted to share your conclusion, even if the available evidence didn't necessarily support your claim.
I think the bigger issue is that the main signal to YC (and other elite institutions) is the acceptance rate (<1%). That's probably the #1 thing people know about YC. A lot of people try to get in, and few do.
The main criticism I have of YC is their constants chants of "everyone should apply!". Here is what you commonly hear:
YC: You should apply to YC!
Person: But I don’t have a product
YC: You should still apply, we let in a lot of people with just an idea!
Person: But I don’t have a co-founder
YC: You should still apply, successful solo founders have made it into the program!
Person: But I [perfectly valid reason not to waste your time]
YC: You should still apply!
Person: Wow, you’re being very encouraging, does this means I have a chance to get in?
YC: Almost certainly not!
At a certain point, I can't really take the org's mission in good faith with this kind of messaging. They want a high application rate, a low acceptance rate (even with bigger batch sizes). Just infinite optionality and founders being strung along.
The reason they want you to apply is twofold -- the application itself is a good exercise in getting you to think about things you should be thinking about. Honestly even if you have no intention at all of applying to YC you should still fill out the application for yourself, it makes you think about important things.
And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them. If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.
> If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.
Would it? With numbers that large, how could anyone possibly do a meaningful comparison and pick out the twenty or thirty or fifty that would get in?
In other words, if it's obvious to everybody that you are getting too many applications to meaningfully evaluate all of them, they everybody knows that you are not meaningfully evaluating all of them. You're applying some kind of mindless algorithmic filter to narrow down the possibilities. But that's not YC's brand. YC's brand is providing meaningful evaluation of startups. Once that brand is undermined, it's gone.
This is true of all top universities too. We get so many applications for grad school that we could admit several classes and not lose any quality.
But I would never discourage anyone from applying. Even if the quality is high, having many applicants gives you good 2nd order choices. This depends on what mix of things you care about from DEI, to looking at specific ideas like the YC calls, to hedging across different markets, to building a portfolio that balances short term wins vs. long term hard tech, maybe some fraction you optimize for publicity, or legacies, etc.
So yes, encouraging applications is the smart move even if by your primary metric you can't distinguish between the top folks anymore.
Only if you can actually do the due diligence required to maintain the quality of the student body, which is what you say the objective is. But if the number of applications is large enough, it's simply not feasible to do that due diligence for every application, and no amount of spin will prevent people from realizing that. So no, I don't agree that it's always the smart move to encourage more applicants.
> even if by your primary metric you can't distinguish between the top folks anymore
It's not a matter of distinguishing between "the top folks". It's a matter of whether or not you can plausibly defend the position that you are taking enough of an in depth look at every applicant, not just "the top folks", to maintain your quality metrics.
I'm convinced those that say "I think its a good exercise filling out an application" have never actually read the application
Here are a few questions:
"How far along are you?"
"What tech stack are you using, or planning to use, to build this product?"
"Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?"
"Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't?"
"How do or will you make money? How much could you make?"
It's really not that deep or thought provoking. Its fine, you should have answers for these questions, but its hardly worth a founders time going over this as closely as many do.
> And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them
Yes, that's the infinite optionality for them. If I was running YC, I would obv promote the same strategy. As a founder, I think their incentives don't necessarily align with mine.
I've read the application. In fact I've filled it out three times, once successfully and twice not. It is indeed an excellent exercise. Among many other things: if you're a first-time founder then it teaches you what's important, and if you're a second-time founder then it reminds you. (Many second-timers do sometimes need to be reminded, myself included.)
Then I started to interact with founders and listen to pitches. Oh boy. I used to think that then VCs are just exaggerating when they say they're like 15 minutes into a conversation and have no idea what the founders are saying. Wow. That's so not true.
The whole ecosystem would be better if every founder at last filled out that sheet.
i realised this too late. and then noticed -- the type of founder they let me. for us the unwashed masses, who are blue collar coders who went to state school. we're just filling up rejection numbers.
yet the arbiter of what determines who succeeds is not YC but the market.
I don't think the main issue here is that a YC company acted with questionable ethics. As you say, people are people and that can happen with even the strictest due diligence.
The problem for YC's prestige stems from funding a company with an unoriginal idea and not even the beginnings of a prototype. I'm aware that YC funds founders more than it funds specific ideas or projects. Nonetheless, you'd expect an impressive group of founders to do more than just fork an existing open source project.
In short, cases like this show that YC is getting (non-illegally) scammed by some of its applicants. That makes YC look foolish.
Even the evidence listed (the retweeted tweet in the article) doesn't support the claim of the author to me. If you open source software and give it a license that permits commercial use on top of it, then you are okay with that use. If I was a cohort of a team that built an open sourced AI editor I would think they would WANT me to build on top of it. Otherwise, why permit that use? They may have a bad business model, where their business does not work if they open source their tech and other companies build competitors on top of it. But that's a questions for them and their decision to open source. But it doesn't seem shady to use open source software from another company that permits commercial use.
> This decline will continue until cool, innovative companies no longer see any reason to apply.
I am the furthest thing from a business man / start-up news addict, but even I know that the point of starting a company is to make money (perhaps fulfilling a need or niche, sure) and "being cool" should have nothing to do with it. Hell, "cool" often doesn't really square with being "innovative" anyway.
Startups determine their ability to execute, and thus generate revenue (or promises of same) from appearing “cool” to prospective talent and future investors. Without it, they wither and die.
However review my last month or so of post history for my views on earned/employment income, unearned income and asset income.
In essence I differentiate between revenue within income, but not income/investment. I don't think taxes should either. Specifically, I think capital gains/intermingling of asset taxes while requiring up to date taxed-upfront employment taxes is one of the worst decisions society ever made.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadIn this sense, how is YC any different from any other VC firm?
I'm sorry if your company got accepted into YC, better luck next time. At least you can hang out with the founders of... 100 AI-assisted Code Editors, 'The first Travel Credit Card for Gen Z', 'Starbucks memberships for restaurants', 'a video first food delivery app, tiktok meets doordash', and 'the operating system for vacation rentals'. Truly a staggering group of talent.
Those are all real companies in W24 btw...
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=F24&batch=S24&ba...
I expect "AI Nip Alert" to show up any day now
I had no idea how “AI” could possibly be of use, so clicked through out of curiosity. Hilariously, it boiled down to “we occasionally use an LLM to email people for you.”
I checked, and over 300 (of ~500) 2024 YC startups have some sort of AI tag. I'm quite curious how the current AI hype is gonna end...
Huh. Is this just that Fyre Festival guy’s thing, only increment the generation by one?
More generally, most of these read as parody.
B) YC companies are risky to use, obviously we meme about people using IBM for "saftey", but there is an opposite side of that which is going with a seed stage company - it's very risky.
C) Even if you are a happy customer, if you are too niche they will typically abandon you. I've been on the decision making side for this, sometimes your early customers don't fit your new market, so you have to let them down slowly.
Forking is part of how open source is supposed to work.
Even if it's allowable by the permissive license of the original code, it's not a net positive for OSS.
I'll take the authors' published intent over your speculation.
That's not the spirit of open source. I'm sure the authors of Continue.dev did not intend for their work to be used this way, even if the license is permissive of it.
Did they go through and alter each commit in the history, making it look as if the committer was talking about brand B instead of brand A at the time they made the commit?
Or did they clone the commit history, and add commits to rebrand, while keeping the historical commits intact?
If they wanted to police use, they could choose a different license, like one of the GPL or CC variants.
That's because there's literally no such thing. It's a licensing choice, not a seance. If you don't want people to use your code, license it correctly.
(I'm not saying this is what happened; I know nothing about this project. I am saying this seems like the assumption the author of the article and some people in this thread are making. I bet that's not what happened, but if YC is actually full of dumb idiots who do zero due diligence whatsoever, then I guess I have to agree with the article's thesis.)
Anecdotally, some of the best recent founders I know are opting not to apply, which I think is a bad sign. But their reasons have nothing to do with the scale, competitiveness, or prestige of the program.
It's tough to avoid that outcome while still conferring positive signal to VCs/potential employees, though.
I'm sure YC/Garry see something in the PearAI founders' ability to market themselves, but I find the whole debacle a bit embarrassing for YC and I know some of my YC batchmates quietly do as well.
I ask because I’m not sure that now is the time for a new startup accelerator to succeed, and we have no way to predict the circumstances that are required for success without couching it in some major changes to externalities.
Edit: YC says "Build something people want." and so I'm going to riff off of that in a bit of a meta way: "Support experiments worth conducting." The accelerator bit comes in once you've reached product market fit and need fuel for the rocket ship, but until then, you're just running an economic science experiment.
I'm guessing it was inevitable that Wall Street would take over the field, and turn it into a machine.
And therefore it was also inevitable that people who, in the past, would've gone to Wall Street, now would flow into the space, and take it over.
But YC did put their own spin on that, in which the traditional affluent-family, prestigious-school kids could also be computer nerds.
For example, a network organization that hires individuals and small teams. The organization works on various projects and product streams, which which can be spun out as new businesses.
This is a flexible model that allows for many different outcomes and journeys for the people. Less of a startup factory and more of an enterprise garden.
I like the idea of gateways as a system for managing ideas and new business developments. Regular gateways every 6 or 12 months that assess projects for continuation, funding and further development. People can be involved in several projects.
I see this type of organization structure as a kind of 'hyper network'. By using AI to monitor and report on network activity it should be possible to have effective management oversight, direction and communication ... beneficent controlled creative chaos.
make it fair instead of funding the same golden-spoon cliquey gang over and over again.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pearai
[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pair-ai
Of course YC would want that (in the short- to mid-term).
The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an accelerator they are in the best position to do that.
The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.
Saw one recently that literally forked VSCode and Cursor and called it a company with some really shady practices. Not even sure what YC was thinking with that one, but it indeed falls into the category of comical vaporware.
How did something like this get funded? They must think there will be a follow through to liquidity event, but no clue how. Maybe YC is playing into the bigger fool theory that someone else will come along and pay more so YC can extricate their equity.
YC doesn't look to have a problem of people joining just to get the stamp on the resume and then "half-assing" it after they get into YC. I think that's something that YC is still quite actively selecting against. As long as they are selecting companies that make it to a series ~C (which most founders will stick around for as long as they are on an good-enough upward-presenting) YC can (partially) liquidate at good enough fund performance.
The challenge would come where the founders are not serious, and instead are viewing YC as a stepping stone to a level up position in a big tech/large firm. While I'm sure everyone has this idea to some extent as a fallback, you need people to be committed to making their business work.
This is completely incorrect. They need liquidity events. Simply getting to follow on funding without ever making it to an exit is a negative outcome for YC.
While an exit (= aquisition, IPO and similar) is obviously always the optimal end-goal, every round of fundraising is a potential liquidity event for all existing stakeholders.
It's very common to have partial liquidation from roughly Series B-C onwards on the side of founders (e.g. wanting to keep up lifestyle with your C-level peers; removing personal financals as stress factor) and earlier investors (e.g. their funds entering the liquidation period of their lifecycle).
That's really short term thinking.
It might work for a class or two, but eventually VCs will realize that they're getting bad returns from their investments, and YC won't be nearly as attractive as it is today.
For long term success, YC needs to pick companies that will eventually become successful. Particularly the big, standout successes.
> The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.
If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.
In a hits business, does quality picking matter? You want to avoid adverse selection, but beyond that - isn't it just about scale?
Originally, at small scale, you need to pick hits better than others (or get lucky).
Next, you want to scale large enough that you can make enough bets to amortize individual bet risk across a large portfolio.
Then, once you're over that scale, you need to be back in the business of picking hits more reliably than the next VC.
I'm not saying that they are necessarily bad returns. It's just that for many reasons there is a strong opportunity for a disconnect between viable business models and seed-investments. E.g. exit event horizons are currently so long[0] that it becomes hard to correlate exit success to seed-funding (for better or worse).
> If you think that's the path to good long-term ROI, I have a startup to sell you.
Oh, I don't disagree with you. But from the actions of YCombinator it seem like either:
- They don't see this as a risk to their long-term ROI (due to some factors we are not seeing here)
- They don't have proper means of self-assessing their selection quality and think they are scaling well while they don't
- The situation is not as bad as the article and some of the comments here make it look like, and everything is fine with YC
[0]: https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/ <- There are many 10+ year old companies on that list without an exit and YCombinator isn't even 20 years old yet
Isn't that exactly what we're discussing happening to YC?
(also, I did some poking around, this is the founder 3 months ago talking about using continue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0OylwLzBQw&t=257s - no horse in this race, just sharing)
For more context, YC doesn't judge your code, never has. It was never a code quality competition. Orthogonally, they do judge the results (user metrics).
it shows
[1]: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a...
They fund competitors because most YC companies usually pivot out anyway.
People have been claiming that since COBOL came out (actually, probably before; I bet some people claimed it about _assembler_), so, er, yeah, will believe that one when I see it.
I think you’re right that that’s the evaluation happening, but it’s totally misguided. If you’re indexing for differentiating levels of taste I would be very wary of empty vessel young influencers. Taste is built over years and years and imo requires a certain disdain for the crowd. Look at Linus Torvalds as a pinnacle of taste in code for example.
It comes from Latin praestigium ("delusion, illusion"), then 1500s French prestige meaning “deceit, imposture, illusion”. In the 1800s it started to mean “an illusion as to one's personal merit or importance, a flattering illusion”.
I would have wrongly guessed it originally meant “good reputation” (same as the article author meant it, I assume) and that the association with bullshit/fakery is just a modern twist from people using the word with cynical irony. But bullshit/fakery was in fact the core meaning.
Without being aware of the etymology I've still had a lifetime feeling since childhood that it is very fragile for some reason that is hard to pinpoint or bring into focus very easily.
Really is about the same feeling as when you know something is hype or BS and for that reason more subject to collapse like a house of cards.
If your batchmates are seeing embarrassment from who else is at the top of such a funnel I don't think much of their judgment. Investors provide capital, not prestige.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM2reZib2RY
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21865065
Instead of say prestige being the side effect of being good at something useful for the society.
I have heard this sentiment before, from a less successful VC. After comparing them based on track record, it was clear YC is in a league of its own. I want to get advice from people who have built startups before. Looks at YC advisors on YouTube and you'll find they're all very successful.
Look at the partners and advisors at most VCs or accelerator programs, and you won't find that level of experience. You'll get mismanaged and start thinking like an investor instead.
Author is not wrong.
This “YC is actually a negative signal” sentiment started back in 2018-2019.
The “actual” good entrepreneurs (e.g., the folks you expect from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley) stopped applying to YC a while back.
There are different signaling mechanisms in 2024, which I won’t reveal here, because the “plebs” will turn it into shit, just like they did to YC, leetcode interviews, and FANG ML jobs.
You have failed to mention anything except to say approximately "YC sucks and I have something better but I don't want to share"
Of course it will be the end. You think leetcode mediums are enough to land a FANG job in 2024? No. But in 2015, they were.
The top-tier are always adapting. Always one step ahead of the rest. Formula 1, top 5% dating profiles, mega churches, olympic athletes, cartel drug smugglers, private elementary schools, and elite entrepreneurs, all the same.
Me posting the “secrets” of 2024 make my life more difficult, because I actively use them. Sure, I’ll adapt once the game changes. But I’ll “rest and vest” until then, right?
> You have failed to mention anything except to say approximately "YC sucks and I have something better but I don't want to share"
I am not obligated to help others. Don’t like my attitude? Well then, you’re not going to like the top-tier culture.
Programmer/hacker culture used to have the positive, helpful camaraderie you are looking for. But that shit is long gone. Like I said, adapt.
Also, YC is mostly back in person and so pretty hard to scale (also batch sizes have gone down in the last couple of years).
When did that change?
2005 - 8 startups
2010 - 63 startups
2015 - 216 startups
2020 - 435 startups
2024 - 509 startups so far (likely 600+ when the Fall batch is done)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies
What you are describing here just sounds like one of their portfolio companies taking full advantage of one of the perks that comes with YC? I don't know what the limit on the "We're hiring" posts is for portfolio companies, and I also have a few on the top of my mind that showed up a lot, but having that as "ads" on this website isn't too bad.
A half-decent Schemer in found3rm0de would've built 5 failed MVPs and exactly one unicorn in that timeframe.
I don't think the continuous hiring posts are anything other than a sign that it doesn't cost them anything and they get good leads every time they do it.
Maybe it is the prestige game that became a death knell for YC. Because it is "cool" to be accepted to YC, the "cool people" with a coolness factor started applying and tried to game through the evaluation process into acceptance. But these cool people aren't really cut out for doing sweaty, gross, sleeve-pulling work. So they likely fail.
What does Sam do? Refocus the company to drift away from the "cool" tech sector where cool people are looking to make their name cool. And start doing stuff in multiple sectors (that will seem cool in the future!).
What didn't he do? Make the grind of becoming a YC selectee even sweatier and harder. Or change the selection process entirely so that all previous books trying to get you through the system fall flat on their faces.
Scaling this model is hard, however, and I think they may be running into scaling limits. There just may not be that many fast growing businesses (startups) every year. We won't know until years from now.
YC funds a lot of companies and has always had super high variance in the companies it funds. Entrepreneurs are a wild bunch of people. There have always been companies where the founders turned out to be BS artists or sociopaths. Companies that folded immediately after the program started. Companies with messy cofounder breakups already brewing at the beginning of the batch. Companies that turned out to be slightly scammy. Some of the founders that were in those companies pivoted and became successful.
Picking on Pear AI (which I don't know anything about) as evidence of YC failing is silly. It's also a super early stage company and you really have no idea what they will do.
The test of YC to me is, can they keep attracting and picking some of the best founders (which you can't really tell for years). And providing the inspiring, warm, but pushy environment that best sets up founders for success, and in turn keeps them coming to YC. I'd apply to YC again in a heartbeat if I were ever starting another company.
There’s a tendency in contemporary online culture to want to condemn the whole person. It’s not enough, it seems, to condemn Altman’s self-serving decisions with OpenAI. We also have to pretend he’s a bungling businessman, whose self-inflicted downfall is imminent. The same pattern can be observed with other public figures. It just doesn’t seem to me to beget a workable understanding of reality.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, except that I like reading HN, and I’d like it if this place didn’t descend into the kind of friend-enemy thinking so prevalent on much of the internet.
I think you mean “marshaled,” correct?
Agreed. Making this level clam requires a lot more evidence. It would have been better if the author presented this idea as something like 'YC better watch out, quality does matter' or something like that. Even then they would need to bring in more evidence and outside examples of industries where this trend took hold.
Only punishment and court judgement requires that level of evidence.
Corruption often never gets exposed at all and at best is only revealed through weaker anecdotal evidence or even rumors.
A blurry picture is often better than no picture at all. Form your own opinion about my link above. If it’s actually true, then that post I made is likely the only thing you’ll ever read about it.
A blurry picture is better than none, but this behavior seems like taking a blurry picture, creatively extrapolating it to crystal clarity, and then fervently claiming it is reality.
Confidence and conviction in an arbitrary belief can help an idea compete in an information poor environment, but that doesnt mean it isn't delusional.
> If the main appeal of joining YC isn’t the mentorship but the prestige of being able to write "YC W22" in your Twitter bio and on your company’s landing page
and
> Take Harvard, for instance: the reason they don’t accept a higher percentage of applicants isn’t because they can’t scale—they have the resources to build more facilities or could even switch to remote like YC—but because they choose not to.
These statements are made with no backing evidence for them. They could be right, but without any evidence that they are I just have to take it on faith that they are, which I won't. At least link to another article making the case for these statements.
This is just bad writing and it is a problem with modern journalism and blogging. The author may, or may not, have a great point, but they did nothing to actually argue their point except point out one tweet at the end. Even that was predicated on the many statements before being true. Take away all the unsubstantiated claims in this article and you are left with, at best, a re-tweet and an argument that Dorai is being a little overly defensive and that may indicate something worth looking into.
Hn claims to be largely independent of the YC fund. But we will never know the full truth.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries
Contemporary weapons are also much more precise. That means lower collateral damages. A lot of development efforts are to further enhance on that front.
Weapon development is essential. Of course we should condemn mis- or excessive use of force, especially against civilians.
[0] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/prof-amos-go...
Right now, we ignore the controls we do have. The US is not supposed to provide weapons to anyone violating human rights, which Israel is very obviously doing, as is agreed universally outside the US. But we still provide them with weapons as they are our "allies". While this is the case, de facto any better weapons we build are used to commit "better" crimes against humanity.
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding on how YC functions. YCombinator was never a test of how good (or unique) your code was. At its core it was a filter of people, people who can work well together and people who can build something useful. That's it. You can read more about this straight from one of the founders [1]. The fact that you used open-source code (within legal bounds) to get their quicker just shows your resourcefulness, something YC actually optimizes for.
More often than not, "good people" tend to be domain experts sometimes really good and unique coders but that, to me, was always a byproduct of the search pattern.
You can obviously disagree with this methodology, but it has worked pretty well.
[1]: https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/the-social-radar-what-i...
Despite our collective desire, Tech is not a guaranteed meritocracy either.
Since a lot of you hate the site, I'll summarise briefly: one of the founders did a thread starting with the following post:
"
I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang
We're building PearAI, an open source AI code editor. Think a better Copilot, or open source Cursor. But you've heard this spiel already...
"
One thing not conveyed here is the first line is in unicode bold and the end is littered with emoji spam. Essentially, the post ticked a few rage inducing boxes for a certain kind of tech twitter user. It was rather cringe, reading like a thread from get-rich-quick influencer types while also likely imbueing some readers and quote tweets with a little jealousy they wouldn't openly admit. This was probably the impetus that pushed one or two angry people to poke around their product and find out about the open source code cloning and the fact the founders were overselling (which founder doesn't, I guess...) which lead to a rout of publicly mocking them and YC in general, resulting in blog posts like the OP, I guess.
I personally don't really think one company amongst the whole batch is enough to judge the start of a trend for YC "trading prestige for growth" or whatever. I think the discussion of prestige is in general is an interesting one, I just don't think PearAI is indicative of it more than they themselves just being hucksters which happens in tech in general.
But they need adult-guidance on communication. You dont go around twitter boasting about your 270K job etc. They need to show grown up hustle (grit, perseverence, etc). Not high-school (mine is bigger than yours) hustle.
it is clear they are in it for the "status" of being YC. and they dont care a whit about solving anybody's problem.
they do this for a while, get it on the resume and go back to their 270K jobs after a few months.
this in and of itself is a hustle, lol. they hustled YC.
Every other day, or at least every week, there is a new topic that everyone piles-on rage and hate to - even accounts that have nothing to do with the topic. This is because eyeballs make users money from X - so getting any audience possible, and getting them inflamed enough to engage is the point.
Even worse, the algorithm is gamed such that the latest rage is pushed to every other users eyeballs, resulting in a constant stream of hate in your feed.
With larger batches and more lax selection that signal is so weak that YC comapnies are mostly like other companies with some traction.
The conclusion (YC's brand has been tarnished because of the lower quality companies in their larger batches who do bad things) doesn't follow from the evidence of this ONE company doing something that people could view as a low integrity move.
This exact situation could have occurred even if they kept their acceptance rates, and cohorts, incredibly small. There can always be bad actors (not saying this company is a bad actor though). I think you wanted to share your conclusion, even if the available evidence didn't necessarily support your claim.
The main criticism I have of YC is their constants chants of "everyone should apply!". Here is what you commonly hear:
YC: You should apply to YC!
Person: But I don’t have a product
YC: You should still apply, we let in a lot of people with just an idea!
Person: But I don’t have a co-founder
YC: You should still apply, successful solo founders have made it into the program!
Person: But I [perfectly valid reason not to waste your time]
YC: You should still apply!
Person: Wow, you’re being very encouraging, does this means I have a chance to get in?
YC: Almost certainly not!
At a certain point, I can't really take the org's mission in good faith with this kind of messaging. They want a high application rate, a low acceptance rate (even with bigger batch sizes). Just infinite optionality and founders being strung along.
I wrote more about it in a blog post
https://mleverything.substack.com/p/dont-play-status-games
And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them. If every startup in the world applied and they could choose, of course that would be better.
It has nothing to do with "juicing the numbers".
Would it? With numbers that large, how could anyone possibly do a meaningful comparison and pick out the twenty or thirty or fifty that would get in?
In other words, if it's obvious to everybody that you are getting too many applications to meaningfully evaluate all of them, they everybody knows that you are not meaningfully evaluating all of them. You're applying some kind of mindless algorithmic filter to narrow down the possibilities. But that's not YC's brand. YC's brand is providing meaningful evaluation of startups. Once that brand is undermined, it's gone.
But I would never discourage anyone from applying. Even if the quality is high, having many applicants gives you good 2nd order choices. This depends on what mix of things you care about from DEI, to looking at specific ideas like the YC calls, to hedging across different markets, to building a portfolio that balances short term wins vs. long term hard tech, maybe some fraction you optimize for publicity, or legacies, etc.
So yes, encouraging applications is the smart move even if by your primary metric you can't distinguish between the top folks anymore.
Only if you can actually do the due diligence required to maintain the quality of the student body, which is what you say the objective is. But if the number of applications is large enough, it's simply not feasible to do that due diligence for every application, and no amount of spin will prevent people from realizing that. So no, I don't agree that it's always the smart move to encourage more applicants.
> even if by your primary metric you can't distinguish between the top folks anymore
It's not a matter of distinguishing between "the top folks". It's a matter of whether or not you can plausibly defend the position that you are taking enough of an in depth look at every applicant, not just "the top folks", to maintain your quality metrics.
That assumes that evaluating a candidate is zero-cost, which surely isn't true.
Here are a few questions:
"How far along are you?"
"What tech stack are you using, or planning to use, to build this product?"
"Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?"
"Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't?"
"How do or will you make money? How much could you make?"
It's really not that deep or thought provoking. Its fine, you should have answers for these questions, but its hardly worth a founders time going over this as closely as many do.
> And the second reason is that they get to see as many options as possible, because that's obviously better for them
Yes, that's the infinite optionality for them. If I was running YC, I would obv promote the same strategy. As a founder, I think their incentives don't necessarily align with mine.
Then I started to interact with founders and listen to pitches. Oh boy. I used to think that then VCs are just exaggerating when they say they're like 15 minutes into a conversation and have no idea what the founders are saying. Wow. That's so not true.
The whole ecosystem would be better if every founder at last filled out that sheet.
yet the arbiter of what determines who succeeds is not YC but the market.
The problem for YC's prestige stems from funding a company with an unoriginal idea and not even the beginnings of a prototype. I'm aware that YC funds founders more than it funds specific ideas or projects. Nonetheless, you'd expect an impressive group of founders to do more than just fork an existing open source project.
In short, cases like this show that YC is getting (non-illegally) scammed by some of its applicants. That makes YC look foolish.
I am the furthest thing from a business man / start-up news addict, but even I know that the point of starting a company is to make money (perhaps fulfilling a need or niche, sure) and "being cool" should have nothing to do with it. Hell, "cool" often doesn't really square with being "innovative" anyway.
I have no objection to, "half a million in cash sure helps you . . "
However review my last month or so of post history for my views on earned/employment income, unearned income and asset income.
In essence I differentiate between revenue within income, but not income/investment. I don't think taxes should either. Specifically, I think capital gains/intermingling of asset taxes while requiring up to date taxed-upfront employment taxes is one of the worst decisions society ever made.