It seems the first few batches of YC were VERY successful. But, the number of successful YC companies I can think of from the last 10 years of batches is very minimal despite them investing in thousands of companies.
Makes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype wise).
Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
Wow, there's so few solo founders, and so few non-US companies. I bet nowadays, there's very few non-AI companies. So if you aren't a US-based AI-startup with multiple founders, perhaps ycombinator is not for you.
If you have a cofounder it forces you to get in the habit of delegating really early on. Prolific solo founders like pieter levels just do everything themselves, which is great for their ego but not enough to build a venture scale business.
They have a disproven ability to find people and rally them around a common cause though. Whether it's due to their personality or the idea or some other thing like timing, the inability to find a co-founder could be considered signal, for some.
These are two well-known biases of YC. I believe the reasons are the following:
* YC founders are usually very young, and young people can be capricious. They don't want a solo founder just deciding to do something without a second founder having some leverage to protect YC.
* YC is in the US and has a very pro-US perspective, so they invest in what they know and like.
YC has a known bias towards multiple founders. They accept solo founders, but solos have to stand out more or maybe already started their business. YC even provides a co-founder matching system (of unknown efficacy).
PG said "Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be."
I do think YC has become chasers of the latest trend rather than creating the trend. That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.
Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing.
Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care.
I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a passion.
I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that YC has not had a success for a very long time.
It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen to the tech industry.
Well it’s a function of those that apply and are accepted, and pitches are going to reflect the current hype. YC occasionally puts out a call for applications in areas they think are interesting but perhaps they haven’t seen many compelling pitches for. Have they recently put out a call for specific areas of interest?
Except now their call for startups are focusing on tech solutions (use LLMS to do x), instead of focusing on problems that need solving. They're now doing exactly what they've railed against, solutions in search of problems
> That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.
Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums.
All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky, made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same way on AOL 15 years before.
Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an existing idea or resell polished turds as new.
and before that, there were literal community message boards. corkboard at the grocery store. people gossiped before there was Facebook. the only real innovation was going from verbal communication to the written word, but now with TikTok, we're back at verbal communication, just with a lot of extra steps. there's no other innovation that's happened in the world since writing, isn't there?
C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place."
EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely massive wins that they have yet to (and shouldn't expect to!) replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.
Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it actually due to YC selecting so well.
Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article and a few social media posts.
But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for a few people.
=
Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity infrastructure company.
That’s… fair, I guess. Both are majority controlled by MANGA, but they are indeed new companies. That’s kinda illuminating: it takes the breakthrough of the century to establish a new name these days, and even then you’ll probably end up selling slices of yourself to the giants.
Or that most of the largest opportunities have been filled and newer companies are aiming at much smaller niches, or to be alternatives to well-established competitors.
Also, in 2005 there wasn't that much of an acquisition ecosystem. I feel like fewer founders back then actually thought about getting acquired and instead shot for building big companies.
You had to go big or your thing would fail, whereas nowadays you can fill a tiny niche and get rich by being acquired by the incumbent you're a complement to.
The era of "any promising startup gets swallowed by big tech" seems over with antitrust, but M&A is still happening.
It's because every market inefficiency eventually disappears as entrepreneurs capitalize on it. It's like there's an optimal architecture for the economy at a given technology level, and the job of the entrepreneur is to find that architecture and refactor the economy, piece by piece. And if they're successful, they get to take everything of value in the old, obsolete parts of the economy that get destroyed.
When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for disruption.
Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and less successful. The big successes already happened. I could see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999 entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3 technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he was totally on point.)
And when the new equilibrium point involves a huge amount of centralization and off-shoring and therefore wealth concentration and loss of livelihood, the proletariat becomes angry.
In that context it's a fiendishly genius move to atomize and distract the "obsolete parts of the economy" and have them vote for their own disempowerment.
It's maddeningly obvious and feels unrelentingly deterministic. If the plutocrats fail to properly cement their position however, we already know what happens next.
I'm always surprised people just seem to discount timing.
The mid/late 00s came with the rise of "Web 2.0" and mobile that was a gigantic technological shakeup, and YC was definitely in "the right place at the right time", and their Web 1.0 pedigree and expertise transitioned perfectly to these new technologies. Importantly, these technologies required relatively little capital for new startups because all the infrastructure in terms on the Internet, GPS, mobile, etc. had already been built.
I'd just argue that in the past 10 years there simply hasn't been nearly the "greenfield" tech landscape that existed in the mid 00s. AI obviously has been a tech sea change, but so far the contours of that change just look much harder to monetize. The frontier models are becoming more and more commoditized, and everyone else is just trying to figure out how not to get shoehorned as "just an OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper". Looks like there may be some winners that are really putting all pieces together in an attractive package (Cursor and Glean come to mind), and it's fair to wonder why YC doesn't have one of these "AI app winners" (and maybe they do, or will, I don't know), but in general, I think there is just nothing like the opportunity there was in the late 00s/early 10s to gobble up a big part of the new tech landscape.
Ya that is my fear. Just like the whole crypto dominated batches. My fear is Garry Tan is leading YC and he falls for every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing.
> he falls for every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing
Isn't this what an early-stage VC firm is supposed to be doing? Lots of investments in companies working in whatever the hot new tech may be. Most companies lose, some break even, one wins so big you forget about the rest.
High risk, high reward, high volume is always how I thought of a firm like YC. And one expects a lot of investments to evaporate to nothing for such an industry.
> Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
Most of their recent communication is going all in on AI. Saying stuff like this batch prefers hiring devs that use AI, and 95% of their codebases are all AI generated.
Companies take time to become successful, so the verdict is still out on most of the companies that started in the last 10 years. Time will tell.
Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top companies")
I believe median time to unicorn status is now about 7 years, so this is not as uncertain as you think. In other words, 50% of YC's 7-year old unicorns have already showed up. The number is higher for older companies.
Yes, but average time to unicorn status has been increasing since the time of Dropbox and Airbnb. I assume you can draw more inferences from companies that are earlier-stage, too.
Just looking at how most have done since going public , most VC backed companies including YC are just exiting and finding the “bigger fool”. YC has done phenomenal for itself. For the public that bought at IPO - not so much.
If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of the S&P500!
14 of the 17 companies lost money for the investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO value.
Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500 benchmark
Of course? On average, companies that are still standing after ~15 to 20 years are going to be a lot larger than the companies who started more recently.
The idea here, AFAICT, is that the right intention matters even if the implementation is lacking and imperfect. If the intention is there, the implementation will improve.
The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.
Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search engine.
Garry Tan and the rest of YC leadership are 100% aligned with Musk's goal of crashing the American economy so they can subjugate labor and buy assets cheap. It can't be a surprise they post on X.
HN is increasingly a significant participant in current US politics. Attempting to pretend otherwise really doesn't work.
HN has a policy of moderating discussions of YC companies less than other threads (and yes, "less" != "not at all"). There's a strong argument that a similar policy should apply to HN-adjacent politics and political acts.
Posting to what was once called Twitter today is an increasingly political act. and a strongly anti-democratic one. Yang (as evidenced by his Wikipedia bio) is a political actor.
HN is the media arm of a venture fund with a portfolio nearing a trillion dollars, as mentioned prominently in TFA.
If you want to talk size, the US House has 438 members, the Senate 100, the Supreme court 9. Their significance has nothing to do with size and everything to do with position, connections, and capacity.
Unfortunately, politics is everywhere where there is more than one person and something to divide, and America is the most politicized country in the world where everything is highly regulated by laws, because the laws are strictly enforced. Politicians fight for power = control over people's lives and that’s how money and the economy are created, so everything becomes secondary to politics. If the world’s politicians would unite and stop wars and do everything for the humanity, we would have hundreds and thousands of better YCs across the planet. But until that happens, it’s better to sell a startup to politicians for big money. For now, we have the only wonder of the world, YC in the USA which is the best, as long as this forum hasn’t closed, IMHO.
We're getting complaints from users that your comments are LLM-generated. Of course it's hard to say for sure, but if they are (in whole or part), please stop. Generated comments aren't allowed here; HN is for human conversation.
What you have identified is nurturing tech development and this has become easier. But more complex tech development should now be the next focal point of incubators. And this means founders who have more speciality in the work they do.
There is still a gap that needs fulfilling. YC is one player who can fulfill it. Late-stage startup development is a business structuring problem and the biggest blank slate for new founders. From term sheets to understanding convertible debt to navigating VC maze.
Happy birthday YC! YC has created a ton of value, and I can say is responsible for the major inflection point in my career. I'm forever grateful to Paul, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor for seeing the value in the reddit team before anyone else did.
Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )
Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007).
I love that this podcast only comes every two weeks. Some (like Software Engineering Daily) are far too often so I either feel the paradox of choice or that I’m missing out.
Such an inspiring book - I still have it by my desk :) I bought it because they covered Joel's FogBugz and 37Signal's Basecamp (I was building a competitor product back then).
There's going to be a lot of "the big successes already happened" type comments about YC but I think they're wrong.
Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship & web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe, or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important ways, but huge successes will surely happen.
Doesn’t YC still predominantly fund young men who aren’t at all industry experts in some mature field? It appears like the majority of startups I see are “AI for X” type applications.
I think this is more a reflection of the applicant pool. It's easier to put together a team when folks are early in their careers - also if you've been in industry for some time you might know VCs and are already an 'insider' to that industry
The business is built on the fact that young founders have an extra 10-15 years to learn everything compared to older ones. I think this will soon change when older people start rejuvenating and extending their lives. Also, it's just a trend like TikTok and startups founded by 25-year-olds sell better. Given the startup maturation cycle of 7-10 years, the founder will be 32-35 yo and they'll need another 10 years to present a success story for the system to work
I remember the initial PG announcement about the founder's summer program and wanting desperately to be a part of it. I wasn't at a place in my life where I ever could join YC but the tribe that's been built by everyone involved has added tremendous value to my life. I'll always be incredibly grateful that this place and YC exists.
Hacker News is just 19 years old? I remember my professor at university mentioning it when I told him I am using .net for my project. According to him I should use OS language like Java and recommended me to HN. I thought it is much older. Time flies.
Y Combinator is 19 years old. Hacker News was launched in February 2007, so it just turned 18.
For the longest time I thought Hacker News must have been some proof of concept for Reddit and must pre-date it, which is not true. Reddit was launched in June 2005, shortly after Y Combinator.
As I remember it HN was initially a “response” to Reddit written in Arc, as by that point Reddit had already become focused on politics and some other more general stuff and had left its programming focus behind. HN was meant to fill that gap, with the important addition of the “entrepreneurial” / start-up business mambo-jambo behind which I could never get, but there were a lot more people that did get it seriously back then and which now have a lot more assets than people like me (didn’t care about start-ups, we were in here only for the programming stuff) now happen to posses. Lesson learned, I guess.
HN has been an outstanding corner of the Internet, seemingly invulnerable to all the trash that has consumed the rest. I'd love to know how HN has avoided the bots and the spam, while retaining a simple and elegant login process.
Dan's moderation practices are viewable via his comment history*. They align well with my preferences, but, with a little imagination, I can see how some people wouldn't like them. One person's idea of good moderation is another person's terrible moderation.
You're not seeing everything he does. For example, he removes capabilities from people's accounts and he can't remember why he did it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42917749
He says he likes things to be "informal" by which he really means "opaque".
No, that's formal. Formal systems that purport to answer all questions in advance are a bureaucratic bane, and as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there. I'm confident that the community feels the same way.
If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.
I don't think it's a good idea to complain publicly about the moderation regime here. To me it seems dang and whoever else has thought things through and made reasonable decisions based on, among other considerations, the amount of labour they have at their disposal. Changing that would likely require a very strong incentive, and chatter does not amount to one.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about how your ideal HN would work, or look like or be moderated like? What sort of stories and comments would it have? How would it be different from the current one? It's hard to tell what you're actually arguing for given that most of your output seems to be directed at some windmill of your own construction.
As I've said, if the capabilities of a user's account are deliberately reduced then report that to the user on their account page. That's being upfront as opposed to being secretive and squirrelly and dodging responsibility.
Ok but the limitations of this have also been explained many times and it's not like the way it works here is unique to HN, that's how almost all forums work. lobste.rs is an attempt to do things somewhat differently and it doesn't feel like much of an improvement.
You have to convince other people that this is 'better' and it matters a lot that statistically nobody else believes it's better. It must have crossed your mind at some point that simply repeating 'my way is better' over and over is, at a minimum, not very persuasive.
No, I'm sorry, this is plainly wrong. This isn't a dialogue between you and dang where you're having some difference of subjective opinion. You aren't debating whether pineapple on pizza is good or not. HN has been around for ages and in that particular aspect it works pretty much (or more transparently) the way just about every internet forum works. If dang and others are repeating something it's in response to you. You have to make some sort of case for your position being better - your position (which you've barely articulated to any degree of detail) is not somehow equivalent to the prevalent implementation because it doesn't have a prevalent implementation. The onus is on you to make the case for it. Like, that's how discourse (and the effecting of any kind of change, presumably) actually works.
You (both zfg and any HN member reading this) can email the mods if you've got questions about how the site's treating you.
I don't believe I've ever had sanctions put on my account here (though dang did admonish me, once, among numerous other interactions). But I've had my IP address caught up in bans (I often read HN without logging in), and a few other things.
That is: if you want to know what's happening to your account, you can fall back on the slightly-higher-friction option of asking what's happening. No, it's not there automatically in your account profile, but then, that solution would permit for an attacker to automatically detect (and presumably counter) such information. The soft / opaque / translucent failure mode of HN actually works reasonably well in that context and environment.
NB: I'm in general agreement with many of your concerns about HN, and in particular how it fits and how it is behaving in a rapidly-changing political environment in which HN and YC have a considerable role. But not everything you're proposing bears out, and even some of what does (e.g., opaque limitations on accounts) doesn't work well in a larger context. I do have strong concerns about how HN's comments guidance hits unevenly in political discussion especially. I'm not entirely sure how to best improve on that, though I've been thinking through options and doing some reading (Jurgen Habermass's work in particular).
I've spent about 15 years studying HN (and often being wrong about it). If you'd (again, zfg or others) care to discuss via email my contact info is on my account page.
HN is a very particular public digital garden and @dang is a gardener doing his gardening stuff, just wondering what is your purpose here if you don't mind sharing?
Looks like he's just talking about how users that start flame wars around the contentious topic of the day will forget about it soon and move on to the next topic. Even if you disagree with him in regards to the topic that was posted on, I don't see how anyone can honestly misinterpret that badly enough to think he's describing HN as a whole.
The "amnesia problem" needs active effort to counteract. Without longitudinal story-telling like you would get in a well-maintained wiki or book, it's inevitable eventually...
I think it's become a huge society-scale problem caused by information overload, and I don't see it improving any time soon.
I sometimes forget that this is a venture capitalist website with a weirdly computer science name. Okay fine. You can have this one day, main YC website.
It really is the strangest community. Clearly an ex-slashdot flavor to it like free the penguins and then someone will make a comment that right-to-repair "increases costs and reduces profitability" and shouldn't be allowed. I don't think these people would naturally have a beer together.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 237 ms ] threadMakes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype wise).
Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
* YC founders are usually very young, and young people can be capricious. They don't want a solo founder just deciding to do something without a second founder having some leverage to protect YC.
* YC is in the US and has a very pro-US perspective, so they invest in what they know and like.
https://capbase.com/why-european-startups-register-in-us/
PG said "Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be."
Also see: Does YC fund solo founders: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/7P-does-yc-fund-solo-fou...
Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing.
Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care.
I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a passion.
I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that YC has not had a success for a very long time.
It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen to the tech industry.
Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums.
All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky, made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same way on AOL 15 years before.
Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an existing idea or resell polished turds as new.
B) peaked* :)
C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place."
EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely massive wins that they have yet to (and shouldn't expect to!) replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.
Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it actually due to YC selecting so well.
Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article and a few social media posts.
But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for a few people.
= Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity infrastructure company.
OpenAI and Anthropic come to mind
Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak, Marshmallow.
But another one is that the first batch has had 20 years to grow and compound while the rest has had less time to become massive.
I'm not saying YC is perfect now (though it's still great). But I think a simple factor could just be time for many portcos.
You had to go big or your thing would fail, whereas nowadays you can fill a tiny niche and get rich by being acquired by the incumbent you're a complement to.
The era of "any promising startup gets swallowed by big tech" seems over with antitrust, but M&A is still happening.
Reddit (yc 2005) only went public last year
I know "going public" doesn't define success, but it does show that companies can still be growing after 10+ years
When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for disruption.
Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and less successful. The big successes already happened. I could see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999 entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3 technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he was totally on point.)
In that context it's a fiendishly genius move to atomize and distract the "obsolete parts of the economy" and have them vote for their own disempowerment.
It's maddeningly obvious and feels unrelentingly deterministic. If the plutocrats fail to properly cement their position however, we already know what happens next.
The mid/late 00s came with the rise of "Web 2.0" and mobile that was a gigantic technological shakeup, and YC was definitely in "the right place at the right time", and their Web 1.0 pedigree and expertise transitioned perfectly to these new technologies. Importantly, these technologies required relatively little capital for new startups because all the infrastructure in terms on the Internet, GPS, mobile, etc. had already been built.
I'd just argue that in the past 10 years there simply hasn't been nearly the "greenfield" tech landscape that existed in the mid 00s. AI obviously has been a tech sea change, but so far the contours of that change just look much harder to monetize. The frontier models are becoming more and more commoditized, and everyone else is just trying to figure out how not to get shoehorned as "just an OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper". Looks like there may be some winners that are really putting all pieces together in an attractive package (Cursor and Glean come to mind), and it's fair to wonder why YC doesn't have one of these "AI app winners" (and maybe they do, or will, I don't know), but in general, I think there is just nothing like the opportunity there was in the late 00s/early 10s to gobble up a big part of the new tech landscape.
Isn't this what an early-stage VC firm is supposed to be doing? Lots of investments in companies working in whatever the hot new tech may be. Most companies lose, some break even, one wins so big you forget about the rest.
High risk, high reward, high volume is always how I thought of a firm like YC. And one expects a lot of investments to evaporate to nothing for such an industry.
Most of their recent communication is going all in on AI. Saying stuff like this batch prefers hiring devs that use AI, and 95% of their codebases are all AI generated.
Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top companies")
https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report
If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of the S&P500! 14 of the 17 companies lost money for the investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO value. Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500 benchmark
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52590
What format of DOB is that? M/DD/YY?
This has been true since https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=20190615 was posted on June 15, 2019.
Edit: HN is apparently written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515628
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63
Every effort has some defect but it’s intention and effort which matters.
World would be a very different place without YC.
Thank you all !
I think I understand what you're saying, but this is a very dangerous generality. I think the HOW matters more than the intent.
The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Ynez_Corrino
Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search engine.
There's plenty of places to get into that. Can't we have one that's focused entirely on hacker news and not any political news?
If you want to know how we think about this, here's a pointer to a bunch of past explanations:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
HN has a policy of moderating discussions of YC companies less than other threads (and yes, "less" != "not at all"). There's a strong argument that a similar policy should apply to HN-adjacent politics and political acts.
Posting to what was once called Twitter today is an increasingly political act. and a strongly anti-democratic one. Yang (as evidenced by his Wikipedia bio) is a political actor.
HN is about the size of a medium-popular subreddit. Its impact on US politics is not much different than that of /r/relationshipadvice.
If you want to talk size, the US House has 438 members, the Senate 100, the Supreme court 9. Their significance has nothing to do with size and everything to do with position, connections, and capacity.
HN punches far above its weight.
I'm looking at a medium sized nerd messageboard. Obviously that's not a meaningful thing to compare to a legislative body or court.
There is still a gap that needs fulfilling. YC is one player who can fulfill it. Late-stage startup development is a business structuring problem and the biggest blank slate for new founders. From term sheets to understanding convertible debt to navigating VC maze.
Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_at_Work
Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007).
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
I love that this podcast only comes every two weeks. Some (like Software Engineering Daily) are far too often so I either feel the paradox of choice or that I’m missing out.
Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship & web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe, or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important ways, but huge successes will surely happen.
As usual, the death of entrepreneurship and startups has been greatly overstated. :)
I applied twice (once alone, once with a really amazing co-founder) and it felt like applying to a large faceless corporation, both times.
Automatic rejection after 30 days with zero feedback.
Kind of sucky, to be honest.
I'd just love to hear that the idea was shit, the application was shit, that my face was ugly, or anything, really.
I wonder if he is raeading HN still...
For the longest time I thought Hacker News must have been some proof of concept for Reddit and must pre-date it, which is not true. Reddit was launched in June 2005, shortly after Y Combinator.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
He says he likes things to be "informal" by which he really means "opaque".
What we don't do is try to answer all the questions in advance. That's for several reasons, the first of which is that it's impossible.
That's opaque.
If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.
Why? Will dang send his goons after me?
dang is simply repeating "my way is better".
Will dang try it?
I don't believe I've ever had sanctions put on my account here (though dang did admonish me, once, among numerous other interactions). But I've had my IP address caught up in bans (I often read HN without logging in), and a few other things.
That is: if you want to know what's happening to your account, you can fall back on the slightly-higher-friction option of asking what's happening. No, it's not there automatically in your account profile, but then, that solution would permit for an attacker to automatically detect (and presumably counter) such information. The soft / opaque / translucent failure mode of HN actually works reasonably well in that context and environment.
NB: I'm in general agreement with many of your concerns about HN, and in particular how it fits and how it is behaving in a rapidly-changing political environment in which HN and YC have a considerable role. But not everything you're proposing bears out, and even some of what does (e.g., opaque limitations on accounts) doesn't work well in a larger context. I do have strong concerns about how HN's comments guidance hits unevenly in political discussion especially. I'm not entirely sure how to best improve on that, though I've been thinking through options and doing some reading (Jurgen Habermass's work in particular).
I've spent about 15 years studying HN (and often being wrong about it). If you'd (again, zfg or others) care to discuss via email my contact info is on my account page.
I think it's become a huge society-scale problem caused by information overload, and I don't see it improving any time soon.