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It's not YC's job to teach executives anything. Their entire model is self-service: they give founders access to people who know this stuff, but you have to ask
by exelius 11y ago
It's not YC's job to teach executives anything. Their entire model is self-service: they give founders access to people who know this stuff, but you have to ask for help to receive it. At the same time, a lot of these founders don't know what they don't know, so IMO this blog post is a way of saying to current and prospective founders "Hey, you need to be careful about this because creative accounting is often illegal". The startup mindset is to find creative solutions to problems, but that doesn't work in finance/accounting.
> I mean, the whole model of YC is to take kids straight out of college
Isn't the average age of YC founders closer to 30?
- teisman 11y agoIt is interesting how this blog-post directly follows the "The Post-YC Slump" post [0]. One can easily make the mistake of considering time spent on financial statements "fake work", fake work being identified as one of the reasons for the slump. The fact that there are financial misstatements indicates that there is more need for this type fake work, or perhaps the whole fake work thing isn't so fake after all. [0] http://blog.samaltman.com/the-post-yc-slump http://blog.samaltman.com/the-post-yc-slump
- mildbow 11y agoExactly what I thought too. Why not have a bootcamp for a few basic finance rules/jargon? Assuming they see the same sort of issues crop up, surely a 1-3 day bootcamp is a lot less "fake work" than every founder now needing to figure out what they need to know and then know it?
- lmm 11y agoDepends how much these financial misstatements end up costing them. Plenty of successful startups base their business on breaking the law, to a lesser or greater extent.