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This makes some interesting points, but it seems ridiculous to say that Dropbox's IPO is "make-or-break" for Y Combinator. Make or break in what sense? That Dro
by montrose 9y ago
This makes some interesting points, but it seems ridiculous to say that Dropbox's IPO is "make-or-break" for Y Combinator. Make or break in what sense? That Dropbox's IPO will influence the opinions of retail investors about other YC companies? That seems very unlikely; retail investors are unlikely even to know Airbnb and Dropbox share that in common. Or does she mean make or break in the sense that if Dropbox does badly, it will affect the opinions of potential YC applicants? Even if it did, which seems unlikely, it wouldn't "break" YC, because as she herself points out in the article, there is already a big pipeline of successful alumni. Nowadays the path to IPO is on the order of a decade (11 years in Dropbox's case), and while that means a long wait till liquidity, it also makes the ecosystem pretty robust.
- rdiddly 9y agoYeah you've debunked the "break," so I'll take the trivial task of debunking the "make": It's already made!
- zwieback 9y agoAgreed, I notice that QZ often has two different titles, one for the link and one for the headline. I'm guessing a senior editor spices it up once the author is done. Here are the words from the link: The Dropbox IPO is a transformative moment for Y Combinator
- montrose 9y agoWow, I wondered if that was what happened. Someone should crawl the site to collect other examples of this at Quartz. It would be a fascinating study of linkbait being formed.
- heynk 9y agoMost media companies seem to do automated headline testing. It would be awesome if someone made a crawler that somehow tracked this, and could determine what the 'winning' headlines were.
- dang 9y agoSo many sites do this that we often take the URL as an alternative to the article headline. Major press do it too. Sometimes they at least have the good sense to put the better phrasing in the HTML doc title too. That way we don't have to dehyphenate it.
- dang 9y agoOK, we'll use that title at least for now. It's not quite as bad, though still inaccurate. As far as I can observe, everyone at YC is just doing what they usually do.