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There are maybe, maybe 10 promising companies in the mix these past two days. YC has really lost its prestige by diluting its batches so much, IMO. There are be
by chatmasta 8y ago
There are maybe, maybe 10 promising companies in the mix these past two days. YC has really lost its prestige by diluting its batches so much, IMO. There are better pathways to funding nowadays for promising startups that don’t require surrendering 7% equity.
- quakenul 8y agoBe specific
- marmadukester39 8y agoI'm curious as to your opinion on the better ways right now.
- sampl 8y agoMe too. One possible option: no accelerator at all. YC doesn’t fund you that much, and you don’t need a demo day to pitch investors. The network and advice can come others ways too: from working for startups, and increasingly online (see YCs own startup school).
- chatmasta 8y agoSkip the accelerator and go straight to seed funding via convertible debt. No need to give up any space on your cap table until series A, and you can probably raise more than $150k or whatever YC is giving these days. Of course this discounts other benefits of YC, but those are arguably becoming less useful as the batches have been diluted with so many lackluster startups. At this point YC almost seems like something people do not for their startups, but for themselves. It attracts prestige collectors that are more concerned with how they look on paper than how they perform in reality.
- _sentient 8y agoI was at Demo Day, and couldn't disagree more. If you actually believe that, go ahead and pick the ten companies you think are worth something, and I'll take the "unpromising" part of the batch. We can put a five year bet into longbets that the top ten companies of my group will outperform your ten companies, as scored by either exit value or value of last round raised. Picking winners is hard, and most great companies today looked dramatically different when they were first getting started.
- throwaway2018i 8y agoI'd be more than willing to do this. How do you want to proceed?
- pedalpete 8y agoI think this would have been said at the start as well. "really, a company that is renting out air mattresses" "another Digg clone" "sync my folders? there are a million tools for that" Though your knee-jerk reaction is correct, it is specifically this which makes YC stand-out. They often seem to pick the things that don't seem promising, and yet those turn in to stand-out successes.
- cercatrova 8y agoThat's exactly what some people did say, at least about Dropbox (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)