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YC was always about exploiting the startup mystique by creating a sweat shop of fruit fly startups, some of which will make it big by sheer dumb luck. It’s the
by new_realist 7y ago
YC was always about exploiting the startup mystique by creating a sweat shop of fruit fly startups, some of which will make it big by sheer dumb luck. It’s the index fund of the startup scene, but naive new grads who can’t get audiences with first-tier VC firms still fall for it.
- mikeg8 7y agoSo how many times has your application been rejected?
- gowld 7y agoHave any of the founders that made it big and exited rich turned around and said they feel ripped off by YC?
- dannyw 7y agoConsidering how well index funds perform in practice, even if your description was correct it sounds like a Great Thing.
- tomhoward 7y ago"Sheer dumb luck" doesn't produce home-run successful companies like Stripe, Airbnb and Twitch. Companies can get lucky and look successful for a while, but they crash and burn just as fast. YC only succeeds if they invest in the home-run companies. The lucky, flash-in-the-pan companies don't provide the returns YC needs.
- throwaway2048 7y agoI think OP is saying its "sheer dumb luck" on the part of YC, not so much the successful companies.
- tomhoward 7y agoThe sentence doesn't read that way, but if that's what they meant, it's just as wrong. YC's publicly-stated strategy from the very beginning has been to cast an extremely wide net, knowing that most wouldn't amount to much but the outliers would return enough to deliver a huge outcome overall. And a key part of their strategy has been to be so founder-friendly that most of the promising startups would want to be part of their program. If you look at the number of "unicorns" that have emerged since 2005, it's remarkable how many went through YC. It's also notable that basically none of the spectacular boom-then-busts went through YC. That's not "dumb luck", it's a well-thought-out strategy that has been proven to work extremely well over a decade-and-a-half.