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How Y Combinator Changed the World
- thghtihadanacct 5y agoThis is like the 18th time this came through
- pxeger1 5y ago5th. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22y%20combinator%20changed%20the%20world%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- new_realist 5y agoY Combinator managed to convince startups that would have been founded anyway to give up expensive equity to them. I'm not sure they would have failed without YC. Put another way, if you take a piece of every startup on the planet, can you claim influence if some of those startups eventually succeed?
- ford 5y agoThis is similar to the idea that it doesn't matter where you go to college - because the things that get you into top X schools are the same traits that correlate with success afterward. This paper is a study that makes that argument: https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322 https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322 (disclaimer - I only read the abstract) Also - in fairness to YC - there are a staggering number of companies that are started every year. I don't have the stats but I would guess that YC outperforms the totality of the startup market.
- ModernMech 5y agoWait... how was the username "ford" never used on HN until now?
- echelon 5y agoHN is a pretty small community. There are ample dictionary word usernames left. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=generalmotors https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=generalmotors https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=usually https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=usually https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fucking https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fucking https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sucks https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sucks https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=although https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=although https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=their https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=their https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hummers https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=hummers https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=appear https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=appear https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rugged https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rugged https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tough https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tough None of these are registered yet. Is it remarkable because it's a name? I bet we can find lots of those, too.
- ModernMech 5y agoI was surprised at ford in particular because it's the name one of the main characters of a book that's very popular in this community.
- trhway 5y agoIt is more like investing a bit in good college students in exchange for the lifetime share of their earnings.
- tomhoward 5y agoAirbnb was basically dead before they got into YC. They very likely would have quit, as they were heavily in personal debt and couldn’t find anyone to invest in them. Reddit was pretty much PG’s idea, or at least an idea he helped Steve and Alexis come up with. Stripe is hard to imagine getting started if PC hadn’t already had an exit with an earlier YC-funded startup. I could go on and on, but the point is clearly false.
- OnlineGladiator 5y ago> Their ideas reflected YC’s implicit view that for every problem in the world, there is a startup solution I dream of a world where we try to solve problems first and monetize them second, and I don't mean growth hacking. > It’s Y Combinator’s world, and we’re all invested in it. There are many people who resent this world. I'd like to live in a world where success isn't measured by money.
- edouard-harris 5y agoSincere question: what would one use to measure success in such a world?
- jacquesm 5y agoIn the delta between those that have it the best and those that have it the worst.
- Msw242 5y agoThat's a hugely flawed north star. We've had inequality as long as we have had surplus. The more surplus, the more inequality. But I'd rather live today than in hunter gatherer times, even though they were materially more equal. "Why not modern life with less inequality?" Well because growing the pie and splitting the pie are competing drivers. If Elon musk weren't already obscenely wealthy, he wouldn't have been able to execute against space x. I'd rather live in a world where Musk is worth a quarter of a trillion dollars than in one where we didn't have Space X.
- srcreigh 5y agoJesus said we'll always have poor people. So you're not wrong. It doesn't have to be a solvable problem to be the best way to measure success. Your working definitions of "best" and "worst" still seem to be about net worth. If money isn't the measure of success, the delta probably wouldn't be net worth delta.
- taytus 5y agoI’ve applied not less than 7 times to YC. Rejected every time. Some of our customers are multi billion dollar companies. We are profitable, growing and got accepted by their direct competitor. I still believe YC influence is amazing and I have nothing but respect for all the people involved in the program but I like to remind fellows entrepreneurs that any accelerator is just a tool. If you want to build something, no amount of rejection will stop you. Happy 2022!!
- Swizec 5y ago> If you want to build something, no amount of rejection will stop you. And if it does, you wouldn’t have built it anyway
- exhilaration 5y agotheir direct competitor For those of us unfamiliar with the startup world, could you share the name of their direct competitor?
- kingcharles 5y agoGetting backing can be hard, even if your idea is amazing. Often amazing ideas just seem to slip through the cracks. There are plenty of stories of startups that felt like giving up after 99 VC meetings, only to get funding at the 100th one and go on to success. It's a tough slog, and it takes the founders away from doing the actual work they love, but don't give up. If your idea is good, keep ploughing onwards. I've given up way too easily in the past. It was only once I saw other companies recreate the same idea many years later and then be valued at billions of dollars that I really realized the value of the original idea and the opportunities I'd missed by not dragging myself out of bed to another fundraising meeting.
- Ostrogodsky 5y ago[flagged]
- AussieWog93 5y agoIf those founders hadn't changed the world, they wouldn't be rich. Sure, Dropbox and Stripe aren't dismantling apartheid or eradicating polio, but these products do solve real problems and make life a little bit more bearable for millions of people. We should give credit where credit's due and acknowledge this impact.
- sangnoir 5y ago> If those founders hadn't changed the world, they wouldn't be rich Good to know I'm changing the world with my CRUD apps - more than all the volunteers in the world since I'm (slowly) getting rich, and they aren't.
- AussieWog93 5y agoI know you're just trying to make a point, but in all seriousness what you're saying could be true. If your CRUD apps are used by tens of thousands of people to make life slightly better - or even if the money you make from your CRUD apps allows your wife and kids to live a free life and not have to worry about making ends meet - you could potentially be making a far greater impact than even someone who devotes their life to volunteering.
- tester756 5y agoI'd call it "changed the world relevantly" and "changed the world irrelevantly"
- ridiculousthrow 5y ago[flagged]
- Msw242 5y agoHow have dropbox and stripe not changed the world? I remember paper filing cabinets, PCI compliance, jump drives, etc.
- ford 5y agoAlso potentially interesting is how YC changed the VC market. [0] is an essay from PG that talks about how VC funding used to work. [1] is a short essay that starts to get at why YC is different. (These should be read with a grain of salt, since PG is the founder of YC) TLDR is that YC was the first firm to fund a lot of small companies, as opposed to a medium amount of medium sized companies. Similar to what Square did for payments by offering credit card readers to individuals, YC offered funding to super small companies where previously it was not available. The impact of this on the world is up for interpretation, but at least one positive result is a lower barrier of entry for entrepreneurship. I am far from an expert so if this is inaccurate feel free to correct me. [0]http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/whyyc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/whyyc.html
- mruniverse 5y agoI was under the impression that the small amount offered was the realization that it didn't take a lot of money to get a startup off the ground. So I thought Paul was one of the first to capitalize on it. This would seem to let him go for both quality and volume.
- ridiculousthrow 5y ago
- systemvoltage 5y agoThe cynicism in this thread is simply astounding. The people of HN has had a negative impact on my view of the world and my own internal optimism. It’s hard to find even the smallest light of hope here. “Can do” attitude is outdated and is replaced by “Pull everyone else down”.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoI agree. Trash takes. I once tried to argue that most YC founders don't spend their time on HN. It got a surprising amount of blowback. With people like this here, it seemed entirely obvious that no founder would want to. But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on.
- tyre 5y agoMany YC founders I know read HN, but far fewer comment. On this article, for example, two other founders have commented. YC founders on any given thread are (generally) few. > But now I think founders just roll their eyes and move on. yes. My personal attitude is that unless it’s grossly unfair _and_ largely upvoted, there’s not much need to jump to YC’s defense. Those two conditions are rarely met in one comment.
- TigeriusKirk 5y agoI wonder sometimes why they keep paying for the site. This can't be what they want it to be. Inertia, I suppose.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoThe site actually serves myriad business purposes and plenty of good comments/discussion happens here, though you do need to try harder to ignore the noise than was once true.
- dang 5y agoYou're as much HN as anyone else here. Don't fall prey to the notice-dislike bias! It leads to an exceedingly negative false feeling of generality, in which the world seems dominated by whatever counts as the worst to you. In reality, it's a statistical distribution and you choose what to focus on. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20dislike%20notice&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22false%20feelings%20of%20generality%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- anothernewdude 5y ago
- DoreenMichele 5y agoIt's news to me that Livingston retired. Wikipedia doesn't seem to have gotten the memo which makes me feel better about not knowing. I no longer try to follow what she's up to but I used to be intensely curious about her career.
- divbzero 5y agoIt’s worth noting that YC grew out of discussions between her and PG when she was applying for a job in VC. YC would not exist without her.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoYeah, they are the two original founders and then he snagged his two cofounders from Viaweb who, I think, only worked part-time on YC. He retired some years before her, which suggests to me this business is probably more "her baby" than his in some sense.
- danbmil99 5y agoI was fortunate enough to be a fly on the wall the first couple of years of YC. A handful of incredible people, but honestly JL seemed to me to be the glue that held it all together.
- specialist 5y agoYa. I would have loved being on that wall with you. The psychological aspects of young YC are the parts I want to hear more about. IIRC, I read that Jessica is an excellent judge of character, and Paul has some kind of spidey sense about technical founders. In addition to everything else, of course.
- danbmil99 5y agoAs far as spidey sense about technical founders, I would also give a lot of credit to Trevor Blackwell, another one of the four founders. Disclaimer: Trevor was my boss at a robotics company he founded.
- excalibur 5y agoWhole article about Y Combinator and not a peep about us. I think the first two rules of YC are "you do not talk about HN."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zt 5y agoThere is a multi-thousand word article about HN in the New Yorker...so seems like covered territory: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-lonely-work-of-moderating-hacker-news https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
- 0x008 5y agoThat was a surprisingly enjoyable read, thank you.
- zt 5y agoThis thread is somewhat depressing. Depressing because the very nature of YC and HN at its best is optimism. A belief in the ability to build and not just a respect for those who do but a genuine desire to support those trying. Maybe not succeeding, but trying to create something in a world so set on making that difficult. It that always morally perfect: no. Does that always work: no. But, at its best, YC operates more like a university than a venture fund. Jessica, PG, Geoff, PB, Michael, Jared, Sama and all the other partners have all done very very well by creating/working on YC, but there is a particular underlying ethos of support. Of just a human connection with founders who build. HN in its earliest days had that too, but I don't see any of that on this thread. The article has a certain ambivalence about the nature of startups themselves (and perhaps, under that, capitalism itself), but Y Combinator has had a profoundly positive effect on my life personally, the lives of hundreds of people I know, the startup and venture ecosystem, and -- whether or not this is "changing the world" -- the economy more broadly. There are people here who are shitting on the companies YC has helped, in their earliest stages, push forward. Would some of them have succeeded without YC, absolutely. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that no other small collection of people in history has been instrumental to creating so much enterprise value from scratch -- and thus economic wellbeing more broadly (with, maybe, the exception of Sequoia) other than a few founders of the very biggest tech companies (which YC companies will eventually join the ranks of). Maybe, you say, that's all just signaling or selection effects. Perhaps you don't learn anything at Harvard or YC; it's just about getting in. Maybe. But when that list includes Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase, Gitlab, Dropbox, PagerDuty, Stripe, Instacart, Brex, Cruise, Faire, Reddit, Zapier, Gusto, Rippling, Flexport, Segment, Checkr, Webflow, Lob, Opeansea, Sift, Astranis, Twitch, Ironclad, just to mention the ones I can pull off the top of my head, I think it says something about the method, the process, and the support mattering. And look I'm a founder who didn't succeed with the company I built during YC but that has more to do with my NOT listening to and focusing on the lessons that the partners were trying to impart than any failure on their part. Now, I'm not without criticisms and suggestions but damn if I'm not rooting for YC and every company in every batch at Alumni Demo Day.
- beckman466 5y ago[flagged]