7 ms·

Ask HN: Is YC becoming less of a home for hackers and more for MBA-types?

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed a large uptick in MBA-types who are expressing interest and being admitted into YC. It feels as if YC is becoming yet another prestigious line-item that status-chasers are using to stack their resume. Have you noticed similarly?

aristofun 3y ago
It would be naive to expect otherwise. YC is a popular brand (and it deserved it). But what’s wrong about good business education?
- mikece 3y ago
  I think OP's point is that this is Hacker News, not Tech MBA news. S/N ratio has slipped a bit but NH is still the best place that I know to find tech news.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    OP's point/question is clearly about YC incubator, not the fairly loosely affiliated site HN on which we're commenting.
tikkun 3y ago
When YC started, startups weren’t mainstream, and the key skill needed was the ability to build things. Now the ability to build things is more widely available, and there are lots of opportunities to make profitable companies without being on the cutting edge of tech skill. For those, being able to sell and reach customers is more critical. Hence what you are seeing. In some domains of course, cutting edge tech skill is the key advantage, and for those kinds of startups, that’s where you’ll see YC fund the hacker types.
- confoundcofound 3y ago
  That makes sense. My issue is that the MBA-types I have spoken to are mostly interested in YC for resume-building. They are typically not driven by mission, passion, or curiosity beyond advancing themselves. And they’re getting in. YC seems to be, more than ever, over-indexing on brand name experience for candidacy, when IMO that runs counter to the spirit of the program.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Natural progression of any ecosystem. Along with this step is increasingly heavy regulation and confusing BS. Eventually, many areas will have locked in incumbents which can’t be dislodged using the existing tech and/or tactics. Those incumbents will get increasingly terrible to deal with due to red tape, MBA types squeezing every drop of profit out in a destructive way, internal core value prop folks (engineering, product, etc.) getting more disillusioned or whatever, etc. Then along comes some change (in market or tech), and the cycle repeats, with much hand waving and gnashing of teeth from some folks (usually older and more establishment) and with much rejoicing from others (usually younger and more up and coming/flexible.). Next time will YC be disrupting? Maybe, maybe not.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Let them go at it, what's wrong with that? There are so few opportunities today for people to get ahead if they're not born into wealth. Why are people here criticizing startup entrepreneurs with an unexciting business idea and mostly profit motives, when people who do the same because it was given to them by their parents are never criticized?
    - confoundcofound 3y ago
      I’m mostly talking about Harvard, Stanford, Wharton etc MBA grads who run the treadmill of BigTech and see YC as another badge to collect.
mPReDiToR 3y ago
I thnk it's 50/50 Half the stories are about ChatGPT or AI, the other are about Twitter/Musk. I find it a chore to scroll past these two topics some days. Am I alone in noticing this?
- avgDev 3y ago
  I joined HN few years ago, right away I felt 'these are my people'. The conversations are still pretty good for the most part but there is definitely a weird uptick of low effort borderline trolling comments. I am not sure what the stats are for the site but I wouldn't be surprised if there was significant growth and when communities expand you start getting average content and average users which can change the experience old timers expect. I have seen these occur in many niche subreddits that grew.
  - diceduckmonk 3y ago
    I feel the the quality of HN discussions been downtrending, and recent months have personally felt disengaged. I’ve been wondering how much of this being the current tech market being a brain / time drain. I would have thought there would be a renaissance of startups and projects with layoffs and all, but maybe it’s far too early to tell
  - fisf 3y ago
    It also has to do with the people the startup scene attracts nowadays. 10 years ago, the majority of candidates for a tech startup qualified as 'builders', very broadly speaking. Now, a larger chunk want to work on 'product' and growth, with an immediate focus on financial upsides. And there is nothing wrong with that inherently, but this is a different (and I daresay, more conformist) culture.
  - rgbgraph 3y ago
    [flagged]
- sph 3y ago
  You're not but (and I'm going to get flagged for this probably) I seem to understand there are so many people voicing their discontent about the abundance of AI posts, they get immediately downranked. I.e. swept under a rug. I actually wrote to dang to ask why a prominent "Ask HN: why so much GPT" post disappeared after an hour and they confirmed this. I still am disappointed to have learned from that conversation that "downranked" means "basically shadow-banned and you can't find it anywhere unless you use a direct link". So yeah, I dislike what HN has turned in 2023. We're not the only ones, but we're the vocal minority and thus put aside. I don't even want to blame dang, he's got the short end of the stick moderating this chaos, but the result is that HN is less and less about hackers because we're the minority now. (In any case, this post is about YC, not HN itself, so we're probably off-topic here)
balderdash 3y ago
I think the initial premise is interesting (increase in non-technical applications to YC) but the juxtaposition around the motives of people with advanced technical and business degrees is comical (and one that seems pervasive on HN)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
poomer 3y ago
It does feel like there are more and more startups every YC batch that are just cynical cash grabs. For example, all the recent LLM-related startups that are just UI wrappers around APIs - its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money, or solely for the reason of wanting to be in YC. Unfortunately, this is a tech industry problem, not just a YC problem. Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol, and increasingly new entrants in the field are the types of folks who would've gone into law or finance in the past.
- diceduckmonk 3y ago
  > its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money Ultimately, startups are about making money.
- lazide 3y ago
  There are fewer obvious untackled problems that are amenable to technical solutions, it’s natural. Also startups are about making money (generally), it’s a means to an end. Otherwise it would be an open source GitHub project, no? If someone can make $1bln integrating some APIs and negotiating hard, writing a bunch of CRUD code duplicating what a bunch of other folks have already done is pretty silly.
- jrochkind1 3y ago
  How do you distinguish a "cynical cash grab" from something else, what do you think makes a startup a "cynical cash grab"? Like... whether they truly believe their product is going to make the world a better place, or something like that? I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves. The VC's are mostly investing based on whether they think a thing will make them lots of money, and always have been, no?
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    I think you look at a company and you say, “is this an honest, principled cash grab?” and if the answer is no, it might be a cynical cash grab.
anon223345 3y ago
The startups they’re finding lately all seem pretty lame “Help revolutions the sales cycle” “Build developer tools” “Block chain in your build chain”
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  > “Help revolutions the sales cycle” Like it or not, that one could be a game changer.
fairity 3y ago
Yes, and YC is aware of this trend also. Michael and Dalton (YC partners) talk about it here: https://youtu.be/ia7IKW0yuG0 https://youtu.be/ia7IKW0yuG0 Since they’re aware, if the trend continues, they might actually believe this conformist archetype has equal or greater chance at success in today’s environment. If that's the case, it's probably bc the archetype tends to overlap with other skillsets that correlate with success (e.g. fundraising, recruiting, management).
- SamvitJ 3y ago
  For anyone lurking in the comments here like I was, this is a really interesting interview and so worth watching.
appleaday1 3y ago
Wait this is a startup forum? I totally ignore the more business aspect of hacker news. I don't really care about YC that much, I would argue that Reddit has better discussions nowadays.
- gabrielgio 3y ago
  What subs are you following or recommend. I can’t really find interesting discussion over there.
  - eatonphil 3y ago
    r/compilers, r/databasedevelopment (I run this one), r/emudev, r/programminglanguages.
nubinetwork 3y ago
Ngl, I do spend most of my time here hiding AI/ML/LLM/neural/diffusion/prompt/arxiv articles.
the-printer 3y ago
I’m relatively late to the shenanigans here, but I feel like what you’re describing was inevitable. I couldn’t imagine any group that organizes with the the primary intention of raising lots of money, making lots of money and then redistributing lots of money not eventually attracting lots of “suits” of the MBA sort. The money is stacked way too high. YC has been around for almost twenty years. It may be worth questioning whether a young tech company with altruistic intentions that fit your expectations getting billion dollar loans is a promising scenario. Granted I don’t agree with the outcome or the format, I “get it”. People are trying to get paid. The money is getting too long for banks to just up and disappear overnight.
jl2718 3y ago
$500k is not just enough to hire builders, it’s way too much for a builder. They’d be forced to do everything but build. In the beginning, it was just enough for a team to survive the summer, and that seemed generous. The tech startup formula has merged with the startup hedge fund or VC fund formula. It has mostly to do with connections to capital. I’d also suggest that most ‘tech’ startups have nothing to do with technology. The biggest have been weird schemes to give something away for free or run unlicensed marketplaces. At some point we have to admit that technology skills are a tiny part of the formula, but still worshipped because it’s the only part of it that is accessible to all, sort of like how we respect athletes more than sports broadcasters. MMA had a parallel rise, so it’s kind of like YC started out developing fighters and now they start dojos. Can a fighter start a dojo? Yes; that is the natural order of things, and many do, but many more dojos are started by people with more money than skill. Startups were not new in 2005; the fervor was just as strong as today, but the role of money was a lot less. The standard advice was ‘going Bedouin’, which worked because the cost of living was a lot lower, and it was much faster and easier to get a job if you needed one. Most people funded from job savings, part-time work, or living with parents[1]. The Facebook deal was unprecedented and weird. Even he took some very strange deals to fund his ideas before that came along. I know because I had a ‘job interview’ with a guy that MZ had some weird deal with to co-fund their projects, of which his was a parking app, and he was mad at ‘the Harvard kid’ for taking $6000 and not doing the work, which he wanted me to finish. I was working on a ride sharing app, so he offered me the same deal. He went to jail soon after, and then sued for 25% of Facebook when he got out. There’s also the infamous deal with ConnectU. All I’m trying to say is that everybody was hustling in weird ways. Now it seems that the money is freely available if you are in the flow of it, and no amount of sheer brilliance can compete with that if you’re not. I think that may change in the near future, but I’ve been saying that for over a decade. Also, if I may editorialize even further, the standard advice has always been inconsistent or inapplicable broadly. I liked the YC idea, but didn’t even apply because I was literally taking his advice not to focus on things like that, but obviously club membership has had benefits. When you succeed doing it your way, hacker, hustler, MBA, YC, vagabond, or whatever, you can tell everybody that’s the only way to do it. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
sage76 3y ago
MBAs are brand whores, and YC is a brand now.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
As it becomes easier to create a startup without technical skills, the more those better at networking will be admitted to a networking based event. Eventually when AI can fulfill all technical needs of a company, entrepreneurs will just be charming attractive people trading notes and watching their stock go up.
- mdgrech23 3y ago
  I've been following hacker news/YCombinator since ~2008 or so. Back then money was way tighter. It was also way easier to build something impressive. More emphasis fell on the builder. None it takes a more diverse group to really build something truly amazing.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    > It was also way easier to build something impressive Really? I'd imagine back then building a product was much tougher given the dearth of resource, low/no code tools and such.
    - rgbgraph 3y ago
      1. Not everyone and their dog was getting into tech; there was a lot of low-hanging fruit, and a lot lower bar for what was considered "impressive." 2. The bar for impressive is now "insanely complex." 3. The tools were shittier, but more flexible, and you sucked it up and learned to deal. Now? The majority of our tools are overengineered in all the wrong places, because their contributors wanted to build something "impressive" (using today's standards) -- rather than useful and practical. We had jQuery (a library) and PHP (a language modeled after the hit Microsoft classic, Minesweeper), and that was enough. Now you need React/Vue/whatever framework to build an "impressive" website (because you'll look like a clown if your website isn't as "polished" as your competitors -- who are also using newfangled frameworks) It was easier to build shit back then, because the standards and expectations were saner.
ttymck 3y ago
If an MBA teaches you how to grift, then getting no-strings-attached-VC money seems like the all-time greatest grift to me.
w10-1 3y ago
It likely has nothing to do with YC. Since the dawn of time builders have partnered with popularizers in search of building wealth or power; that's not new. For MBA's, the easy money is in consulting, financial engineering, or monopolizing enterprises - mergers, crypto, pharma, etc. Tech startup's are typically a romantic sideline for those who want some added meaning. But now that deals, consulting, and crypto are dead for the moment, tech startup's look like a good way to go long or at least keep busy until the river runs fast again. Against this influx, YC still has technical achievement as a barrier to entry and natural moat. The real question is not hackers vs MBA's, but how honest investors are with each other. Some might latch on to exciting but opaque technologies, knowing they could sell them in later rounds to other investors. Conversely, later-round investors might only work with early-round investors who provide excellent accurate insight into the viability of technologies. New, hungry investors might give up more insight, while established ones jealously defend opportunities in their space. Investor cohorts might flow in and out with political or currency tides unrelated to opportunity. The investor signal is much stronger than the market signal. Profitable companies now are cutting employees AND doing stock buy-back's and dividends, to satisfy investors. The same is likely true at YC. YC deals reflect investor interest and shape the next generation of companies. Let's hope they stop veering from disruption to destruction (and from self-interest to divisiveness), and start figuring out how to reduce coordination costs of all our new prosthetic powers without reducing everything to a bureaucratic corporation.
sneed_chucker 3y ago
Yes and it's part of a larger trend in tech and computing. As it becomes more lucrative, more people get involved for the primary reason of making money, whereas formerly a larger proportion of people were involved because they found it interesting. Both are legitimate reasons to be involved in tech in my opinion, but it's definitely a shift in demographics.
VirtualVoyager 3y ago
[dead]
krapp 3y ago
It always has been. It used to be called Startup News. It was created by a SV startup entrepreneur and is run by a SV startup incubator. And yes, people do make impressing the HN crowd and getting hype here part of their business model.
june_twenty 3y ago
I've noticed there's a lot of people here who might have been engineers at one point but now they're manager types and have long forgotten the hacker mindset.
krishadi 3y ago
The ease of funding opportunities these days. Startups start to please their source of money. And, it rather seems that those are investors/grants rather than customers. My assumption is that, it's easy for the MBA-types to please VCs/Grant-agencies. And, so you have the outcome...
ss48 3y ago
I think some of it has to do with Hacker News being focused on new and shiny things. There comes a point where it becomes more cost-prohibitive to produce something new that is as good or better than what already exists. Once that happens, the focus shifts to whatever get's marketed better or caters towards a larger audience and focuses on keeping them on the same page, or bypassing controls and restrictions that are in place for existing solutions.

aristofun 3y ago

It would be naive to expect otherwise. YC is a popular brand (and it deserved it). But what’s wrong about good business education?

mikece 3y ago
I think OP's point is that this is Hacker News, not Tech MBA news. S/N ratio has slipped a bit but NH is still the best place that I know to find tech news.
- OJFord 3y ago
  OP's point/question is clearly about YC incubator, not the fairly loosely affiliated site HN on which we're commenting.

tikkun 3y ago

When YC started, startups weren’t mainstream, and the key skill needed was the ability to build things. Now the ability to build things is more widely available, and there are lots of opportunities to make profitable companies without being on the cutting edge of tech skill. For those, being able to sell and reach customers is more critical. Hence what you are seeing. In some domains of course, cutting edge tech skill is the key advantage, and for those kinds of startups, that’s where you’ll see YC fund the hacker types.

confoundcofound 3y ago
That makes sense. My issue is that the MBA-types I have spoken to are mostly interested in YC for resume-building. They are typically not driven by mission, passion, or curiosity beyond advancing themselves. And they’re getting in. YC seems to be, more than ever, over-indexing on brand name experience for candidacy, when IMO that runs counter to the spirit of the program.
- lazide 3y ago
  Natural progression of any ecosystem. Along with this step is increasingly heavy regulation and confusing BS. Eventually, many areas will have locked in incumbents which can’t be dislodged using the existing tech and/or tactics. Those incumbents will get increasingly terrible to deal with due to red tape, MBA types squeezing every drop of profit out in a destructive way, internal core value prop folks (engineering, product, etc.) getting more disillusioned or whatever, etc. Then along comes some change (in market or tech), and the cycle repeats, with much hand waving and gnashing of teeth from some folks (usually older and more establishment) and with much rejoicing from others (usually younger and more up and coming/flexible.). Next time will YC be disrupting? Maybe, maybe not.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Let them go at it, what's wrong with that? There are so few opportunities today for people to get ahead if they're not born into wealth. Why are people here criticizing startup entrepreneurs with an unexciting business idea and mostly profit motives, when people who do the same because it was given to them by their parents are never criticized?
  - confoundcofound 3y ago
    I’m mostly talking about Harvard, Stanford, Wharton etc MBA grads who run the treadmill of BigTech and see YC as another badge to collect.

mPReDiToR 3y ago

I thnk it's 50/50 Half the stories are about ChatGPT or AI, the other are about Twitter/Musk. I find it a chore to scroll past these two topics some days. Am I alone in noticing this?

avgDev 3y ago
I joined HN few years ago, right away I felt 'these are my people'. The conversations are still pretty good for the most part but there is definitely a weird uptick of low effort borderline trolling comments. I am not sure what the stats are for the site but I wouldn't be surprised if there was significant growth and when communities expand you start getting average content and average users which can change the experience old timers expect. I have seen these occur in many niche subreddits that grew.
- diceduckmonk 3y ago
  I feel the the quality of HN discussions been downtrending, and recent months have personally felt disengaged. I’ve been wondering how much of this being the current tech market being a brain / time drain. I would have thought there would be a renaissance of startups and projects with layoffs and all, but maybe it’s far too early to tell
- fisf 3y ago
  It also has to do with the people the startup scene attracts nowadays. 10 years ago, the majority of candidates for a tech startup qualified as 'builders', very broadly speaking. Now, a larger chunk want to work on 'product' and growth, with an immediate focus on financial upsides. And there is nothing wrong with that inherently, but this is a different (and I daresay, more conformist) culture.
- rgbgraph 3y ago
  [flagged]
sph 3y ago
You're not but (and I'm going to get flagged for this probably) I seem to understand there are so many people voicing their discontent about the abundance of AI posts, they get immediately downranked. I.e. swept under a rug. I actually wrote to dang to ask why a prominent "Ask HN: why so much GPT" post disappeared after an hour and they confirmed this. I still am disappointed to have learned from that conversation that "downranked" means "basically shadow-banned and you can't find it anywhere unless you use a direct link". So yeah, I dislike what HN has turned in 2023. We're not the only ones, but we're the vocal minority and thus put aside. I don't even want to blame dang, he's got the short end of the stick moderating this chaos, but the result is that HN is less and less about hackers because we're the minority now. (In any case, this post is about YC, not HN itself, so we're probably off-topic here)

balderdash 3y ago

I think the initial premise is interesting (increase in non-technical applications to YC) but the juxtaposition around the motives of people with advanced technical and business degrees is comical (and one that seems pervasive on HN)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

poomer 3y ago

It does feel like there are more and more startups every YC batch that are just cynical cash grabs. For example, all the recent LLM-related startups that are just UI wrappers around APIs - its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money, or solely for the reason of wanting to be in YC. Unfortunately, this is a tech industry problem, not just a YC problem. Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol, and increasingly new entrants in the field are the types of folks who would've gone into law or finance in the past.

diceduckmonk 3y ago
> its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money Ultimately, startups are about making money.
lazide 3y ago
There are fewer obvious untackled problems that are amenable to technical solutions, it’s natural. Also startups are about making money (generally), it’s a means to an end. Otherwise it would be an open source GitHub project, no? If someone can make $1bln integrating some APIs and negotiating hard, writing a bunch of CRUD code duplicating what a bunch of other folks have already done is pretty silly.
jrochkind1 3y ago
How do you distinguish a "cynical cash grab" from something else, what do you think makes a startup a "cynical cash grab"? Like... whether they truly believe their product is going to make the world a better place, or something like that? I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves. The VC's are mostly investing based on whether they think a thing will make them lots of money, and always have been, no?
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  I think you look at a company and you say, “is this an honest, principled cash grab?” and if the answer is no, it might be a cynical cash grab.

anon223345 3y ago

The startups they’re finding lately all seem pretty lame “Help revolutions the sales cycle” “Build developer tools” “Block chain in your build chain”

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
> “Help revolutions the sales cycle” Like it or not, that one could be a game changer.

fairity 3y ago

Yes, and YC is aware of this trend also. Michael and Dalton (YC partners) talk about it here: https://youtu.be/ia7IKW0yuG0 https://youtu.be/ia7IKW0yuG0 Since they’re aware, if the trend continues, they might actually believe this conformist archetype has equal or greater chance at success in today’s environment. If that's the case, it's probably bc the archetype tends to overlap with other skillsets that correlate with success (e.g. fundraising, recruiting, management).

SamvitJ 3y ago
For anyone lurking in the comments here like I was, this is a really interesting interview and so worth watching.

appleaday1 3y ago

Wait this is a startup forum? I totally ignore the more business aspect of hacker news. I don't really care about YC that much, I would argue that Reddit has better discussions nowadays.

gabrielgio 3y ago
What subs are you following or recommend. I can’t really find interesting discussion over there.
- eatonphil 3y ago
  r/compilers, r/databasedevelopment (I run this one), r/emudev, r/programminglanguages.

nubinetwork 3y ago

Ngl, I do spend most of my time here hiding AI/ML/LLM/neural/diffusion/prompt/arxiv articles.

the-printer 3y ago

I’m relatively late to the shenanigans here, but I feel like what you’re describing was inevitable. I couldn’t imagine any group that organizes with the the primary intention of raising lots of money, making lots of money and then redistributing lots of money not eventually attracting lots of “suits” of the MBA sort. The money is stacked way too high. YC has been around for almost twenty years. It may be worth questioning whether a young tech company with altruistic intentions that fit your expectations getting billion dollar loans is a promising scenario. Granted I don’t agree with the outcome or the format, I “get it”. People are trying to get paid. The money is getting too long for banks to just up and disappear overnight.

jl2718 3y ago

$500k is not just enough to hire builders, it’s way too much for a builder. They’d be forced to do everything but build. In the beginning, it was just enough for a team to survive the summer, and that seemed generous. The tech startup formula has merged with the startup hedge fund or VC fund formula. It has mostly to do with connections to capital. I’d also suggest that most ‘tech’ startups have nothing to do with technology. The biggest have been weird schemes to give something away for free or run unlicensed marketplaces. At some point we have to admit that technology skills are a tiny part of the formula, but still worshipped because it’s the only part of it that is accessible to all, sort of like how we respect athletes more than sports broadcasters. MMA had a parallel rise, so it’s kind of like YC started out developing fighters and now they start dojos. Can a fighter start a dojo? Yes; that is the natural order of things, and many do, but many more dojos are started by people with more money than skill. Startups were not new in 2005; the fervor was just as strong as today, but the role of money was a lot less. The standard advice was ‘going Bedouin’, which worked because the cost of living was a lot lower, and it was much faster and easier to get a job if you needed one. Most people funded from job savings, part-time work, or living with parents[1]. The Facebook deal was unprecedented and weird. Even he took some very strange deals to fund his ideas before that came along. I know because I had a ‘job interview’ with a guy that MZ had some weird deal with to co-fund their projects, of which his was a parking app, and he was mad at ‘the Harvard kid’ for taking $6000 and not doing the work, which he wanted me to finish. I was working on a ride sharing app, so he offered me the same deal. He went to jail soon after, and then sued for 25% of Facebook when he got out. There’s also the infamous deal with ConnectU. All I’m trying to say is that everybody was hustling in weird ways. Now it seems that the money is freely available if you are in the flow of it, and no amount of sheer brilliance can compete with that if you’re not. I think that may change in the near future, but I’ve been saying that for over a decade. Also, if I may editorialize even further, the standard advice has always been inconsistent or inapplicable broadly. I liked the YC idea, but didn’t even apply because I was literally taking his advice not to focus on things like that, but obviously club membership has had benefits. When you succeed doing it your way, hacker, hustler, MBA, YC, vagabond, or whatever, you can tell everybody that’s the only way to do it. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html

sage76 3y ago

MBAs are brand whores, and YC is a brand now.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

As it becomes easier to create a startup without technical skills, the more those better at networking will be admitted to a networking based event. Eventually when AI can fulfill all technical needs of a company, entrepreneurs will just be charming attractive people trading notes and watching their stock go up.

mdgrech23 3y ago
I've been following hacker news/YCombinator since ~2008 or so. Back then money was way tighter. It was also way easier to build something impressive. More emphasis fell on the builder. None it takes a more diverse group to really build something truly amazing.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  > It was also way easier to build something impressive Really? I'd imagine back then building a product was much tougher given the dearth of resource, low/no code tools and such.
  - rgbgraph 3y ago
    1. Not everyone and their dog was getting into tech; there was a lot of low-hanging fruit, and a lot lower bar for what was considered "impressive." 2. The bar for impressive is now "insanely complex." 3. The tools were shittier, but more flexible, and you sucked it up and learned to deal. Now? The majority of our tools are overengineered in all the wrong places, because their contributors wanted to build something "impressive" (using today's standards) -- rather than useful and practical. We had jQuery (a library) and PHP (a language modeled after the hit Microsoft classic, Minesweeper), and that was enough. Now you need React/Vue/whatever framework to build an "impressive" website (because you'll look like a clown if your website isn't as "polished" as your competitors -- who are also using newfangled frameworks) It was easier to build shit back then, because the standards and expectations were saner.

ttymck 3y ago

If an MBA teaches you how to grift, then getting no-strings-attached-VC money seems like the all-time greatest grift to me.

w10-1 3y ago

It likely has nothing to do with YC. Since the dawn of time builders have partnered with popularizers in search of building wealth or power; that's not new. For MBA's, the easy money is in consulting, financial engineering, or monopolizing enterprises - mergers, crypto, pharma, etc. Tech startup's are typically a romantic sideline for those who want some added meaning. But now that deals, consulting, and crypto are dead for the moment, tech startup's look like a good way to go long or at least keep busy until the river runs fast again. Against this influx, YC still has technical achievement as a barrier to entry and natural moat. The real question is not hackers vs MBA's, but how honest investors are with each other. Some might latch on to exciting but opaque technologies, knowing they could sell them in later rounds to other investors. Conversely, later-round investors might only work with early-round investors who provide excellent accurate insight into the viability of technologies. New, hungry investors might give up more insight, while established ones jealously defend opportunities in their space. Investor cohorts might flow in and out with political or currency tides unrelated to opportunity. The investor signal is much stronger than the market signal. Profitable companies now are cutting employees AND doing stock buy-back's and dividends, to satisfy investors. The same is likely true at YC. YC deals reflect investor interest and shape the next generation of companies. Let's hope they stop veering from disruption to destruction (and from self-interest to divisiveness), and start figuring out how to reduce coordination costs of all our new prosthetic powers without reducing everything to a bureaucratic corporation.

sneed_chucker 3y ago

Yes and it's part of a larger trend in tech and computing. As it becomes more lucrative, more people get involved for the primary reason of making money, whereas formerly a larger proportion of people were involved because they found it interesting. Both are legitimate reasons to be involved in tech in my opinion, but it's definitely a shift in demographics.

VirtualVoyager 3y ago

[dead]

krapp 3y ago

It always has been. It used to be called Startup News. It was created by a SV startup entrepreneur and is run by a SV startup incubator. And yes, people do make impressing the HN crowd and getting hype here part of their business model.

june_twenty 3y ago

I've noticed there's a lot of people here who might have been engineers at one point but now they're manager types and have long forgotten the hacker mindset.

krishadi 3y ago

The ease of funding opportunities these days. Startups start to please their source of money. And, it rather seems that those are investors/grants rather than customers. My assumption is that, it's easy for the MBA-types to please VCs/Grant-agencies. And, so you have the outcome...

ss48 3y ago

I think some of it has to do with Hacker News being focused on new and shiny things. There comes a point where it becomes more cost-prohibitive to produce something new that is as good or better than what already exists. Once that happens, the focus shifts to whatever get's marketed better or caters towards a larger audience and focuses on keeping them on the same page, or bypassing controls and restrictions that are in place for existing solutions.