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Why you shouldn't join Y Combinator
- aristofun 3y agoThe egodicity term is misused there to begin with. Ergodicity is not about unequal distribution it is about all every part of the system having same chances of finding gold in the long run.
- DVassallo 3y agoThat’s exactly how i used the term.
- sf4lifer 3y agoYou shouldn't seek or take advice from the internet
- paulsutter 3y agoIf you don't want to raise venture funding, you shouldn't join YC. Venture funding is rocket fuel, and if you're not building a rocket you really don't want rocket fuel.
- candiddevmike 3y agoI keep seeing this "cute" line repeated, how do you find out if you're building a rocket or not...?
- wcarss 3y agoIt's just what you want. Continuing to misuse the metaphor: Do you want to try to go to space/the moon or whatever, for reasons like the personal glory and (mild) fame, the satisfaction of building the thing, the importance of being the person at the center of it all, the joy of changing an industry, etc? That's the rocket: big big plans and you're kinda in it for the work. Or, do you want a plane to a nice beach where you can relax? Because the fastest route to get enough money to relax is probably not via building a rocket these days. Some caveats here: the successful (read: very lucky and very good) rocket builders do get the opportunity to relax, and often on a different level than the people who saved up and bought airplane tickets. But the 'great rocket builders' famously rarely "want to relax". And the vast vast majority of rocket builders don't actually directly succeed, but many do parlay it into savings for that plane ticket. But overall it's much easier for a random person to save up for a plane ticket than build a rocket.
- fourseventy 3y agoAre you taking a huge swing at a huge market looking to IPO? If so it's a rocket. If you are building a niche product looking to scale to a few hundred thousand or single digit millions in revenue, its not.
- brigadier132 3y agoThe point of the article is that it's not rational for individual startup founders to take rocket fuel at company conception which is what YC provides.
- paulsutter 3y agoStartup means rocket. Very few businesses are startups, and very few business founders have use for YC Definition from Paul Graham essay Startup = Growth: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
- mhitza 3y agoMany of the YC projects I've seen posted on HN don't look like rockets. Or maybe I'm of the false impression that developer tooling, or products that bring iterative improvements cannot be rockets.
- malfist 3y agoAre you confusing Show HN projects with companies accepted into the Y Combinator startup incubator? They're two very separate classifications
- diggan 3y agoMaybe parent is referring to "Launch HN" posts (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches https://news.ycombinator.com/launches), which features YC startups.
- camdenreslink 3y agoAny posts with “Launch HN” are promoted posts from YC startups.
- jnovek 3y agoYC focuses on product-market fit so it's not uncommon to see a YC company start as something that just looks like a single feature. The product objective of doing this is to gather some early user feedback so you can grow and refine that feature into an entire business. Until that happens you are flying blind.
- wslh 3y agoI think we often miss the marketing part and take a lot of focus in the technology stack. A good part of the need for funding is linked to the marketing part. You can make hundreds of technology copycats of existing unicorns but surely cannot market themselves as the did.
- fakedang 3y agoWell honestly, if your product requires a significant amount of marketing dollars to reach "product market fit", is it really PMF? Going by the definitions stated by Marc Andreessen and some of the YC Partners, product market fit is when you don't really need to spend marketing dollars because your product is growing so organically (with minimal marketing spend) that your team is barely able to keep up with the growth. Chatbase is a very good example for a PMF product, one that comes off my head, and that didn't require any VC funding. On the other hand, I remember a YC startup launching similar in the summer, but I don't remember its name now.
- thatwasunusual 3y ago> Venture funding is rocket fuel, and if you're not building a rocket you really don't want rocket fuel. Fantastic. :D
- 0_____0 3y agoRocket fuel is very often highly refined kerosene. You could use it to run a jet engine or a diesel truck with small modifications. * I will be entering this reply into "most HN comment" contest running at the end of this year
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThis is ignoring the whole tanker full of liquid oxygen part of the equation.
- 0_____0 3y agoI mean you can plumb that into your diesel truck if you really wanted to. Ever see a RAM Fifteenhunnerd run in vacuum?
- kortex 3y agoMaybe a better analogy is nitromethane. If you put it in your honda civic, you will blow up your engine. You put it in a top-fuel dragster which cranks out thousands of hp and needs an engine rebuild after each race.
- 0_____0 3y agoBetter, but with EFI I bet you could get it working with what otherwise looks like an extremely lean tune
- gcanyon 3y agoDepending on who you ask, RP-1 costs between 20 and 80 times what diesel goes for. Others have tortured this analogy enough, but you certainly don't want to fuel your non-rocket startup with funding that costs far too much, which is conceptually adjacent to the point of the original article.
- dgudkov 3y agoThis is not a very good analogy because it assumes there is only one option if you build a rocket. A founder should get funding through selling equity (to VCs) if the risks are high. If the risks are low, the founder get funding through debt, even if you're "building a rocket". Or bootstrap, if possible. What every VC dreams is to get equity in a low-risk venture. Because the return is high, but the risk is low. That's why there is so much marketing that convinces founders to pay with equity.
- albntomat0 3y agoThe article discusses known issues being a startup founder, such as the low odds of success, as if they’re unique to YC, followed by a pitch for his own product.
- brigadier132 3y agoYou missed the point. Using the analogy from the article, if you take YC money (or any VC money) you need to dig until you find a massive pile of treasure, if you dig and find a small pile of treasure you have to ignore it and start over because VCs are not looking for small piles of treasure, they only care about massive ones. Ignore the fact that the small pile of treasure could actually result in a very good life for a small group of people in a small company.
- lacrimacida 3y agoCan they take the pile and start another company?
- brigadier132 3y agoNo, the VC will want a big exit, the founders will be forced to raise more money and grow the business to be unsustainable and then it will either be shuttered or acquired.
- PeterisP 3y agoNo, they'd be forced by the board to spend/invest that pile towards digging deeper trying to find a massive treasure.
- albntomat0 3y agoI considered that as an issue with being a vc funded startup founder. I could have made that part slightly more clear. Once again, a much broader issue than just YC! The author could have written the exact same article, just with VC instead of YC.
- steveBK123 3y ago
- HenryBemis 3y agoSo much to unpack, so I will not just not bother apart from one point that I keep to be discussing with many people who are stuck in a buzzword mode: "I run a community for small-time entrepreneurs who are satisfied with reliably attainable mediocre success". The bakery around the corner from my house has been around for the past 20 years. It makes a bucketloads of money every day. The guy who runs it is in complaint-mode 24/7. BUT he still runs the place, he still NOT innovates, he still sells good, tasty, average, boring bread. Perhaps Daniel wants that. Good for him. The same for the "community for small-time entrepreneurs". Good for them. But if someone has the next Dropbox-potential idea, you better hand out with this crew here, than that crew there. Because that crew there will settle for mediocre, while this crew here will aim higher.
- TheCapeGreek 3y agoI agree with you, but I also agree with Daniel. Content like this is IMO oriented to two audiences: - Those who think of VC funding for a startup as the "default mode" and haven't considered a "slow burn"/lifestyle business/bootstrap/whatever alternative buzzword approach. - Those who already agree with the indie hacker/no-VC style approach and Daniel's writing appeals to their confirmation bias. It's a feel-good piece for them.
- braza 3y ago> Those who already agree with the indie hacker/no-VC style approach and Daniel's writing appeals to their confirmation bias Indeed. Maybe old founders of YC can chime in but I do not think that someone that has that entrepreneurial spirit to have a start-up would gave up to a small-bet approach. If we count all skills/perks/network of being in a YC program (seeing from the outside) it's a very hard sell to this folks. There are several folks that at the same time could not take the BigCo. 9-5 could not take the solopreneurship/bootstrap as well. Personally the idea of small-bets would not work for me due to the nature of my job (low-stress environment, high pay, a job that fits in my lifestyle and transitivity around countries with my set of skills) but I see the point on the approach.
- runako 3y ago
- djbusby 3y agoI don't think this person understands what/why pivot happens. I also want entrepreneurs to build smaller, self funded businesses but bagging on the VC isn't the way to demonstrate that. Both paths (and others) can exist at the same time. The customer, the entrepreneur and (if you want them) investors need to be aligned. Some want huge, some want less huge. Neither path guarantee success. Starting a business is more like a guaranteed failure (95% or something)
- greatpostman 3y agoIf you build a business that makes 500k a year, which can be done with 30-50 customers for saas selling for 10-15k, you can sell the business and retire. Even at 250k a year, you have an asset that could change your financial life for good. If you raise VC money, the above scenarios are considered a failure. You will have to shutdown/get acquired for nothing. You have to shoot for the moon to get massive ARR, that very very few companies ever hit. It’s really about the level of success needed to have a financial windfall, and bootstrapping is way lower for that.
- gavinhoward 3y agoI'm a business owner currently doing what the parent says to do, and the parent is exactly correct. I want a business that can support my wife and me; 500k is my target, and it would be a great situation for us because I would have a great work/life balance (based on how much time I spend right now). But if I took money, the investors would clamor for more, and the stress would probably kill me.
- ejlxsh 3y agoWhat are you doing to try hit that 500k target? Running a SaaS, consulting, etc?
- gavinhoward 3y agoI am giving away my code as FOSS, so I'm doing the following, in this order: 1. Charging for bug reports or feature requests. 2. Support. (And I have great examples of public support as marketing.) 3. Consulting. (This would be exclusively to help companies trying to use my software, but unlike support, it would be about writing the stuff that uses my software and ensuring the client understands it so that I could do a handoff. The result would be carefully commented and documented code, probably just short of literate programming [1].) 4. SaaS. (If I did this, the server might not be FOSS, but the client would be, and it would use encryption.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
- cj 3y agoThere’s a lot of different ways to build a business. YC promotes one path of doing so (the VC funded path). If your incentives as a founder aligns with YC’s values and interests, then it can be a great value add. But for every company that’s a fit for YC, there are a lot of companies that absolutely aren’t a good fit (e.g. if you’re planning on bootstrapping, you should steer clear of YC). There’s no 1 right way to get a business off the ground.
- sharemywin 3y agoI think the point was just because your a "good fit" for YC doesn't mean the odds are with you. It's similar to the lotto moto. "you can win if you don't play".
- ethanbond 3y agoIf this is news to you, you definitely shouldn’t be starting a VC backed company. (“You” being the proverbial “you”)
- shipscode 3y agoAren’t most yc or funded founders broke asf? Meanwhile the solopreneur scene is printing cash money. Daniel makes good points here.
- llamaimperative 3y ago> So the best way to find good ideas is to have many ideas, try them out, take what works, and throw away the rest. But this is not what YC wants you to do. YC wants you to pick an idea that has market pull (or the potential for it), and to then dig a hole in the same spot until you reach the boiling magma. Because what if you stop digging just before you strike gold? This is the hardest question of starting a startup (or trying to do anything novel), as far as I can tell, but this was not at all my experience with YC’s advice. The overwhelming feeling is: be humble in the face of reality, try something and try to try it in a way that you can assess whether it’s working — quickly/cheaply — then try something new. YC seemed perfectly fine with us either pivoting or staying the course so long as it seemed like we were trying to be intellectually honest with ourselves, and what more could you hope for? It’s not like they have the answer either — nor do they act like it. Edit: Also YC explicitly advises against using VC feedback as signal on your idea. Ideally you’re pivoting well before you run up against “VCs won’t fund my next round,” because clearly things already weren’t working prior to that. You were trying new things and being honest about whether they were working, weren’t you?
- jnovek 3y agoAs a fellow YC founder, I agree with everything you've said here. This article wrongly characterizes the YC experience. I think the author is attempting to apply a normal VC incentive structure to YC, but YC positions itself a little differently in the landscape.
- andrew_ 3y agoAs a former employer for a YC funded company that was shut down against the founder's wishes, forced to via the investor board; I can say that this article does not universally wrongly characterize the YC experience. We had another year of runway in the bank and solid growth. ZIRP ended and the board nuked us from orbit.
- llamaimperative 3y agoDid YC have a board seat?
- mrkeen 3y agoVery compelling arguments against being someone's longshot bet. But then he says that pivoting doesn't work either. Wasn't pivoting, in his analogy, deciding to dig for treasure in a new place?
- Terretta 3y agoFrom the comments about pivots, there are arguably two forms: 1) after digging a deep hole, or even a mine, deciding no treasure, and starting a new mine 2) checking whether the shovel breaks the surface easily, and moving around till it can dig It may be true VC want diggers to see how deep the mine can go before giving up, it may also be true VC want diggers to scrabble around surface area at the start until there's at least some sign of purchase. Those aren't exclusive.
- KaoruAoiShiho 3y agoDon't really get it, there is no should or shouldn't. If you think your idea has multi billion dollar market then go for it, if it doesn't then YC probably don't want you anyway, there is no conflict.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI guess the thing that always sticks out to me is: access to seed capital to bootstrap. How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job, and still feed themselves and family and pay mortgage ... to go off for months to a year to build a product to bootstrap something like that? If you get into Y Combinator or whatever, there is at least a partial answer to that. Though clearly it comes with some really intense "strings attached." This seems like a yawning gap in technology and it biases the set of solutions and products out there to those things that feed the VC furnace.
- marcinzm 3y ago>How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job, and still feed themselves and family and pay mortgage ... to go off for months to a year to build a product to bootstrap something like that? Work on it part time or save money beforehand by living below your means (which you really should do anyways but that's besides the point).
- jeffbee 3y ago> How can people ... adult, not in their early 20s etc ... afford to quit their job, and still feed themselves and family and pay mortgage ... to go off for months to a year to build a product to bootstrap something like that? They can’t. That’s why bootstrap capitalism is largely a myth. When you scratch the surface what you often find is inherited wealth. If a person starts with a free house or a million dollars they have a massive advantage.
- marcinzm 3y agoThere's a massive number of small businesses in the US owned by immigrants that came to the US with fairly little. It's fair to say you prefer a regular job or VC money to the hell those immigrants went through but that is different than it being even close to impossible.
- acdha 3y agoYes, but also consider that most of those were smaller businesses with different revenue prospects. It’s still an accomplishment but the feel good stories which feature in the news are things like “Mark started a billion dollar company in his dorm room”, not “Lan worked 80 hour weeks to start a solid restaurant which provides a decent middle class income but no likelihood of becoming actually rich”.
- abhayhegde 3y ago> If the system was ergodic, what’s happening to the collective would also translate to all individuals. That's a definition of ergodicity I've never heard before. Ergodicity usually meant the phase space is fully occupied; in other words, a system tends to go through all possible configurations and sometimes irrespective of initial conditions.
- _aaed 3y agoAgreed, I think fallacy of composition is more appropriate here
- braza 3y agoNot the OP, but being a former follower from him he is a big fan of Nassim Taleb that made some changes in the ergodicity concept to the everyday life in some of his books[1]. [1] - https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf41029d3 https://medium.com/incerto/the-logic-of-risk-taking-107bf410...
- DVassallo 3y agoI’m using the definition from economics not physics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1vXAHGIpfc&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1vXAHGIpfc&feature=emb_logo
- marcosdumay 3y agoOn economics, one implies the other. (it's not true about every stochastic process, but for the ones important to economics, they do.) If your life experiences do not depend on the initial conditions, then people all have about the same chance of reaching them.
- bradley13 3y agoThe article makes excellent points. VCs fund a zillion different projects, playing the odds that one of them will make a mint. For the individual project, - which is you - the chances of success are very small. One comments says that venture funding is rocket fuel. That's true, but only if you actually have a rocket. You probably don't: you have a VW bug, or maybe a BMW. Almost no one has a rocket. Anyway, I honestly don't understand the craving to hit a $billion business. It's completely unrealistic - it's just not going to happen. Creating a business that can support you, turning over 6-digits (instead of 9 or 10) is much more realistic. You won't get VCs on board for that, nor do you need them.
- brigadier132 3y ago> Anyway, I honestly don't understand the craving to hit a $billion business. It's completely unrealistic I think what the author is missing is that founders could have massive exits in the previous bubble in Series B rounds and walk away with millions. With that possible outcome available it's rational for founders to play the bubble game. Otherwise, I agree, defining success as building an $X billion revenue business is completely irrational when there are infinite many success scenarios between 1million and $1 billion in revenue that you miss out on once you over grow your business' expenses.
- simpaticoder 3y agoThat's true, but only if you actually have a rocket. You probably don't: you have a VW bug, or maybe a BMW. Almost no one has a rocket. You're right, I think. What I get reading this thread, and other sources, is that VCs will trash perfectly good VWs and BMWs trying to turn them into rockets. The reason being that only rockets have value to them. VW and BMW business are failures. E.g. a .1% chance at $1B is actually worth far more to a VC than a 100% chance at $1M even though the EV is the same.
- enedil 3y agoHow is the EV of 1% of change at $1B and 100% chance at $1M the same? The EV is respectively $10M and $1M. I actually think, that if it was the same, they would have different approach towards being a VC.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iandanforth 3y agoI am not persuaded by this article. I am not 22 and I have never gone through YC, but many friends have. I would urge any young founders to try to do the same. The reason most successful CEOs are older is due to experience and networks. YC, even if your startup fails, gives you both in spades. It also gives you some financial stability you might not otherwise have to attempt this moonshot. If you don't have capital to spend on pay-to-access communities let alone fund a startup then YC makes a good offer. If you manage to fail and pivot multiple times, you've just had a crash course in multiple areas, maybe even multiple industries. If you can't get lucky, you can at least get wise. So the "you" in this article might actually apply to me. I'm older, I could self-fund my own work for quite a while, and be happy with a modestly successful business. But the "you" in this article is not general. If "you" are young, hungry, willing to sleep on floors, eat ramen, and want to pursue your dream with a possibly naive passion, then yes. You should join Y Combinator.
- Fnoord 3y ago> The reason most successful CEOs are older is due to experience and networks. What about resources in general? Like, settled and more money to burn?
- iandanforth 3y agoI don't know. I can think of persuasive arguments that financial security helps and ones that financial security hurts a given individual's chances of being a successful CEO. My intuition is that there would be a correlation but that it's not causal.
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago> ” I can't afford to rely on 26 lifetimes. But maybe you think you’re special. You’re not like those 3,950 dummies who failed. Maybe you are in fact special, but I wouldn’t rely too much on that. Business is much more random than it seems. If business was predictable, YC wouldn't have a measly 1.25% success rate, or thereabouts.” This argument is very disappointing and dishonest. The piece repeatedly implies and assumes that every YC-funded company that isn’t currently valued at over a billion dollars is a failure for the founder. This ignores the fact that many companies are still growing and will cross that threshold in a few years. It’s also not an honest representation of all the smaller acquisitions to call them “failures”. Twitch’s acquisition wasn’t quite for a billion, but it was a massive success for its founders. There are many other companies that exited in the 9-figure range, for which this is true. Plenty of others excited in the 8 figure range and were still better outcomes than if the founders had just remained employees. Even those whose startups went to zero usually end up fine in terms of career. What percentage of Daniel’s students have built unicorns? Have any or are they all, by his own metric, “failures”?
- esafak 3y agoAt those success rates, he's going to need a lot of students working for long enough to exit to yield statistically significant results. How long has his program been open?
- AlchemistCamp 3y agoI bought it two years ago, and according to Gumroad, the version I bought has made 3,499 sales. It might be more due to different versions of his course, and it's certainly not much fewer than the pool of 4,000 he's using to calculate the failure rate for YC founders.
- dancemethis 3y agoAlready joined HN.
- samtheprogram 3y agoWould you value this take on YC whatsoever if they hadn’t been it in? How would they know what it’s really like?
- burcs 3y agoIt's hard to take advice from someone peddling their own course. I will say I'm probably somewhat biased as, we went through YC, and yes if you don't want to be VC-backed, then don't do it. Maybe the title should be "You shouldn't raise Venture Capital, buy my course instead!" That being said, the beauty of YC, SAFEs, and seed funding is you don't have anyone on your board. You get to decide what you want to build, how you want to build it, etc... The point of joining YC and raising money is because it helps you figure out what to build/not to build, and to build faster, and YC is REALLY good at helping you sort that out. There are founders out there who realized they've built a product that doesn't have the unicorn potential and pay back their investors. I'm pretty sure Daniel worked at Gumroad for a bit, and that's what Sahil did. Again I find it really hard to take advice from folks who have "something better" to sell you.
- DVassallo 3y agoYou think all the YC articles aren’t also peddling something? At least I’m clear.
- michaelteter 3y ago> find it really hard to take advice from folks who have "something better" to sell you We do this all the time when considering a change from one product or service to another. The potentially better offering tells why their way is better, and why the other ways are inferior. Then they sell us their way.
- tim333 3y agoYeah but is it a good idea? I mean a neutral source might be better than someone trying shill product.
- jiveturkey 3y agoDisagree with your take, generally speaking. This is just called salesmanship. You don't present a balanced picture, you present a selectively, opinionated, persuasive one. The reader can take from it what they will. And as Daniel points out in a sibling comment, YC is actually much worse on this front. > I'm pretty sure Daniel worked at Gumroad for a bit, huh. Yes he appears to have been Head of Product. So I'd say the abstract for https://smallbets.co/event/4019ad11-d5db-45dd-a341-a0f130378080 https://smallbets.co/event/4019ad11-d5db-45dd-a341-a0f130378... goes beyond salesmanship and is willfully deceptive. Unless he joined Gumroad after that video was produced? Hopefully he'll see this and comment. And update the abstract.
- portman 3y agoI believe the author made a simple math error. Economic returns of VC-backed companies follow a power law distribution. This means that the vast majority of the returns for the VC are at the "fat head" of the distribution. The "long tail" does not impact returns, for the VC. However, for the founder, those returns in the tail can be life-changing. It takes a $5B exit for YC to care. But a $5M exit can be real money for the founder. So the correct math, from the perspective of the founder, is not "what % are unicorns" but rather "what % sell for more than capital invested" and that number is likely to be closer to 50% than 1%.
- DVassallo 3y agoI’ve been on the acquirer side of $50M exits and from what I’ve seen almost no one makes any money in those situations. It is usually a deal done in desperation and everyone is diluted to the brim.
- portman 3y agoI mean, N=3, but I've made decent money on smaller exits. The relevant metric is not exit price, it's ratio of exit price to pref stack; i.e. raise $40M and sell for $50M, founder is worse than if they raised $2M and sold for $10M.
- fakedang 3y agoThe $5M exit is more likely for a founder who isn't raising VC money, and instead who's following Vassallo's principles and running a bootstrapped business.
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- krosaen 3y agoI bet the distribution of outcomes among all YC participants tells a different story - not all or nothing. Getting acquired or acqui-hired, while not as prestigious, often nets the founders as much or more than the opportunity cost of not taking lucrative tech jobs. And surely there are plenty that need to close up shop without any financial outcome at all as well, but again, would love to see the distribution. Also, even those who do not net any financial outcome, how many of those founders would say they regret going through YC? Guessing they have built a great network, learned a ton more than they would have as an IC at a big company, and are well positioned to do whatever they want to next, even joining a big company after all.
- treprinum 3y agoVC business is reinforcement learning for investors doing the exploitation part whereas founders doing the exploration part.
- esafak 3y agoI think you have it backwards. Each founder exploits one idea, and the ensemble of VC's founders explores. You seem to be thinking of the colloquial definition of exploitation.
- bko 3y agoThis article is just bad. > So, digging in one spot is a dumb strategy for the economy of the individual, but a very wise strategy for the collective economy of all individuals. First starts with the idea of diversification and why its good. Fair enough. Then an argument how a mining company could "just hire individual miners to do dig in one spot for cheap". While the individual miners are getting poorer you'll get rich! So why don't mining operations operate this way? Because there isn't an unlimited supply of stupid people to do waste away their lives for you to capture all the value. > This is what happens in a non-ergodic system. We often hear politicians claim that the GDP is growing, but all the gains are going to the 1%. This is the same thing. The wealth of a country could be growing, but almost all the citizens could be getting poorer. There’s nothing inconsistent with this. The average is simply being dragged up by the freak outliers. I'm fortunate enough to be living in a country with a growing GDP and I can tell you, life is pretty good here, even if you're not 1%. Sure could be better, but certainly great compared to countries with a contracting or stagnant economy. But cool, overstate your claim that the system is rigged. > One of the bad learnings you get from YC is that there’s a formula for success, and it looks like this: First you do some brainstorming. Then you come up with a good idea that can scale to a billion dollars (otherwise what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?) I was never part of YC but I read a lot of their literature and listened to a lot of their members, and this is opposite of their advice. The gospel is do things that don't scale and solve problems you're familiar with or have felt personally. I guess my biggest gripe with the post is that the author sees founders as basically dumb diggers, a stupid exploitable resource that places like YC take advantage of. His bar for success is unicorn and only 1.25% of companies funded by YC make it. But would the other 98.75% have been better off working on optimizing ad placement at Google or something similar? Sure taking VC money doesn't make sense in a lot of cases. If you can build a cash business without it, you probably should. And YC is definitely one of the better VCs from what I understand and have even pioneered the SAFE which was a huge step up from some contracts founders were asked to sign in the past.
- corry 3y agoThis has so much backwards. You don't get to just 'decide' if your fledgling business is a potential unicorn or will just be a lifestyle SaaS business. It's a product of your idea/technology, the size of the market, competitive pressures, and your early traction. It's more like this: You wake up and realize that -- while it's still early -- the thing you started has major potential; but you need a lot of capital to seize the opportunity. So you realize that going the VC route is likely your best bet. And that if you're doing the VC route, getting into YC is the best possible start. If instead you wake up and realize your TAM is probably <$100M, your tech isn't anything particularly novel, and your path to a 'good life' is fairly clear if you can just organically grow from there - great, don't go the VC route. But this idea that you're trying to discover treasure in a field or some bullshit is just bad. The better analogy is - you have a patch of land. You can slightly change that patch of land but it's mostly fixed. You could slowly farm that land and make a good living. Or you could risk it all, dig everything up in a search for oil, and maybe strike it big. If you fail, the land is worthless. Now, today you realize you have strong indications and evidence that there is A LOT of oil down there. So you go talk to some money guys, get funding for the exploration, and you're off. But the guy who has zero evidence of oil, zero reasons for thinking it's down there, and is happy farming anyways - OF COURSE is better off just going the farm route.
- corry 3y agoJust to continue my metaphor (because - why not?) - So you suspect you may have oil hiding deep in your property, and while you know your land REALLY well, you're not totally sure how to go about validating that its there; or even if you could validate it, how to proceed best. You hear there is a very friendly and experienced outfit called YC that will help you (a) quickly figure out if there's oil, and (b) if there might be oil, set you up for success with the bigger money that you'll need to extract the oil. This YC firm is basically geared towards helping someone like you figure this out quickly. And actually, YC will give you $ to explore this very thing. In exchange, they will own part of your land (a small fraction). If it turns out there isn't oil after all - not the end of the world. You'll go back to farming, and at least you won't be wondering if you should have explored the oil thing more. YC won't care much about you anymore since they are in the business of owning a small % of the land that strikes BIG oil. But they also won't be a nuisance. If it turns out there IS oil under there, then YC will help you navigate the big oil money people to help you get it out faster. Metaphors are never perfect but I'm having fun with this one. :)
- demondemidi 3y agoThe only startup founders I've known (and we didn't call them that in the late 80's early 90's) fall into two categories: those who want to get rich and don't care about the product, and those who really believe in their product (and hope that it makes them rich, but that's not the primary objective). I'm not sure if there is a third type, if there is I have not met them. The most successful people I know fell into category two, and all struggled for more than a decade each and had multiple mentors, but ultimately took out loans (from banks, friends, etc) that weren't based on owning shares; none relied on VC. None of them are billionaires, but they are solid decimillionaires (if that's even a word) whose businesses practically run on autopilot. I think the author makes excellent points that I thought were common sense but I guess they are not, however I don't know a lot of techie entrepreneurs anymore, they are all much younger than me (mid-50s). All I know about younger startup folks is based on scanning HN for the past decade, but it seems they are all chasing the brass ring the same way the author describes. And the truth is in the numbers.
- DVassallo 3y agoThe most successful might be from category two, but what is the denominator? How many with that attitude failed? I suspect category one has significantly higher survival, probably close to 100%.
- gen220 3y agoI think it depends on what you count as "survival". Group 1's long-term success/survival is contingent on timely exits and timely access to future funding, which historically (i.e. during all times + places, except 2008-2021 in SV) is a pretty volatile commodity. Group 2 develops fairly portable skills that they can "sell" to the market whenever they want to give up on building by themselves. They can compound in a way that's uncorrelated from LPs' appetites for risky allocations. It's like comparing a firecracker and a candle. Although they both depend on combustion, the goals of the two groups are almost disjoint.
- demondemidi 3y agoCategory a - 0 of 5; category b - 7 of 9.
- Sosh101 3y agoAre there examples of YC investments that have become successful after a pivot?
- BiteCode_dev 3y agoSeems like it's just a matter of the stats you want, goals you have and compromise you are willing to make, as usual. Per the article itself, Y combinators is actually a good deal if your objectives and theirs align. If they don't, don's sign up. Also the sky is blue.
- posix86 3y agoWhat I don't understand with this article is why it should be beneficial for YC to make you dig deep rather than everywhere. The digging analogy basically says that you can push founders in a way that the probability of ANY success decreases, but the overall average return increases. What push mechanism is that supposed to be? Fixation on an idea? And how will it increase return?
- langsoul-com 3y agoDig deep because that's the highest chance of a single or few people hitting gold. There's not enough time for a single person to dig everywhere and it'd likely be a low payout if they did. The push is that YC won't find the exact same idea and none others. It's a spread to maximise the tiles of people digging.
- esafak 3y agoIt is due to heavy-tailed returns; the winner who goes deep strikes big and compensates for the rest.
- karl11 3y agoFrom the outside looking in, it seems to me that the biggest benefit of YC is the people you get to meet and build relationships with along w/ the advice and feedback and accountability to focus on the things that actually matter to growing a business. These are lessons and relationships that will carry through even if you decide that VC-backed hypergrowth isn't for you and you want a small lifestyle business. Joining YC does not preclude you from doing things differently, but it does provide access to some amazingly smart and capable people that would be hard, if not impossible, to replicate somewhere else.
- lucasfcosta 3y agoI strongly disagree with the post. YC is the most founder friendly investor I’ve ever met, and they do have founder’s best interest in mind. Also, their deal allows them to have interests aligned with founder’s if you just stop and read what’s publicly available. I will always recommend YC.
- DVassallo 3y agoI never implied they were not friendly. All the YC folks seem very nice. I’m sure they want you to succeed, but they succeed more if you take a strategy that is against your self-interest.
- langsoul-com 3y agoI think this article is more directed towards all Venture Capital funding rather than just Y Comb. Mostly the type that demands an absolutely insane amount of return. Actually more like why you shouldn't make a startup and instead live a bit longer. Then, if an idea comes to you, it'd be vetted through more experience and time. And if you still want VC funding, just remember the house is setup to always win.
- klohto 3y agoI hate Vassallo’s spam on every single platform. I get it, you have a bootstrapping course. Anyway, to the YC point about pivoting and digging a hole: Daniel has 0 experience with YC and this is absolutely not what YC encourages. YC is more than happy to see you pivot. You have the driver seat and you know best. Do I agree you shouldn’t take VC money so easily? Yes. Do I agree everything applies to YC? Definitely not. Hell, pick your VCs well and you won’t face any of those problems.
- getpost 3y agotl;dr: The "Small Bets Newsletter" says YC isn't suitable for small bets. YC isn't designed for small bets! That's not their thing. It would be interesting to see stats on non-huge exits though, some kind of distribution showing the following with a time element, indicating, say, the number of months for various outcomes. Huge exits 1.25% (define huge), Exit exceeding YC's investment, YC investment repaid, YC investment partially repaid, YC investment entirely lost
- alexmolas 3y agoThis article is built over the assumption that 1.25% is small, but it never presents how this number changes between YC and non-YC companies. Without this comparison it doesn't make sense to say 1.25% is small.
- DVassallo 3y agoIt is too small when the expected payoff is business success in one lifetime.
- anonu 3y agoThis is sort of a gibberish article. It has nothing to do with YC really. The story being told is that of any venture backed startup. The investors take the risk but if you build a business they may do better than you financially. Money generates money. Another point they make is what I call "shots on goal". Investors will have tons of shots. That's the nature of investors. If your a startup founder it's tempting to think you have "one shot" but that's nonsense. Every day you have shots, every client call is a shot, every product decision is a shot.
- hcks 3y ago1.5% chance of becoming a billionaire per try is good odds, actually. Also doesn’t take into account all the outcomes you become merely a millionaire (likely over 5% in the case of YC?)
- sobellian 3y ago> One of the bad learnings you get from YC is that there’s a formula for success, and it looks like this: First you do some brainstorming. Then you come up with a good idea that can scale to a billion dollars (otherwise what’s the point of getting out of bed in the morning?) Then you work hard until you find “product-market-fit.” And then if the noises from investors indicate you won’t be getting a next round of funding, you start looking for a “pivot.” YC is fairly relentless about iteratively finding product market fit but as far as pivoting goes - while YC makes it clear that you can pivot, it's pretty obvious that it's not ideal (but if people don't want your product, that's even less ideal). YC most definitely does not bill pivoting as part of a formula for success. They also care about your idea when you apply, they do not expect you to start fresh during the batch. I honestly don't remember them saying anything about brainstorming, and that's probably because it's not true - most good startups have an unfair advantage in their industry and most founders already have some experience in their field of choice. Throwing a dart at a board and making a unicorn is quite rare indeed. So this "formula" is mostly a strawman. And notably he tears down pretty much everything but iteratively finding product market fit, the one kernel of truth in this entire rant. > Think about this for a second: The most successful business owners are typically in their 40s and 50s. Why is YC full of 22 year olds? Why aren’t the 40 year old entrepreneurs taking up this incredible deal that YC is offering? YC will tell you it’s because only the 22 year old kids can be true visionaries. BULL. SHIT. So I went through YC in 2014 and I was 22 at the time - and I was among the youngest in the batch. Most founders seemed more towards his proposed age range, and to be fair they seemed to have a better handle on things. Go figure. So YC most definitely does not say that "only the 22 year old kids can be true visionaries." At least in 2014, it was in fact rare for them to bet on 22 year-olds. > You might think that those who failed might still have gotten something. Maybe. If you haven't founded a business before, it's quite valuable because you don't know what you don't know. Once you're a little more seasoned, I'd say it's a lot more situational.
- satisfice 3y agoThis is a compelling piece.
- pharmakom 3y agoJoin YC, maybe your startup is a success and you retire early. There’s a slim chance of that. However, YC on your resume opens the door for that comfy fang career slinging Java at 300k total comp.
- grepLeigh 3y agoThere are easier ways to get into FANNG: * Read Cracking the Coding Interview and practice every exercise twice. * Publish high-quality content (projects, tutorials, blog posts). * Contribute to OS in some meaningful way, like owning the packaging for your favorite library for your favorite distro. * Reach out to people at the company you want to work for, or go to a meetup hosted by that Co. All of the above is much easier than starting a company.
- esafak 3y agoNot as fun or educational, though, in the well-rounded sense. The best way to understand the business of software is to start one.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jefftk 3y ago> only about 50 companies met that expectation out of the 4,000 or so that went through their program. That’s 1.25% ... All those 4,000 kids who went into YC also thought they were visionaries, and where are they now? They’re all in the startup cemetery, except for a dozen or so who despite the low odds managed to flip 10 heads in a row. This is a bit nitpicky, but: * Some of those 4,000 may end up super successful but haven't yet; this isn't considering lag. * Ten heads in a row is 0.1%; this is closest to six heads in a row. I agree that your odds are low, and you should consider how much you care about a small chance of a massive success. But the odds do matter!
- pdonis 3y agoMy pretentiousness detector went off when I saw a completely wrong definition of "ergodicity" at the start of the article.
- DVassallo 3y agoIt’s the definition from economics, not physics: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0#:~:text=It%20underlies%20the%20assumption%20that,essentially%20eliminated%20from%20the%20models https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0#:~:text=It.... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f1vXAHGIpfc&feature=emb_logo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f1vXAHGIpfc&feature=emb_logo
- pdonis 3y ago> It’s the definition from economics, not physics They're pretty much the same, and have nothing to do with... "First, you have to understand a very important concept: in some systems, what’s best for a group is not necessarily what’s best for the individuals who make up the group. In other words, the total wealth of a group of people could be increasing, while almost everyone making up that group could be seeing their wealth diminish. When this happens, we say we have a non-ergodic system. If the system was ergodic, what’s happening to the collective would also translate to all individuals." ...which is how the article defines "ergodic" in the section with that name at the start.
- DVassallo 3y agoThe author of that paper, an economics professor, agrees with my definition: https://twitter.com/ole_b_peters/status/1450761675049734144 https://twitter.com/ole_b_peters/status/1450761675049734144
- pdonis 3y agoArgument from authority. Sorry, not buying it. The physics/economics definition is basically that time average = ensemble average. (The term "expectation value" is used in the Nature paper you reference, but that amounts to the same thing.) But individuals do not experience the ensemble average. A condition on averages is not the same as a condition on individual outcomes.
- jp57 3y agoThis article could just as easily be "why you should not try to be a rock star", or "why you should not try to be a college professor". Both are non-ergodic pursuits where the chance of success is low and the expected financial ROI across all aspirants is negative. Coincidentally, I've done both and failed at both and I don't regret either one. But contrary to the article, I did get valuable non-financial rewards from these experiences. I wouldn't trade my rock-band experiences for anything. Twenty-five years have passed since the last time I seriously got on stage with my guitar, but my old bandmates are still my closest friends. My PhD taught me so much about how to tackle big ambiguous problems, how to think deeply about things, how to be patient when clarity comes slowly, and how to drag a hard painful project over the finish line. I also made career contacts that were invaluable later. It sounds to me like YC might be worth trying once, especially for a young person, and when you get to the point where you have to pivot, you should take what you've learned and bail. If the terms of the agreement make that impossible, then maybe it is a bad deal.
- nkotov 3y agoHaving been on both sides of this, ran a YC startup and now running a "lifestyle" SaaS business, the honest reality is that both have their risks/rewards. I wouldn't trade anything for the experience + network I received from being a part of a YC batch. But bootstrapping a business and going from $0 to $1 is also just as exciting for me as well right now. Most likely for my next business, I will be re-applying for YC again. The best note that I saved that someone else wrote: Know What You Want. Do you want to build a lifestyle business? Do you want to grow into a company with employees? Do you want funding? An exit? You should figure these things out. Decide your own goals, don’t let someone decide it for you.
- cubes 3y agoThis article would be more accurately titled, "Why you shouldn't try to build a venture capital funded business." Of course, my suggested title is not nearly as compelling and edgy as the actual title, and would be less likely to make it to the front page of Hacker News. The content in the article isn't inaccurate or misleading per se, but it's also basically repackaging well understood information about the economics of startups and venture backed businesses. Further, the author asserts that, if you're trying to optimize your personal economic outcomes, you should not pursue venture funding. But this wrongly assumes that money is the sole motivator people have for starting a business. Further, it ignores the massive economic value that the venture ecosystem has created. Some people want to retire early. Some people have bigger ambitions. Neither group is right or wrong, but, if you're starting the business, you should know which group you're part of.
- DVassallo 3y ago> "Further, it ignores the massive economic value that the venture ecosystem has created." The subtitle of the post is: "Or why YC is good for the economy but bad for your economy."
- scandox 3y ago> If you reach the magma layer and you still have nothing, then you’d be encouraged to pivot. But that’s not how you find business opportunities in the real world. I think he is treating pivoting as if it's some totally random exercise. Surely a pivot is when you see something within your existing activity that may be a better avenue to pursue? Or am I misunderstanding that?
- rich_sasha 3y agoIf your VC funded business fails, you probably still collected a salary. Also "failed" could mean, you had a $50m exit. You could still argue it's a bad trade, poor work-life balance etc. but it's not like 1% chance of being a billionaire or debtors prison.
- shtopointo 3y agoI like David's posts on Twitter generally, but this piece is poorly written. Big opener, controversial take, put a thing down, just to build your own product up by comparison, lack of nuance... from the get-go you can tell it's a marketing piece. The premise imo is wrong. > Silicon Valley is a non-ergodic industry How do you define this? Obviously Daniel's take is on the founders that failed, that were stressed out by investors etc. but he doesn't talk about the thousands of people with the highest paying, most comfortable job they've ever had. People that switched from manual labor to customer support or programming. Or the thousands of minted (multi-)millionaires that got there by just working a comfortable 9-5 for 5-10 years? (in fact, he may be one of the beneficiaries of a SV style system, through his AWS career that sounded like it landed him enough money to start on his entrepreneurial journey – not so non-ergodic now...) And of course, he loses credibility because he is selling his course. The whole point of the blog post is to sour YC and siphon off a few readers to his course. Kudos to him too, I mean, that's marketing, and it seems like that course is great too! But, imo, he is not taking the high road here. YC has a great track record at helping people succeed. And if they didn't succeed, it opened doors. YC foots the bill for you to explore an idea. Sure, you can be smart enough to get into YC, but still naive enough to believe a religion-version of YC, about changing the world and something-something vision; then again, maybe you are smart enough to know what you're getting yourself into. Or you should. Because on the other hand, there are plenty of people peddling get-rich-quick schemes out there, and how you can make it on your own, "just do this thing". Life's tough out there, and going solo is a difficult journey (something not mentioned often). You work for a company, or you work with investors, you are protected / sheltered. Choose your own path, for sure, but also recognize the pros and cons and how nuanced this situation is.
- Eumenes 3y agoAlot of commenters here talking about scaling a saas biz which they can ride to retirement but imo it's a shot not worth taking for the average person. Way easier to build a consulting practice or become skilled in a niche area of development. There's literally Fortran developers making 500k year taking odd contracts. I know a MongoDB sme who bills $300/hr to fix common scalability challenges and address technical debt. Yes it's not sexy and you won't be featured on product hunt, but you'll be rich and can retire young in decadence.
- cracrecry 3y agoThis man is calling anyone that does not become a billionaire a failure and those that get it a "success". This binary thinking is beyond stupid. It is a reasonable thing with hard work to become millionaire and to earn more money than what you need. It is a reasonable thing to work on interesting problems with interesting people. Once you have enough money your are not going to get happier with more money. On the contrary, with billions in the bank you can not do normal things because people could want to kidnap your family, and people around you are faking all the time their true intentions. You are being asked for money all the time and so on. You can trust nobody. Most people that get into YC are going to get enough of those good things, but not too much, and this is going to make them to be in the top 5% in the world in satisfaction.
- raincole 3y agoHe even has a "Unlearning is hard" section in his article. Maybe he needs to unlearn the idea that you need to go big or go die.
- Mimmy 3y agoThis is a really bad article. There is a nugget of truth, but it's never properly articulated because the author himself doesn't actually understand the distinction. If you've already decided you want to build a unicorn and are willing to make take that <1% chance of success, YC will help you. If you want a lifestyle business, you could probably skip YC (though you probably wouldn't get accepted even if you applied with that idea anyways).
- jackcosgrove 3y agoAre there any "accelerators" that are employee-owned? I'm thinking of an arrangement where it's basically a software consulting company 90% of the time to pay the bills and get experience/inspiration. The remaining 10% of the time is spent trying to spin out new businesses that are collectively owned. Modulate the ratio as appropriate. So if one project becomes successful, the principals can pivot to that and drop other ventures?
- jasonmarks_ 3y agoI'm trying to bootstrap a SaaS ( handshake www.weatherthetrip.com/download also on X @jasonmarks__ ) and sympathize with some of the points. Do I know what YC really does? Not really. Maybe they grease marketing? I don't think that's worth the equity ask though.
- mitchelldeacon9 3y agoFor a contrarian argument, it is worth considering the advice of Michael Porter in his seminal study "Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors" (published in 1980): > Some argue that firms should not choose competitive positions at all but concentrate on staying flexible, incorporating new ideas, or building up critical resources or core competencies that are portrayed as independent of competitive position. I respectfully disagree. Staying flexible in strategic terms renders competitive advantage almost unobtainable. Jumping from strategy to strategy makes it impossible to be good at implementing any of them. Continuous incorporation of new ideas is important to maintaining operational effectiveness, but this surely is not inconsistent with having a firm strategic position (xv-xvi)... A strategic position is a path, not a fixed location (xiv). In other words, there is no such animal as a "fully diversified" entrepreneurial business (unless your business is simply investing money in a diversified stock portfolio). The very concept of a (non-financial) capitalist enterprise implies some degree of specialization. Even YC, to some extent, specializes and focuses their investments in certain high-tech industries.
- greenie_beans 3y agoeverybody seems to miss one of the arguments of this article: instead of being a tiny bet for a VC, you should be like your own VC and make tiny bets on yourself. that's sensible logic.
- steveBK123 3y agoI think people also way overestimate the founder takes from even successful exits. One of my classmates was a co-founder of a company that had a near-$100M exit (acquired) ~10 years ago (back when that was real money). That sounds like a lot, right? By the time the VCs took their cut, the equity grants were deducted, and the founders split the proceeds.. it wasn't life changing money. The money wasn't much different than a typical equity grant at a FAANG for a 30-something dev. Especially after 5-10 years of effort. And then you might be stuck working for the acquirer for some contractual period before you can exit. It was also one of the many ZIRP businesses that would never be bootstrapped. That is - gain a bunch of customers by giving away services for free in hope that you somehow get so many that you can ... do something, later.
- moneywoes 3y agowow. was he heavily dilluted?
- engineercodex 3y agoA lot more founders and employees are heavily diluted than you think. I always just assumed massive exits meant people were rich. But when I calculated out how much an exec would make for a diluted $1B exit compared to working at FAANG for the same amount of time... FAANG turned out better many times (unfortunately). I think preventing dilution should be one of the highest priorities for founders for themselves and for retention. Every single dilution event sets the outcome bar higher and, thus, harder to achieve.
- steveBK123 3y agoYeah I mean, it can get diluted pretty quick right! Say you co-found with 1-2 others, so you start at 30-51%. You want to attract some good talent, so you give away 10% to early hires. Each funding round you give up 15-25%. You can see how your equity can quickly get below 10%. Zuck managed to hold onto ~30% but your typical control is much lower these days. Musk had 28% of Tesla at IPO. Kalanick had 8% of Uber at IPO. Foley had 6% of Peloton at IPO. Splunk 3 co-founders had 5-7.5% each at IPO. Butterfield had 8% at Slack IPO. So you may be foregoing 10 years of $700K FAANG comp for a ~$80M payday (8% equity of $1B unicorn exit). To me it raises the question if non-founder startup equity is basically worthless. If a founder ends up diluted down to 8% at exit, what happens to the 0.5-1% shares you get promised at hire? 0.06-0.125% ?? So your first senior engineer hire into a unicorn equity might end up worth a grand $1M at IPO? Ouch. Go grind some leetcode and work for FAANG and make that in 2 years.
- aussiegreenie 3y agoI work with University spin-outs mainly in Life Sciences. They take years and cost millions of dollars betfore they can start generating revenue. I also own a metal recycling business. It is on track for USD 10 million revenue with about $1 million EBIT. This business has a low risk, it is cash-based and generates cash every month. Basically, working with the startup are almost a charity. Yes, I like going to various universities, yes, I dicussing Deep Technology but my main source of incone and wealth comes from used beer cans. Why do I need more that $500K pa? I will be dead soon enough.
- vmatsiiako 3y agoThis is just a collection of absolutely flawed arguments. Any (even a little bit) smart person reading this should see the BS immediately
- DoreenMichele 3y agoEh, YC and Mr. "Don't join YC! Buy my course instead!" are in the same business, they just have different target markets. Both make money off the fact that establishing a successful, profitable business is hard and most people can't do it without some help, especially education and feedback. He's not really competing with YC, so it's a little silly to target YC. Except, you know, it works well as a clickbait title because YC is a well-known big name, so it's disingenuous but "smart marketing."
- bhgtopt 3y ago[dead]
- tim333 3y agoThis article is so rubbish about YC. There was a very good article about YC's founding and philosophy by Jessica Livingston the other day https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/grow-the-puzzle-around-you https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/grow-the-puzzle-around-... I mean, from Vassallo: >...YC wouldn't have a measly 1.25% success rate, or thereabouts. From YCs site "39% of YC companies have raised a Series A". If success is only going over $1bn them him and all his students are failures along with 99.99% of the population. >The biggest indicator YC is a bad deal is that only people who are easily duped take up these deals. Again from YC "Every 6 months over 10,000 companies apply to participate in our accelerator and we typically have a 1.5% - 2% acceptance rate." The main problem with YC would seem to be the difficulty of getting in. Fair enough starting VC style startups isn't for everyone but there's no need to lie about YC to flog his dumb course really.
- chfritz 3y agoSo many mistakes! a) What you describe is the VC industry, not YC. b) Yes, it's a well known fact that the expected value (in $$$) of doing a startup is less than that of being an employee, so don't do it for the money; and c) most importantly, your article makes no argument for the claim of your title, because it doesn't compare success rates with or without joining YC.