I think this “tweet” is totally unbalanced. And I think he misses some of the significant downsides. He is moaning about Venture Capital, not YC. You can use t

I think this “tweet” is totally unbalanced. And I think he misses some of the significant downsides. He is moaning about Venture Capital, not YC. You can use the YC money and bootstrap. Although obviously YC is pushing the Venture Capital drug and will filter for Venture Capital seeking founders/opportunities. My experience of an incubator showed me that incubators disable founders. Incubators put back into school where the teachers tell you they know everything. Many mentor relationships are dangerous too. It damages your psyche and is hard to escape the desire to get the best advice/mentoring. Learning to be a founder is all about making your own good and bad decision. The right attitude is hard to maintain, and hopefully YC builds it (no idea if it does). Get advice but learn how to ignore most of it (even geniuses get most things wrong). 7% for $500k is a great deal if you use it carefully: use the network and experience to your advantage and you should get more than an extra 7% growth. Take care that other flashier startups don’t steal your star employees. YC gets preferential shares, but founders get common shares: so alignment is wrong. YC has the financial incentive to team up with Venture Capitalists against founders. Not saying they do, but it is a bad signal that YC gives. You need to watch YCs behaviour with the few winners to learn the outcomes for YC versus founders - on average only the few winners matter financially. The final results for the reddit.com IPO are really weird given reddit was in the first YC batch: https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/who-got-rich-reddit-ipo-2024-3 https://archive.is/https://www.businessinsider.com/who-got-r... (Sam Altman had 9% ownership). Finally, PG has written multiple essays about how startups need to shoot for the moon. I have seen zero information come out from YC about median returns for founders, or an analysis of the $ earned against the time invested for the vast majority of founders (the ones that do not successfully start unicorns). Some light on this subject from YC would be welcome. Too much of the external YC writing is clearly self-serving while saying they help founders (the whole VC industry is like this though). I am in New Zealand so I have little experience with YC (watched one guy from here accept and flame out - but I had a bad signal about him anyway).