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Some thoughts on my first YC Demo Day
- mkagenius 1y agoWhy is this top post on hn within one minute of posting?
- TZubiri 1y agoMaybe karma affects post visibility?
- sillyfluke 1y agoI'm guessing the speed with which it received its initial few votes. It's a threadbare article with little or no meat on the bone. So it is a little strange.
- mkagenius 1y agoIt had literally two votes. Anyway looks like I shouldn't have brought this issue up, getting downvoted
- sillyfluke 1y agoYeah, you're supposed to email hn instead of posting if you think it's an issue. I've seen 3 point new posts up near the top before so I assumed that's what it was. 2 points top of the page is pretty aggressive tho, it might have been a near instant upvote by someone who was interested in the topic.
- ge96 1y agoCarl Weathers
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI don’t know how or why, but I have seen this happen many times. Many of my submissions appear at the front within minutes of receiving 2-3 votes. I have no affiliation with YC, nor are my submissions.
- mkagenius 1y agoBruh, the amount of posts you are doing!
- Brajeshwar 1y agoI submit about 10-15 and sometimes up to 20 a day. I have developed a typical routine to submit articles. I tend to gather interesting links during the day, and when America’s West Coast wakes up, I submit them in batches of bursts over an hour or so before I retire for the day. https://brajeshwar.com/2023/hacker-news/ https://brajeshwar.com/2023/hacker-news/
- mkagenius 1y agoWow!
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoSounds more like a cattle auction than a place where partnerships are formed to deliver meaningful value to consumers.
- echelon 1y agoThis is market efficiency. That's the very definition of delivering meaningful value. The more efficient the capital allocation is, the greater the benefit to the whole market. The only weirdness is that these are companies led by founders with "personalities". That's a weird variable to correct for.
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoHow much more efficient is it to allocate capital to a group individuals who have been educated at institutions that produce an increasingly rigid type of thinker, who are all making the same hype driven products?
- echelon 1y agoThat's one type of signal and gradient. There are lots of others. One of the best is traction with paying customers. The great thing is that investment capital can try many strategies at once. As can innovation capital and labor. Collectively we are water, filling all the cracks. Marbles, exploring all the slopes and curves. The fitness gradients of the universe are all in front of us. Follow the ones that make sense and that pull at you. We're all programmed differently enough that the whole space is being sampled, even in the weird places, the well-worn yet unweildy paths, and the completely non obvious domains. The algorithm focuses energy when certainty crystalizes.
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoEverything you've said about humanity filling cracks and diving deeper into worthwhile problems is correct. I do have one question though-- how many YC25 companies have more than $1 million in revenue?
- soared 1y agohttps://billchambers.me/about/ https://billchambers.me/about/ This page on mobile made me laugh. But otherwise, makes sense - get rid off all the flash and this is what demo days/etc are about
- ecb_penguin 1y agoI didn't realize how poorly YC startups were managed until I joined one. It's mostly a ponzi scheme, where unprofitable companies pass their books off to non-technical investors that love hype. > 1 slide. 1 minute pitches. 1 speaker. This is why YC has such poor results. They're more interested in "1 slide" vs actual financials. > Vertical AI was all over the place. Cursor for X was also prevalent. No thought leadership at all.
- HPMOR 1y agoYC is very similar to a university. There is a small group of companies that create the reputation on which everybody lives. The results are extremely exponentially distributed. So yes, it makes sense you joining some arbitrary YC startup was a bad experience. The average performance of a YC company is __phenomenal__, the median performance is poor.
- ecb_penguin 1y ago> YC is very similar to a university No it's not. It's not even remotely comparable. > There is a small group of companies that create the reputation on which everybody lives Also called luck. YC investors cannot articulate what made them successful, or else they'd have better results. Universities have decades of sustained output. They are not comparable. > you joining some arbitrary YC startup was a bad experience I am at a YC unicorn. We are one of YC's most successful startups. > The average performance of a YC company is __phenomenal__ It absolutely is not. It doesn't even beat the SP500. The __vast__ majority of YC companies are unprofitable failures. You could flip a coin and beat YC.
- HPMOR 1y agoYou're wrong. YC's returns far exceed the returns of the S&P 500. This is why LP's throw money at YC's funds. And secondly, I've been through YC. It is very apparent after many many group office hours, which startups are likely to be in the 6% unicorn group and which are not. You are correct the vast majority of YC companies are failures. However this does not preclude that the *mean* of YC outcomes is very very good. If Bill Gates were in a room with me and my friends the MEAN net worth would be tens of billions of dollars, the median would be less than a $100k.
- pyb 1y ago"2 on 20" Am I understanding correctly? If every YC startup is shooting for a 20 million USD valuation, that's amazing. Even if not all will make it.
- HPMOR 1y agoNobody ever pays too much or too little for a startup. Because either you __really__ make it, or you don't. It is statistically more likely for your YC startup to be worth more than $1 billion, than it is to be acquired in a cash deal for $80mm. It is because of this fact that $2/22mm is not unreasonable. However, most of the hot companies during the batch will fetch $3-4mm/30-40mm valuation. The average raise during demo day is close to ~$3mm, the median <$800k.