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"NFTs show relatively small groups of tens of thousands of people can work together collectively for a common good" - Garry Tan, 23 March 2022 https://x.com/g

"NFTs show relatively small groups of tens of thousands of people can work together collectively for a common good" - Garry Tan, 23 March 2022 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210 "If you own an NFT..." you are an innovator among innovators. - Garry Tan, 30 September 2021 [quote tweet] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450 Web3 vs Earlier incarnations technology adoption curve [image tweet] https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584 "airdrops going mainstream could truly upend some % of the centralized ad-based economy of Web2" - Garry Tan, 25 Dec 2021 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448 https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448

nextaccountic 10mo ago
When I see this kind of comment, I read it as a disclosure that he invested in crypto and NFTs
presentation 10mo ago
[flagged]
alephnerd 10mo ago
One of the our job responsibilities as VCs is to 1. Advertise our thesis by building a narrative 2. Evangelize our portfolio By posting a narrative (that most likely went through some form of Strategic Comms team) comparing Zoho against a vibe coded product while also showcasing some of YC's star vibe-coded products, Garry is able to both craft a narrative that helps support YC's portfolio as well as bring a couple of people to start thinking about Vibecoding. It also acts as an indirect attack on G-Suite without calling out a massive organization like Alphabet by name, which YC needs to coexist with because a large portion of YC portfolio companies will either be acquired by Alphabet or will take or have taken some amount of funding from Alphabet and Alphabet related personal, and Alphabet personal are LPs in YC. It doesn't matter if the take is right or wrong - it's started a discussion, and maybe one or two Zoho customers have now heard of a couple YC products to consider (outside of the HN bubble, very few people know about vibe coding or AI/ML). All businesses do this, and knowing Zoho, they will probably leverage this as well as a way to market data sovereigninty and "make in India" by raising the specter of the big bad American capitalist trying to undermine a bootstrapped Indian company. Anyhow, Zoho has built it's own foundation model [0] and offers an Agents marketplace for domain-specific agents [1]. I'm not sure if can compete head on against a LLaMa or DeepSeek on from sheer performance perspective, but it's good enough (something which a lot of engineers forget is more important than being perfect) to build a "data sovereignty" and "tech nationalism" story which they will absolutely run with as a result. [0] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html [1] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/ https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/
- noobermin 10mo ago
  The only thing about this constant discussion about the metas and what not is that clearly everyone knows this, so who is this supposed to be for? I'm a peanut gallery member here, not a VC or a person who needs to appeal to VCs honestly, but then you can take my opinion as an unbiased third party... I could have guessed 1 and 2 are were motives for this kind of talk. But...clearly everyone else who actually cares about this game because it affects their livelihood or money is already aware VCs do 1 and 2, and unless you're exceptionally impressionable, it wouldn't work on you, no? I have a theory but the primary one is not very flattering to those involved.
  - alephnerd 10mo ago
    > who is this supposed to be for 1. A number of media and substack articles about a Twitter beef that becomes a submarine article for Replit, Emergent Labs, and Taskade 2. A couple executives who may have not heard about these startups (this is actually very common outside the tech IC bubble) and will now ask their tech teams to contact them to see if they fit their needs 3. LPs who invested in YC by further reshoring Garry and YC's entire investment thesis. > it wouldn't work on you... It doesn't matter that it doesn't work on me - everyone does this form of narrative building (that's the entire point of Strategic Comms teams) so you have to play the game because that's how a Nash Equilibrium be. Building a zeitgeist is a core part of demand gen, and yea it is transparent and tacky, but even 1 conversion for what was basically 1 hour of drafting makes the RoI positive.
  - bgwalter 10mo ago
    It's for the press and the general public who don't really understand the tech. The hype can usually be sustained for around two years. The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI". This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.
    - 10mo ago
jmathai 10mo ago
Was it really just 4 years ago that NFTs were "the next big thing"? The tweets don't age well in hindsight but sometimes there are technologies which feel like they might break through but never do. Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.
- 4er_transform 10mo ago
  NFTs from first principles looked like a bad idea even then. They solved 0 problems. When a technology solves 0 problems, it’s doomed to fail.
  - IshKebab 10mo ago
    They solved the money laundering problem pretty well!
- nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago
  Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. It demonstrates an inability to differentiate between hype and utility. NFT's for real estate ownership, container tracking etc. could still have some form of utility. But what people think of when they hear NFT's isn't that, it's shitty monkey jpg's. NFT's were never the next big thing, except for a very specific subset of very gullible idiots.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
    > Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. I always thought that NFTs were completely ridiculous and essentially nothing but hype. But then again, I thought that amazon wasn't going to work either, when I was there building it, so I'm not sure that even in a given individual "good intuition for breakthrough innovation" is a unitary thing.
jm4 10mo ago
This guy is the Jim Cramer of tech CEO's. Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development. It's not like everybody is going to become a vibe coder and there won't be a need for SaaS or low code solutions. I think tech people overestimate the capability and willingness for the average Joe to vibe code or engage with technology beyond the minimum required.
- sixtyj 10mo ago
  People vibe code, for sure. But what are the results? Vibe coded apps without maintenance that nobody can repair as the code is such a nice mess…
  - rsynnott 10mo ago
    That happened with VB (and particularly with VBA), too.
  - kamaal 10mo ago
    >>apps without maintenance This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'. This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake. Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.
- palmotea 10mo ago
  > Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development [emphasis mine]. Visual Basic has never been well-regarded as a platform for "professional software development," so the analogy doesn't fit in that aspect.
BloondAndDoom 10mo ago
This is impressive in the worst way! There is a stark difference between original YC management and the current one. I just cannot believe someone who has such a limited understanding of the industry & tech can be the CEO of YC. Following a leader like Paul Graham is practically impossible (and rest of the founding team was surely very talented) but this is just horrible. Not sure if it matters whether he's good or bad in the short term, but after 5 years of this kind of management they'll absolutely lose their advantage. It's ironic how YC became the Google/Microsoft of its industry.
music4airports 10mo ago
Whoopsie! I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. Hmmmm... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 Looks like the entire thread was bumped down from 17th place to 130th. https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ >We moderate less, not more, when a story involves YC or a YC startup. This is pretty much the #1 rule of HN moderation. I've posted about it many times over 10 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- tomhow 10mo ago
  Moderators didn't touch (or see) this until later, and the only way we intervened was to turn off the flags and flamewar penalties. HN users flagged it and the flamewar (or signal vs noise) detector pulled it well off the front page before moderators knew anything about it. > I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. As dang wrote years ago [1], "Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through". But the real issue with this post is... there's nothing interesting or scandalous here, is there? Just someone (sure, our president) expressing opinions – which are all consistent with his business and investment activities. What's the issue? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978

nextaccountic 10mo ago

When I see this kind of comment, I read it as a disclosure that he invested in crypto and NFTs

presentation 10mo ago

[flagged]

alephnerd 10mo ago

One of the our job responsibilities as VCs is to 1. Advertise our thesis by building a narrative 2. Evangelize our portfolio By posting a narrative (that most likely went through some form of Strategic Comms team) comparing Zoho against a vibe coded product while also showcasing some of YC's star vibe-coded products, Garry is able to both craft a narrative that helps support YC's portfolio as well as bring a couple of people to start thinking about Vibecoding. It also acts as an indirect attack on G-Suite without calling out a massive organization like Alphabet by name, which YC needs to coexist with because a large portion of YC portfolio companies will either be acquired by Alphabet or will take or have taken some amount of funding from Alphabet and Alphabet related personal, and Alphabet personal are LPs in YC. It doesn't matter if the take is right or wrong - it's started a discussion, and maybe one or two Zoho customers have now heard of a couple YC products to consider (outside of the HN bubble, very few people know about vibe coding or AI/ML). All businesses do this, and knowing Zoho, they will probably leverage this as well as a way to market data sovereigninty and "make in India" by raising the specter of the big bad American capitalist trying to undermine a bootstrapped Indian company. Anyhow, Zoho has built it's own foundation model [0] and offers an Agents marketplace for domain-specific agents [1]. I'm not sure if can compete head on against a LLaMa or DeepSeek on from sheer performance perspective, but it's good enough (something which a lot of engineers forget is more important than being perfect) to build a "data sovereignty" and "tech nationalism" story which they will absolutely run with as a result. [0] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html [1] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/ https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/

noobermin 10mo ago
The only thing about this constant discussion about the metas and what not is that clearly everyone knows this, so who is this supposed to be for? I'm a peanut gallery member here, not a VC or a person who needs to appeal to VCs honestly, but then you can take my opinion as an unbiased third party... I could have guessed 1 and 2 are were motives for this kind of talk. But...clearly everyone else who actually cares about this game because it affects their livelihood or money is already aware VCs do 1 and 2, and unless you're exceptionally impressionable, it wouldn't work on you, no? I have a theory but the primary one is not very flattering to those involved.
- alephnerd 10mo ago
  > who is this supposed to be for 1. A number of media and substack articles about a Twitter beef that becomes a submarine article for Replit, Emergent Labs, and Taskade 2. A couple executives who may have not heard about these startups (this is actually very common outside the tech IC bubble) and will now ask their tech teams to contact them to see if they fit their needs 3. LPs who invested in YC by further reshoring Garry and YC's entire investment thesis. > it wouldn't work on you... It doesn't matter that it doesn't work on me - everyone does this form of narrative building (that's the entire point of Strategic Comms teams) so you have to play the game because that's how a Nash Equilibrium be. Building a zeitgeist is a core part of demand gen, and yea it is transparent and tacky, but even 1 conversion for what was basically 1 hour of drafting makes the RoI positive.
- bgwalter 10mo ago
  It's for the press and the general public who don't really understand the tech. The hype can usually be sustained for around two years. The press nearly always obliges in the first year. It works for wars and pandemics, too. In the second year the first dissenters begin to show up. We are now in past the stage of opinion reversal, where the press and the public mostly hate "AI". This is also why it is wrong to compare "AI" to the early Internet. After the Internet bubble burst, the public still liked the Internet.
  - 10mo ago

jmathai 10mo ago

Was it really just 4 years ago that NFTs were "the next big thing"? The tweets don't age well in hindsight but sometimes there are technologies which feel like they might break through but never do. Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.

4er_transform 10mo ago
NFTs from first principles looked like a bad idea even then. They solved 0 problems. When a technology solves 0 problems, it’s doomed to fail.
- IshKebab 10mo ago
  They solved the money laundering problem pretty well!
nyc_data_geek1 10mo ago
Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. It demonstrates an inability to differentiate between hype and utility. NFT's for real estate ownership, container tracking etc. could still have some form of utility. But what people think of when they hear NFT's isn't that, it's shitty monkey jpg's. NFT's were never the next big thing, except for a very specific subset of very gullible idiots.
- PaulDavisThe1st 10mo ago
  > Having been bullish on NFTs, which were never more than hype in the primary use case promulgated for them, is absolutely a strong argument against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation. I always thought that NFTs were completely ridiculous and essentially nothing but hype. But then again, I thought that amazon wasn't going to work either, when I was there building it, so I'm not sure that even in a given individual "good intuition for breakthrough innovation" is a unitary thing.

jm4 10mo ago

This guy is the Jim Cramer of tech CEO's. Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development. It's not like everybody is going to become a vibe coder and there won't be a need for SaaS or low code solutions. I think tech people overestimate the capability and willingness for the average Joe to vibe code or engage with technology beyond the minimum required.

sixtyj 10mo ago
People vibe code, for sure. But what are the results? Vibe coded apps without maintenance that nobody can repair as the code is such a nice mess…
- rsynnott 10mo ago
  That happened with VB (and particularly with VBA), too.
- kamaal 10mo ago
  >>apps without maintenance This is perhaps what most non-dev people don't get. Maintenance is a far more harder thing than building something. So you want to go slow when building things, not fast. Either way building things fast has been a solved problem for a while, people don't go fast not because we don't have tools, but there are other fairly valid reasons to go slow. This is true with so many other things outside of software. I guess its called 'haste'. This is true for most things. Especially where money and life are at stake. But Im guessing you could extend this to anything where reputation is at stake. Im guessing it doesn't apply to some start ups, but other wise every one is subject to this.
palmotea 10mo ago
> Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development [emphasis mine]. Visual Basic has never been well-regarded as a platform for "professional software development," so the analogy doesn't fit in that aspect.

BloondAndDoom 10mo ago

This is impressive in the worst way! There is a stark difference between original YC management and the current one. I just cannot believe someone who has such a limited understanding of the industry & tech can be the CEO of YC. Following a leader like Paul Graham is practically impossible (and rest of the founding team was surely very talented) but this is just horrible. Not sure if it matters whether he's good or bad in the short term, but after 5 years of this kind of management they'll absolutely lose their advantage. It's ironic how YC became the Google/Microsoft of its industry.

music4airports 10mo ago

Whoopsie! I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. Hmmmm... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3 Looks like the entire thread was bumped down from 17th place to 130th. https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ https://hnrankings.info/46120728/ >We moderate less, not more, when a story involves YC or a YC startup. This is pretty much the #1 rule of HN moderation. I've posted about it many times over 10 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846)

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
tomhow 10mo ago
Moderators didn't touch (or see) this until later, and the only way we intervened was to turn off the flags and flamewar penalties. HN users flagged it and the flamewar (or signal vs noise) detector pulled it well off the front page before moderators knew anything about it. > I thought HN policy is to moderate less, not more, when YC is involved. As dang wrote years ago [1], "Moderating HN less, however, does not mean not moderating at all—that would be a loophole you could drive a truck through". But the real issue with this post is... there's nothing interesting or scandalous here, is there? Just someone (sure, our president) expressing opinions – which are all consistent with his business and investment activities. What's the issue? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27321978