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Ron Conway steps back as Y Combinator cuts team funding
- hayksaakian 14y agoHow is YC doing financially?
- btilly 14y agoYC is fine. Also I note that this is not YC money that is being cut back. This is YC asking outside investors to give YC companies less money up front before they have proven themselves.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kapilkale 14y agoVery well. From last year: http://ycombinator.com/nums.html http://ycombinator.com/nums.html
- rdl 14y agoThe other thing to remember is that YC is growing. Even if YC isn't getting any better at this despite lots of experience, bigger team, etc., they're investing in larger batches (even the most recent decline to <50 is still bigger than until W11). So, assuming a constant distribution of AirBnBs and Dropboxes and Herokus and Cloudkicks and Wufoos, there should be a lot of great companies still in play. (I think Stripe is clearly one of those; Parse and Meteor may be others).
- jnsaff2 14y agoIs there a list of failed/doomed YC startups? Maybe with some analysis?
- tokenadult 14y agoSome investors have more of a long-term perspective than others. Always the scary part of investing in early-stage startups has been the need to fund a lot of losers to cast a wide enough net to find the occasional winner. The main YC team will keep refining its procedures for searching out winners who haven't won yet, while screening out losers who won't win even with a YC investment, but that will always be an inexact art.
- 001sky 14y agosearching out winners who haven't won yet, while screening out losers who won't win even with -- Ad Hominem Investing. Also worth a second look, as a Thesis.
- akkartik 14y agoI didn't read it as "..won't _ever_ win.." At worst it means, "..are not ready yet."
- vidarh 14y agoIt comes across a bit harsh worded that way, but if you look at it purely from the point of view of a VC looking for a decent ROI, most of will be "losers" - most startups fails, and while many founders will try again and again and many will eventually make it, a large portion will never succeed at getting growth enough for an investor like YC to make a decent return. If it was meant as a personality judgement, then I agree with your assessment. But if you view it as purely a statement about their odds of success at present time, it's just business.
- 001sky 14y agoBut most startups fail because the product sucks. its not the people that "fail" in the market. The end-market could care less about "the people", in that sense. Its worth sanity checking even good heuristics, occasionally.
- jonathanjaeger 14y agoMakes sense -- that extra $70K or so probably isn't the deciding factor in seeing whether someone has a validated idea and product. Ron Conway probably stepped back in part because now EVERY company is a Ron Conway-backed company and that his backing doesn't have the same cachet as before.
- ghshephard 14y agoNovember 26 - see the full thread of comments on reduction of team funding and rationale behind it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861867 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4861867
- DanielRibeiro 14y agoMore comments on Pg's submission[1], and relevant HN discussion[2] [1] http://ycombinator.com/ycvc.html http://ycombinator.com/ycvc.html [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4833074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4833074
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jasonkolb 14y agoDoes it strike anyone else as odd that the context for this discussion revolves solely around the funding they're given, and that's the only barometer in this discussion? While I get that it's not the reason being given, it's hard not to infer that this pullback in funding is in some way related to the real-world success rate of recent YC companies.
- pg 14y agoDo you think I lied when I said we wanted the amount to be lower because $150k was causing messy disputes? To get the number down to $80k, I had to ask all the participants to invest less than they'd originally planned to. Among the YC partners there are still some who think the amount should be lower than $80k.
- kylec 14y ago$80k is still a lot more than the (iirc) initial $5k + $5k/founder.
- pg 14y agoThe $80k is not invested by YC. I get the impression from some of the threads about this that people don't realize that. YC still invests $11k + $3k per founder, as we've done for years. The $80k is a separate, additional investment offered by third parties.
- edanm 14y agoThe article definitely reads as though YC is, at the very least, completely in charge of this money. I know that it's not true, as do other older members, but I wouldn't be surprised if new members get the wrong impression.
- tptacek 14y agoThis is an 80k sight unseen investment conditioned solely on acceptance into a YC batch. YC controls it in the sense that they control the batches, but you could fund your own YCXC program that offered $x0,000 to each company in each YC batch. It would succeed or fail to the extent that individual YC companies, all of which completely control their own operations, decided to take you up on it.
- kapauldo 14y agoI wonder if there's more to the story. Conway has pulled his funding, they're cutting everyone's funding because a minority have fights when they break up. Doesn't add up.
- tomjen3 14y agoIt seems insane to cut the best investor out of the group - even if you want to reduce the total investment you still want the best people.
- hayksaakian 14y agoFrom TFA, it seems like he'll still be available for office hours, just not providing $$$
- nandemo 14y agoAre those investors advising startups individually at that stage?
- tomjen3 14y agoIt seems insane to cut the best investor out of the group - even if you want to reduce the total investment you still want the best people.