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I tend to think about this topic as an 'independence spectrum' where YCombinator seems to suggest your independence should be somewhere in the middle. The spec
by nadam 11y ago
I tend to think about this topic as an 'independence spectrum' where YCombinator seems to suggest your independence should be somewhere in the middle.
The spectrum is this:
Being an employee -> being a founder with no majority in the board of your own company -> being bootstrapped, full control
I remember when pg wrote the piece 'you weren't meant to have a boss' which was extremely heavily against 'being an employee', while this piece by Sam Altman seems to be against full control as an 'extreme case'. (For me it is not extreme at all, on the contrary, it is the most natural thing on earth, as natural as the examples in pg's piece about "you weren't meant to have a boss")
I symphathise with having full control, although I can see that you have to make compromises in life; (that's the reason I am an employee now, but at least I have full control in my side project :) )
- hawkice 11y agoI can't help but think that, even if YCombinator is the same it has always been, I honestly do not understand the culture they are trying to foster. Is it that you weren't meant to have a boss, or that smart investors make good bosses (have a whole group of them, even if it costs your company money). I have noticed the average programming chops of a YC founder has gone down a lot, and I thought that was a group core value, and remarkably close to mandatory. I hope YC is both a financial success and changes the lives of the founders in the program for the better. But it isn't something I would apply for anymore. I feel like, as someone who wasn't popular in school, but loved lisp, I am no longer part of the in-group, because I don't have experience with Finance or Sales.