Has YC ever considered having a control group by randomly pre-accepting certain applicants into the program automatically? I'd be curious to see the stats on how successful that group would be versus the group that's actually picked by the committee.
We do talk about that every once in awhile, but the average company that applies to YC is not very good and thus the experiment would hurt the network (and be painful for us to work with).
What we've more seriously considered is randomly funding some companies just below the threshold.
Also, we do look at our ranking to see how companies at the top vs companies near the cutoff do. It's rare (but not unheard of) for a company very near the cutoff to be one of our most successful companies.
Can you elaborate on what makes a company "not very good"?
Would you ever consider releasing anonymized data on companies that apply and are accepted along with those who apply but aren't accepted into a batch? That'd give future applicants much more insight into the process.
EDIT: i should emphasize this is only my experience as a startup hiring manager. maybe YC attracts nothing but geniuses, i dunno. i'm just a guy on the internet.
since yc is obviously not going to talk shit on their own applicants, i'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that it's just like every other job application process when six figures (or more) of money is on the line. big paychecks attract plenty of, shall we say, 'aspirational' applicants.
1. apps where spelling and grammar is clearly not a priority (sure, i'll give you 5 figures a month to spell shit wrong)
2. the wrong kind of company will apply, i.e. a restaurant
3. bullshit artists gonna bullshit, even when they stink
4. people simply not smart enough to do the job. just plain dumb is a real thing, folks.
5. people with too little real world experience
6. really stupid ideas (who's to judge? well, the people with the money get to judge, that's sort of how applications work)
the fact that you can use the term 'anonymized data' in a sentence that actually makes sense is going to put you in the top 10% automatically - yes, the bar is that low when you're dealing with the general public. the trick is getting into the top 1% though. it's a power law distribution of difficulty.
every job advertisement attracts applications like these, and yc is basically just a really, really fancy and structured super-duper college/job application process combined, but for crazed entrepreneurs (like me). you are going to get a lot, maybe even mostly people on the left hand side of the normal distribution of iq, talent, and work ethic/experience. the easy thing is the dipshits and fakers are easy to spot-and-drop almost immediately. i can basically glance at a resume and disqualify it in 10-15 seconds if it's not good enough. you just can't bullshit someone far smarter, more experienced, and better at bullshitting than you. CAVEAT: there are extremely smart and experienced bullshitters out there though -- that's the real danger area. that's what you're really worried about.
basically the only thing you can count on is that they want your money!!
Oh wow. I wish they said that the bar was so low. I would like to apply as well if that's the case.
Edit: I still think the idea of Dropbox is pretty stupid and I wouldn't have given Drew Houston a penny if I was an investor. But I never thought the average application would be so far worse if Dropbox got funded and succeeded.
It's been a few years since I've reviewed applications, but yes, you should apply. Put it this way: if you simply (a) answer all the questions (b) coherently, you're well ahead.
You're making the mistake of judging the idea too much and forgetting that Drew Houston went to MIT, and had worked as a tech lead at a company. That already puts him in the top 10% of applicants, regardless of his idea.
I guess so. I, on the other hand went to a state school and my work experience is working on fairly straightforward line of business applications. I am not so much criticizing Dropbox as much as I'm making fun of my own lack of vision.
when in doubt, ask for what you want. that's what all the unqualified people are doing, so you might as well do it too.
the most uncommon and valuable skill in the world is for a smart person to willingly put themselves in a position where they could easily fail, or be ridiculed. dumb people do this all the time. this is an advantage to being dumb. you have no ego to lose. nor much of anything else.
that is the cross-section of intelligence and success. just look in the mirror for an example.
and for what it's worth, if you think dropbox is a tepid idea, just consider slack. enterprise irc with history and attachments. worth billions. there's more to it than just a cool idea. the example i always use is: i've got a great idea. let's build a time machine. it'll be great!
A lot of the not very good companies don't have a business plan, aren't organized very well, have issues, are in it for the money but lack experience and skills. They need a lot of help just to get better and I guess they don't have what it takes to get funded.
You don't want to fund a company that doesn't know what they are doing and needs a lot of help to get to that level where they do get funded.
But that is a startup opportunity to help these awful companies get better so they can get funded and then pay the mentors money for the training.
I'm sure they get coffee shops and pizza places apply as well that don't qualify but want to do some sort of cybercafe in their store.
This is a phenomenon referred to by various terms, including the Dunning-Kruger Effect and several colloquialisms (like "you don't know what you don't know").
The short version is that there is an inverse relationship between actual and perceived skill. In general, the better someone is at something, the less they rate themselves relative to their peers.
This is a big problem when recruiting people for skilled positions. The best applicants assume that they won't be good enough and don't apply. The newest applicants have no reservations about applying and assume that they are qualified for anything, kind of like someone who graduates with a BS in CompSci and thinks it means he knows everything about being a professional programmer before he's even ever held a real programming position.
Joel Spolsky discusses this too! I can't seem to find the post right now, though. The gist is that he was encouraging good developers to apply to Fog Creek, because he noticed that a lot of developers he would have liked to hire were intimidated about applying there, as he had previously discussed things like dismissing non-amazing candidates, how rare it is for good people to be on the market, and the extensive perks his company extended to its developers (like an office with a door that shuts). The good people read these posts and automatically filtered themselves out, no doubt comparing against their idealized version of what they'd like themselves to be, emphasizing the gaps and flaws that they know are in their resume, instead of the reality of the applicant field, the competence of which most good people grossly overestimate.
There's another cheesy colloquialism that I think encompasses this well: "you're comparing your behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel". We use ourselves as the reference point for understanding others, but the intimacy we have with our own thoughts and failings can cause us to forget that they're not as big as they seem. We should be cautious before allowing ourselves to be intimidated by others, bearing in mind that we only see a small snippet of the picture.
>You seem pretty sure about this. How would you validate that belief? What are the consequences if you're wrong?
The thing about saying no is that it's a lot less risky than saying yes, in terms of damage potential, not necessarily in terms of "lost upside" (which IMO is something that rarely merits consideration). If you pass on a good candidate, they will move on and find another home that works for them; no harm, no foul, so one doesn't need to feel bad about admitting that the person is skilled, but just not a good fit.
If you bring someone on board and they turn out bad, they can and often do cause substantial harm to the company/org. Once they're there, they have access to everything they need to wreak havoc, and as I'm sure you know, malicious intentions unfortunately aren't really necessary to cause problems. Big issues for your company can be caused by simple incompetence.
Joel Spolsky discusses this in his essay on interviewing [0]. It's just much safer to let the candidates that aren't enthusiastic yesses go than take a gamble and lose.
>Also, why you no use capitalization? It makes your post read dumb.
I don't really mind this, but I do think this is noteworthy since he specifically called out spelling and grammatical errors as disqualifiers. I assume in reality, he's forgiving of personal quirks or typos, and means that he rejects candidates out of hand who appear genuinely unable to spell or properly utilize much of the industry's vernacular.
I recall pg previously stating that there was no correlation between how close to the cutoff an accepted candidate was and how well they ended up doing. Now Sam says the opposite. I can't find the original quote now and this was when PG was still in charge, so they probably have improved their interviewing process and collected more data since.
I can second this. I worked for a similar unnamed incubator company in the Bay Area and a vast majority of the ideas sent to us were from good-hearted people, but absolutely ludicrous and—at least from our opinion—would never be able to become successful businesses. Some people just really seem to have problems understanding product-market fit.
My guess would be that applicants to Y-Combinator are probably along the same spectrum–some great ideas, some decent ideas, and a lot of junk inbetween.
If they don't answer just watch a few seasons of Shark Tank or Dragon's Den (any country). I highly doubt there's much different in business nut-bar factors. Some people just have no grasp (yet) of what it takes to get good.
Yeah. The way a person communicates tells you a lot about their ability to lead a company. Most people would pitch us ideas and we wouldn't even vaguely get a sense of what they were trying to sell—native english speakers too. Not surprising at all—but people who had chances to get funding were those who were clear & concise. Those who's pitches who we didn't understand immediately were for the most part mentally discarded and never acted upon by us.
There are plenty around - one example where I live is a very persistent chap with some sort of mystical flying machine based on garbage physics and a track record including fraud by scamming investors.
Or another idea along these lines might be to have a checkbox on the application that says "Submit to audience choice if rejected" and, if they don't get in, those applications are opened to voting by HN users above a certain karma threshold. Pick the five highest ranked applications and bring them in as a normal YC company.
Aren't you afraid that something like that can be easily gamed? Or maybe voting can be limited to accounts that are 2-3+ years old and/or Karma greater than n.
I like this. An alternative would be to have borderlines ranked by those who got into YC in the current round or in past rounds. Top peer ranked would get in just under the cutoff. HN sounds even more exciting (probably couldn't include the whole application, maybe just a company description -- although that might not be something people are comfortable with). Either way, I wonder if there is any peer non-YC consideration.
If the thought is that randomly selected start-ups might possibly outperform hand-picked ones, then I suppose anyone with a few million $$$ laying around is free to test that hypothesis. If true you could make bank!
Hi Sam.
Will you consider a batch in other US locations? (For example in Atlanta).
It can increase the applicant base due to lower cost of living and will allow a different flavor of founders to apply in my opinion.
I think the next billion $ enterprise startup will be more likely to come from such a batch. People who face enterprise software problems are not always in a stage in life that allows them to move to SF for a few months. YC might be missing out a large cohort of founders who work in enterprise software, outside of the Bay Area, and would disrupt their industry given the chance but are less flexible in moving to SF.
There are many "old tech" hubs outside SF that can generate great new startups. medical IT, medical devices, mechanical and aviation industry, enterprise software etc. Are Enterprise software ideas and founders with years of enterprise software experience adequately represented at YC?
Hey Sam, where do I apply for YC basic income? : ) Many people have no problems in life except those related to not having enough dough.
I know a number of really creative/talented individuals who would be a lot better off if they didn't struggle to feed/house themselves. People who contribute to open source, build art projects and love to share knowledge. Definite contributors to society and the betterment of their fellow man.
Have you ever considered just letting people to apply for YC for a few years of basic income. The individuals that I'm thinking of would contribute more to society if given basic income than in any other situation I can imagine. (Many of them bay area locals, if you want to interview a few in person). Driven to create but stifled by various real and/or self imposed restrictions.
The problem with this is that 1) YC is not a charity (though they do fund some nonprofits) 2) there's no generic, legal way to buy equity in people (https://www.quora.com/Can-you-buy-human-shares)
Not that way -- but in most states, an employer can claim ownership of an employee's business ideas.
You could do it formally with a contract: the employee is part-time, salaried, and assigns 49% ownership of new intellectual property to the employer, with a mutual right to match bids for the other's share.
The comments have made me reconsider my question. I also saw the article about a YC basic income experiment.
Have you considered structuring the experiment in terms of creating a intentional basic income community? An example fitting my bohemian ideals would be: Funding a group of people by providing a place to live (warehouse) and a monthly stipend for food and fun stuff and seeing where they end up after a few years?
I have PTSD from looking for a programming job for a decade (first thing you are supposed to do to overcome it is.... remove the stressor from your life??) Maybe they could just hook us up with some basic jobs.
What is your plan for AI safety, and how does OpenAI fit into it?
In http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2 you laid out sensible requirements and safeguards we should demand of late-stage AI development when it gets further along. But OpenAI's founding statement seems to have baked in a mission and vision that's incompatible with those safeguards, requiring immediate sharing of breakthroughs even if the technologies required to use them safely aren't ready yet. That founding statement used to have the word "safely" in it, but this was edited out without any sort of announcement or comment, and, to the best of my thirdhand-rumor knowledge, OpenAI is not currently doing any safety-related research.
We're still working through this--it turns out to be a research problem in itself.
We talk about it a lot, and I'm working on a post about it (for example, we may not share intermediate breakthrough that we think pose major safety risks), but I've been much busier than expected the last few months and haven't gotten to it yet.
What can a run-of-the-mill technical person do to help?
We know that super-AI is more likely than not to be existentially dangerous. It would be remiss to foresee the apocalypse and assume someone else will fix it.
So I've been working diligently for the last few weeks putting the final edits on my application to YC. I'm 68 years old an the only founder. On the positive side I've got almost 50 years of work in the project that defines the state of the art.
Am I wasting my time in applying considering my age and singleness?
I'm not sure if there are solo founders over 50 who were at YC but some individuals who are cofounders are. Dr John Slough of Helion for example.
I've got similar issues myself. Perhaps cofounders are the answer.
Maybe we can take inspiration from Rose Blumkin, founder of the Nebraska Furniture Mart who sold the store to Warren Buffett and then after arguments with her family left in a huff and set up a rival called Mrs. B's Clearance and Factory Outlet across the street at age 95. It became profitable and was Omaha's third-largest carpet outlet before Buffett bought that too.
You haven't let anything stop you yet, so why would a negative answer from Sam stop you?
With that in mind, what's the point of asking the question? There's nothing to be gained by asking, and potentially something to be lost (displaying lack of confidence).
For my part, I've had "entrepreneurial spasms" as a solo founder and it's been a terrible idea for me. This is because I'm a terrible procrastinator. I need a schedule-oriented person to keep me in check / act as the rudder to my "powerful engine".
Hey Sam, semi technical question here. NIPS, ran an experiments a few years ago where for 10% of the papers they had two completely independent teams of reviewers assess papers and score them - the agreement between the teams was very low: http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html (barely better than chance, actually).
Would you consider doing something similar for YC? Obviously, you already have multiple people looking at websites/applications, but I'd be really curious to see what the agreement is like - and you have some absolutely exception AI/data scientists people at openAI who could crunch all the numbers.
We have multiple people review each application (except the very good/very bad ones) and we look at the cases where the assessments are very different.
Some of the best companies have the most disagreement, which is why we have implemented our "strong yes" policy--if any single partner wants to fund a company, we fund it. It's much more important to our returns that we fund the next Airbnb than if we mistakenly fund one more bad company.
This is a really uninformative answer. Every peer reviewed conference/journal also does this. The NIPS study was special because they did more. They ran a controlled experiment to determine the exact variance in acceptance rates and then published the results. The GP was asking you to repeat the NIPS experiment.
They're in different business. NIPS needs to minimise the amount of really bad papers they accept. YC needs to maximise the amount of really good companies they fund.
Allegations are circling the web that a side effect of the (also alleged) startup bubble is that there are more good founders than good ideas. The purported effect is to water down the societal value of the products and services that are produced by companies exiting accelerators and incubators.
A few obvious counter arguments come to mind right away, such as YC's startups in fusion energy and non-profits like Watsi. If I could, I'd Google up a histogram of funded startup business models as granular as 'restaurant food delivery' or 'pre-packaged home cooked meals' and see where the ideas are concentrated.
What is your opinion on the aggregate? Does YC have any formal or informal policies aimed at balancing the mix of weighty vs. frivolous businesses?
Some of the most important startups start out looking incredibly ambitious. Others start out looking incredibly trivial, but with users that are in love with their product.
I'm working on a piece about universal basic income, and I have the following summary of the how I think that many tech people like yourself believe UBI is going to work:
1. Companies innovate by doing things more cheaply with automation than human workers can do them.
2. As a result of automation, the more efficient companies reap all the profits in a market as they drive the less efficient companies out of business (and the humans out of jobs).
3. This bonanza of profits that automation yields is taxed.
4. The taxes from the accumulated wealth of the winners -- wealth that, again, exists because the winning companies' machines were able to do things more efficiently than the losing companies' human laborers -- go toward paying the laid-off laborers a basic income.
> This bonanza of profits that automation yields is taxed.
Optimizing companies will do everything possible to avoid the corporate taxes (>60%) required to make universal basic income a reality. If you are assuming that winning companies are the best at implementing automation and reducing cost, it is a fatal mistake to assume that they will suddenly become charitable when it comes to wealth redistribution - no, they will "win" because they optimize every single aspect of their balance sheets. They'll move their capital offshore where it will be taxed at a fraction of the US rate. They'll pay lobbyists to make sure tax loopholes stay open, and that the wealth accretes to the few at the top of the company who run the business. This is simply the nature of capitalism. If you allow a few companies to gain too much power, they will abuse that power. That is why we have a government that does an OK job of breaking up monopolies, creating anti-trust laws, regulating risk-taking, etc.
> taxes from the accumulated wealth of the winners...go toward paying the laid-off laborers a basic income
What about the people who never had a job? Those born into a society where they are not needed for labor? UBI for everyone creates a large misdirection of resources that perpetuates the problem of too many people, too few jobs, social unrest. We have solved this problem in the past through war, which stimulates the economy through government spending, reduces excess labor (especially young, angry, dangerous men), reignites nationalism and social cohesion (against a common and clearly evil enemy such as Hitler), and realigns national incentives towards R&D and infrastructure investment. I am not advocating for war, merely making an observation. Does UBI get distributed to everyone who is unemployed, or only those who are laid off from jobs?
I encourage you to examine the concept of "helicopter money" and study the incentive structures it creates and why we haven't truly implemented it before during tough economic times.
It is a job of the government to counteract destabilizing influences such as the wealth concentrating effects of technology and under-competition. As a foreigner living in the US, the US government honestly sucks eggs at it. Healthcare, banks, cable, broadband, cell phone service, Google, Apple, Microsoft... all classic antitrust cases across the board, waiting for an un-captured regulator.
If world governments continue to fail also at corporate tax, the current dystopic situation of regressive effective corporate tax rates through profit export will persist, and risks everything we have gained through capitalism and democracy.
I encourage you to read the definition of UBI. Universal means you give to everyone, from the homeless guy on the street, to Bill Gates. Not just laid off people. Also, your top-of-head speculations are not the best evidence available for its effects.
A Universal Basic Income is not necessarily paid to everyone, at least not directly. A UBI means a certain income level is guaranteed, if you are earning more than the guaranteed level, you may not be given anything in addition. This is most clearly demonstrated by one proposed implementation of UBI, namely, a negative income tax. A negative income tax would entail those earning below the guaranteed level being paid enough to raise their income to the guaranteed level. Those earning more than the guaranteed level are taxed.
Negative Income Tax is pretty much the only implementation of UBI I personally could get behind. I just wouldn't be able to support an implementation of a UBI that pays Bill Gates the same amount as a person born with a severe disability (which obviously they had no choice about being born with).
It wasn't Bill Gates' choice to be born without a disability. Honestly, I despise your opinion. Bill Gates pays so much more in taxes that a basic income would hardly matter to him. It's just part of his tax calculation: X% - UBI. It's nothing to us either. There aren't many Bill Gates out there. Also, in this way nothing needs to be measured. It's simply: Are you human? Here's your UBI. Do you have income? Here's how much you owe in taxes.
The system for everyone should be the same. It's simpler and more fair. Bill Gates deserves to know that if he lost it all tomorrow we would take care of him. We can make one system that ensures everyone is cared for. The sickly and the ambitious. I don't think we have the proficiency necessary to keep people from falling through the cracks otherwise. Maybe in very specific cases (like Bill Gates) but not at scale. There are disabilities that exist that we don't even know about yet.
I won't argue about definitions, except to say I am following [1], and suggest you do the same (because it is a use of words that matches their general meanings, not because it is there).
Unless taxation and reporting are made trivial (which is hard without giving up on privacy including cash), the poorest do not have the money or time to jump through hoops. Hence UBI, having the minimal requirements, will help the most of the poorest. This more than compensates for the (arguable, but I'll concede it) bug of giving some money to the rich as well.
>A Universal Basic Income is not necessarily paid to everyone, at least not directly. A UBI means a certain income level is guaranteed, if you are earning more than the guaranteed level, you may not be given anything in addition.
Well that is fucked up? They dont call it a "UNIVERSAL" basic income.
Yeah let's give a basic income to EVERYONE, EXCEPT ... that makes 0 sense. You just described wellfare really.
Universal or bust. Everyone or no-one imo. It's a universal basic income afterall. Not a conditional basic income.
> wealth that, again, exists because the winning companies' machines were able to do things more efficiently than the losing companies' human laborers
Losing companies also produce wealth, perhaps even more so, because e.g. they didn't spend enough on advertising. However, in this winner-takes-all economy, the losers have to give up.
All wealth does not exist only because of winning companies.
You're missing alternative opportunities created by 1, 2, and 3. For example, wage insurance, a negative income tax, or state-funded retraining.
You're also missing other big upside to UBI. For example, if people can be more sure that they won't be reduced to destitution if the quit there 9-5 to work on a passion project, they will be more likely to do that. More people taking more bets on passion projects means more opportunities for explosively successful companies.
It's likely that any cost advantage that the innovators have will be short lived as competitors follow suit or one-up them. Competition will erode the profit advantage and in the end, the consumers will benefit.
It would be interesting to see an analysis not just of automation and robotics putting pressure on employment, but the effect of same on consumer prices and cost of living.
UBI has to pay enough for health and dental insurance so in case something happens they can pay the bills.
If you pay a small amount of money to live on and they can't afford insurance and they get sick they can't afford the bills.
I myself am on disability and filed chapter 13 bankruptcy due to medical bills. It ruined my credit and now I have dental that doesn't cover my root and gum scalings and I have a cadaract forming in my left eye and can't afford surgery. I might even end up homeless as a result. I used to be a programmer until I got too sick and had to quit.
Disability is like basic income but it only pays what your FICA contrubuted to it. The more you pay into it the more you get if you become disabled.
Also working on challenges and projects mean nothing if you have no money to market them and get investors. Esp if you can't afford a good computer or a web server. Get stuck with cheap ones that are limited.
I'd love to apply, but I'm on a H1-b visa and I'm basically in prison. How did the other international founders you worked with get around the immigration mess to start a company?
Find a great lawyer and have them use your startup Delaware corp as sponsor for your H1B. It's like moving employers. You may need to move $$$ into the company to demonstrate there is enough money to meet your minimum wage category and few other hoops. Alternatively apply for an investors visa but this will mean more capital injection into your US entity and more of those hoops to jump. Happy to talk offline. I'm no lawyer but have been through few Visas and similar scenario to yours. PS. There is no prison ;-)
As a Canadian, I'd suspect entering the US under a TN visa (Free trade agreement if you have an applicable university degree or 10 years experience) would probably do it. Anybody have experience with that when attending YC?
For TN you need a job offer. Specifically, when you try to enter the US on the TN status (it's not a visa technically), you'll be asked to show an offer letter from a US company that clearly states your intended role and salary.
Obviously YC can't enter into NDAs with applicants but can you shed a little bit of light on what YC does to protect the applicants' business ideas?
Some might be discouraged from applying because they fear if the idea is interesting (but not the team or there's another reason it's not accepted) that someone from within YC or a related ecosystem might just take the idea and look at the product so far and decide to just do it themselves (but obviously with more resources, connections, etc and obviously holding more equity).
Honestly, we are so busy, there are so many companies, and ideas are worth so little, that most of us don't think twice about a specific company once we move on to the next applications.
The very best ideas usually don't seem worth stealing.
"ideas are worth so little" .. that's a very broad and dangerous statement for you to make given that people might want to tell you things in confidence.
Obviously, if you have IP, dont apply at YC because they don't think it's worth anything.
An idea is "self-driving cars." IP is how to make it happen. I'd venture to say that it's tough to communicate all of IP during a short application process.
If an idea is a good business opportunity, it's common for multiple people to be working on it independently at the same time. It's also common for many people to fail working on that very idea before you get to it.
One of the values of VCs and networks and experts is that they can tell you how other companies in your space have failed (running out of money, founder breakups, "people won't pay for it", "it really needs X but X doesn't scale", etc.).
If you watch the start-up space for long enough you start seeing multiple teams with the "same idea" but only a handful succeed at it; even at small a scale as university incubators.
There are a number of ways to think about this, but one of them comes from "design thinking", which advocates processes like brainstorming in order to generate and sort ideas before starting a project. This is in contrast to what I sometimes think of as the "natural" or "naive" approach to starting a project, where you might spend time searching for "an idea", and when you've found "the idea", you begin executing. Turns out, methods of ideating reveal that a single person or a group of people can easily come up with thousands of good ideas in a matter of hours. After participating in these sorts of activities, I find it impossible to assign much value to an idea. The actual value, or lack thereof, only reveals itself much later and involves many more factors than the initial concept.
Here's another one: what is an idea? Typically it is a sentence expressing a business proposition, or the essential functioning of a technology. But is it the same "idea" no matter who utters it? I think it's pretty clear that an idea is actually short-hand for a 'space of experience' held by the person saying it. In this sense, it's actually not possible to "steal" an idea, because ideas are linked to the people who have them, and because were someone to try, they would find that they can steal the sentence that refers to the actual idea, but lack the perspective to unlock the true meaning.
Either way, this is a meme in the startup industry, and very true in my experience. Do not fixate on ideas: nobody can steal them and/or they are not important in the first place.
If ideas worth something, then an idea would be a commodity being traded among people in markets. Since there isn't a market where people trade ideas with something else, like money, there simply isn't a market for ideas. Hence, ideas are worth nothing.
Most markets are for items there are many of. There are lots of apples, people see friends enjoying them, people buy one, like it, buy another, a price is established. Key facts: you get to buy it more than once, more than one person gets to buy it, you can tell in advance it is worth something. Take too many of those away, and the market goes away.
An idea (for a venture) is: unique (a close variant missing a key part has completely different value), you would not pay for it twice, and selling it to multiple people diminishes its value. Why would you think the value of an idea would be well captured in a market?
You do realize a market is just one mechanism for expressing value, right? or is air value-less?
I don't buy this; I think starting off in the right market is a huge determinant of success.
The reason there's no market is because it takes an idea and a person who can execute -- knowledge, skills, connections, experience, etc. Ideas aren't separable from people in a way that would make a market possible.
Obviously it depends a bit on the details but if you think of the big hits, saying say Alta Vista is crap let's build a better search engine or Myspace is crap let's build a better one of those wasn't worth much for the basic ideas because hundreds of people no doubt thought that. Now the detailed algorithms may have been worth something. But it's mostly in the actually building the better thing that counts.
I guess knowing which ideas are good would be valuable. If someone had said you'd make a fortune doing myspace with real names and no flashing nonsense that would have been useful but just having a list of a 1000 ideas with no testing is probably not worth much.
Does anyone other than those evaluating applications (i.e. YC staff) have access to these applications, the ideas they contain or any prototypes which may have been submitted?
Sam, this conception of an "idea"
is in astoundingly strong
conflict with the conceptions of ideas elsewhere in business and national security that are commonly
strongly and seriously protected as classified national security secrets (e.g., how stealth works, how the engines on the SR-71 worked, the details of the Navy's version of GPS), intellectual property, trade secrets, patents, how academic honors are awarded, e.g., the Abel prize, the Nobel science prizes, the Fields Medal, the Clay Math prizes, and more.
"The very best ideas usually don't seem worth stealing."
You are actually citing examples of execution excellence and IP, rather than "ideas" as the word is used in early stage VC circles. For example the idea of making a low radar cross section aircraft is not new or valuable since right after radar was first developed. However executing on that idea to create the stealth fighter design produces something very valuable.
But how to create stealth took some darned good "ideas".
Sure, the startup "circles" regard an idea as a short description of a sentence or
two to a family member, neighbor, or prospective user/customer of how the new product/service will look to them.
But, then what about how to make that product/service work? Ignore that? That part should be crucial: Crucial
for having the first good or a much better product/solution,
a technological advantage and barrier to entry,
etc. That "idea" could take
original research, be regarded as
valuable intellectual property and protected as a trade secret,
etc.
Sure, the user/customer need
not be aware of that "idea" maybe in the internals of the product/service.
Then to say
"The very best ideas usually don't seem worth stealing."
ignores the crucial, core ideas, say, the details of the coating (likely highly classified and from a lot of R&D) and shape (again
from a lot of R&D, and
Maxwell's equations computations, likely
challenging and classified) that were key to stealth.
Or, here's an "idea": A safe, effective, cheap one pill taken once to cure any cancer. Sure that "idea" is just pie in the sky and worthless. But to create such a pill will take one heck of a good idea. To me it is just such good ideas that
should be central in information technology
startups. It sounds like
Sam is neglecting that
any such ideas are possible,
relevant, valuable, or important. Or, to me, an
idea for an algorithm that
shows that P = NP is astounding, and astoundingly valuable -- implement it on
a server and behind a lot of
security and just sell the
results, say, anyone who
wants to send in any
integer linear programming
problem, that is, any of
the thousands of important
real world examples of
NP-complete problems.
Actually the shape of the f-117 came out of computations based on publicly published work. A Skunk works engineer was skimming through obscure russian math papers when he came across it by chance. 'Skunk Works' by Ben Rich
I am firmly on your side in regards ideas, but I think the problem is we are not all meaning the same thing by what is an idea. If your idea is crap (uber for x) then the only thing that matters is execution. If your idea is good then it is very valuable independent of execution.
My favourite pure good idea with enormous value has to be the Kelly criterion [1].
I lost money (luckly not too much) in the stock market on a position where I was right and I didn't know why. I decided to find out and I learned that the size of my trade was larger than the Kelly criterion.
The Kelly criterion seems to not be well known - why I can't say other than there are a lot of groups that benefit from people being ignorant of it.
(e.g., how stealth works, how the engines on the SR-71 worked, the details of the Navy's version of GPS)
None of these are "ideas", they are implementations/executions of ideas. They are the result of trial and error (even thought-experiments) that ultimately resulted in real world impact and observable changes. Ideas are unexpressed potential. How the Navy's version of GPS works isn't valuable until after the Navy starts using it. Before that, it's just conjecture. But at the point where the Navy deploys GPS, while it is information, it's not solely an idea; it's pragmatic.
Even knowledge of a newfangled GPS system the Navy is working on or going to deploy and start using on a certain date isn't an idea anymore: it's actionable information that can be traded on. An idea is a kind of information, but not all information is an idea. And while thoughts can be information, not all thoughts are ideas.
That being said, I think you are partially right: the concept of an idea not having value is unintuitive, and a lot of other industries are commonly in the habit of presenting ideas as having value. You'll see this when people talk about patents, as if having a patent somehow conveys value on the thing that is patented beyond just the government enforced exclusivity. A patented idea that can not be brought to market in some fashion isn't that valuable (and actually has negative value: not only is it not brought to market; without bringing it to market, you can not reap the benefits of exclusivity; and you've paid for obtaining the right to a patent you are unable to exploit. So it's a net negative).
I totally get your meaning, but it could discourage potential applicants/newbies to startups. Could be misread as you not being open to their ideas (though of course I know you just mean execution is almost everything!)
Education-wise, are you able to describe the percentages of applicants with backgrounds coming from top schools versus lower-tier schools?
Being in the Bay Area, I know that Stanford and UC Berkeley tend to have a decent amount of relatively successful launches/founders, but on the other hand I can't say I hear nearly as much about people who went to San Francisco State or San Jose State (or any other lower-tier schools that are not just located in SF Bay Area).
If there is a large enough discrepancy, do you have any ideas of ways to jumpstart or spark other educational communities to have a greater focus on trying out ideas, especially with YC (or other programs)?
Personally, I'm finishing studying at San Jose State and while there is an Entrepreneurship Club, the focus for that side of things (at least from what I've seen) tends to stay purely on the Business college end, rather than other potential high-impact areas (aside from the occasional mobile app here and there).
We looked at our data here last year--we fund founders from a very wide variety of schools, and no school at all, but many of our most successful founders went to 'top schools' and thus it's easy to get the mistaken impression we select for that.
In a way we do, in that it's one (of many) examples for someone doing something impressive in the past. We definitely look for founders who have shown some evidence of doing something impressive (and we try to adjust for whatever life circumstances people were born into).
But the main reason we don't is that there are important counterexamples in our portfolio, and if we said "we're only going to fund founders from top schools" we'd miss out on some big successes.
I wasn't suggesting that you should only fund founders from top schools, but that you should select for it (which it sounds like you already do).
The pedigrees of some of YC's most successful founders, for anyone who's curious:
* Twitch: Yale, MIT
* Cruise: MIT, Claremont McKenna
* OMGPOP: Princeton
* Heroku: UCSD
* Airbnb: RISD, Harvard
* Dropbox: MIT
* Zenefits: Harvard
It's interesting that Stanford and Berkeley are not represented here, probably because good companies founded by students there can easily get funded without going through YC. It seems like YC's strength lies in drawing elites from the rest of the country to SV.
Thanks for the additions. Don't know much about RethinkDB, but as for the others:
Reddit is a great example of founders without pedigree. Although it hasn't been too successful as a company, it's created phenomenal value for its users. I definitely spend more time on Reddit than Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter combined.
I'd say Waterloo is elite in the tech sense, and Apoorva worked at Amazon in fulfillment, so it made a lot of sense in the specific case of Instacart.
Mixpanel was being advised by Max Levchin from before they applied to YC. He became their first big customer and helped them with every funding round, and probably put in a good word with YC when they applied[0]. Another YC alum, Amplitude, which is founded by MIT grads, is now giving Mixpanel a run for their money[1,2]. I don't know Suhail or Tim, but I can't imagine the average ASU dropout's experience would be anything like theirs.
When was the last time you built a billion dollar company? Conrad's resignation doesn't change the fact that he has accomplished a hell of a lot more in his professional life than 99.9% of people ever have or will.
Hi Sam, when I applied to YC a while back (2014 I think), I noticed that the video I posted was looked at once after 12am, and the landing page on my website was opened at something like 1am for 10 seconds. With the amount of applications you guys receive that seems inevitable, but it also seems that you would miss a lot of stuff if the reviewers are checking things well into the night. Have you made some progress on that front since?
Many of us (myself included) go to a nice hideaway somewhere far from the bay area to read applications so we can concentrate. So I wouldn't pay much attention to the timestamp. That said, given the volume of applications we receive and the relatively small size of our partnership, we do have to spend a regrettably short amount of time on each application.
I've heard similar results before, and as a judge for another incubator which doesn't get near the application numbers as YC, I'll give you my two cents.
I wouldn't be to concerned on timestamps. I'd look more at time on site and time on video.
The video has to get to the point quickly and present your ideas. If I'm 15-20 seconds in and you haven't clearly stated your business, and I didn't get an instant understanding of it from your application, I'll probably stop watching the video, assuming that I'm not going to get anything more out of it.
If I decide to keep watching the video, I actually just listen to it while I'm reviewing the rest of the application.
Then I'll go on to the website if there is one. First off judgement of website will again be - is it clear why this exists, will a new user/customer/target get why they are here. What am I looking to get from the website? Can I find it, can I get more info.
I doubt I spend more than 30 seconds on an applicants website, but that isn't a dig, or even a negative. Go to any site like of a not yet publicly available product, try this test with google brillo https://developers.google.com/brillo/, set a watch and check out how much time you spend on the site. 30 seconds is a long time. 10 seconds is enough to get it and judge favorably or otherwise.
I've applied for the latest round of YC and was very surprised to see my video was watched for the full 2-minutes. I went over time, but explained everything up front (I think). At the same time, it's possible the video just played in the background while the judge moved on to other things and ignored it...
When YC started, it was so small that PG and Jessica knew everyone's names and could invest a lot of time and effort into making the startups successful. One complaint as YC gets bigger is that there is more "Fast food advice", i.e. there are so many startups that a partner can't hardly remember all of them and we both know that most often than not the devil is in the details. What's YC plan to make sure this doesn't happen as it continues to grow stronger? I assume getting more partners on board is definitely one, and having special group for certain verticals (i.e. biotech or hardware). Any other plans? Thanks for the AMA
The main thing is that we shard YC into small internal groups. I know all the startups in my group in the batch well, and very little about the startups in other groups.
I think in an interview pg talked about this. IIRC they tried using a sharding approach and failed, and instead just came up with mini YC silos(partners get grouped and handle a group of companies)
One of the problem about the bay area is housing. If YC continues to make successful companies this problem is going to get worse. Does YC have plan to do something about this problem?
My company Krewe (https://www.gokrewe.com) is aimed at helping people make a new group of close friends in their neighborhood that they can see every day and build a strong local community. I only have a couple hundred sign ups (after about three weeks) so I don't know for sure that the concept will work. I also don't have a cofounder. Should I apply to YC now, or potentially wait for the next batch when I would (hopefully) have more traction?
The main problem, imho, with the current model of startup creation, is that it heavily selects for young technical people with little in the way of other commitments to take chances on new ideas. Many young technical people are hard-working and driven and that's wonderful, but (1) they form a narrow demographic [if you hang out at too many hacker cons you'll wildly overestimate the popularity of crummy cable sci-fi shows, for instance] (2) they have very little exposure to meaningful problems, so we end up with hundreds of meal delivery and laundry startup, because what else troubles a recent college engineering grad?
I have seen hundreds of apps like yours. It's a terrible space. First of all, literally every social app in the world is designed to help people make friends. That's how friends are generally made: people have something in common like "takes the same bus to school", "works at the same company", or "comments on the same warhammer 40k miniatures painting advice forum", they get to know each other, things grow from there.
I posit that "Make a New Group of Close Friends in Your Neighborhood" is not actually a value proposition that you can deliver on, even with perfect execution and infinite engineering resources. I just don't believe it. But clearly you do, so let's put that aside and I'll grant you that this technology could exist and you implement it perfectly.
How many times in someone's life could you imagine them using this? How many close friends in their neighborhood can anyone really maintain? Once? Twice? Maybe three times if they move a lot? Let's say it's six total times. And let's also posit that, against all odds, it always works, there's always the right mix of people in a given neighborhood to make this always work.
What are you going to do? Charge for the six uses? Show ads six times? GEICO has ads on TV all the time because even though you basically never change car insurance, they need to be top-of-mind when you think of who to google. I think your cost of customer acquisition, given the idea that your technology works indistinguishably from magic, will be ludicrous. Remember, there's no reason for people to even tell their friends about this: its an app for people with no friends. I think you will have to spend a fortune continually acquiring users.
Then, what's your arpu over the customer's lifetime? I can't imagine how you can charge for this. Ads? Some sort of affiliate marketing? I would think, if your product worked, the total user engagement with the site over the entire lifetime of the customer would be on the order of what, an hour? There's just no place to make money here.
Personally, I also think this is not a real problem, customers do not exist for this service, etc. but you know, I'll spot you that, along with the idea that if it was a problem, you could fix it. _Even if those things are true_, you are going to end up with a horrendous business. See also: every "helps friends figure out who's down to hang out" startup, every "helps organize your travel plans" startup, every "uber for X" where X is something you buy like four times in your life startup.
There is something about the founder mindset that is drawn to this bad idea, just like founders are drawn to build "like making apps, but easier!" startups over and over again that essentially never work (maybe Hypercard?).
I read an autobiography once by a former Navy SEAL. He said the first thing he does when any young kid tells him he wants to join the SEALs is spend an hour or so telling the kid why being a SEAL sucks and why he'll never make it. He said 99% of the time, the kids give up on the idea. He said it's nothing personal, he usually barely knows the kids, it's just that if someone you barely know can talk you out of even trying to join the SEALs in an hour, there's no fucking chance you'll survive BUD/S and all that stuff, so he's really just saving them a bunch of time. He's doing his own "pre-BUD/S" screening that's a lot cheaper and easier for everyone, and that involves a lot less heartache. I always felt like that was a pretty good idea.
Thanks for trying to talk me out of this. No one has done that before despite me trying to get them to, so I really appreciate the feedback.
None of your points causes any concern for me though. I have lot of ideas on how to retain users--it's not simply a single use product. Krewe is not a "Tinder for friends," it's completely different and actually tries to mimic the way people naturally form and maintain friendships.
I am very certain that there is huge demand for a way to comfortably and conveniently make friends. Anyone who's ever moved to a new city, or had friends move away, knows how hard and how awful it is to not have anyone you're close with nearby. 20% of Americans say they're lonely, and people generally have fewer close friends than they used to. Depression, addiction, and suicide rates have been rising for years as a result. No one has tried to argue with me that making friends as an adult is hard. Consider yourself very lucky to not know that is a problem.
Do I have the right solution? I'm not 100% sure, but I know that I'm at least very near it, and I will find it or die trying.
Good attitude, and though I agree with some of the points brought up, I will ask you make a small adjustment to your final statement re:'the right solution'.
You may not and most likely are not near to the right solution, and your goal maybe shouldn't be to find the right solution to the stated problem, but can you keep rephrasing the problem to show you a better solution to a better problem?
It is very difficult not to get attached to a solution to a problem, but if you're solving for the wrong problem, you've already lost.
As someone who has lived in 4 different cities and as many countries in the past 8 years, I would definitely use a "just moved to X city" service/app that helps people who just moved somewhere make friends. It's a bit more narrow than what you are proposing but sometimes it's easier to start with a smaller niche and expand from there.
> First of all, literally every social app in the world is designed to help people make friends.
Really?
---
I just signed up. I just moved to SF. All of my friends have money and live in the Mission, I live in the Sunset. I'd love to meet people in my neighborhood.
I will use Krewe. Will I like it? That I don't know, but I'm certainly excited to see how it plays out.
I love finding interesting ways to meet new people - locally or halfway around the world (currently trying Plane, a social icebreaker app I discovered on PH - they have no website but here's the App Store shortlink: bit.ly/planeapp)
I rarely comment on people's apps positively or negatively but this comment, while perhaps intended to be helpful, rubbed me the wrong way. Perhaps it's the arrogant tone (my interpretation).
I have. I guess my model is the opposite of theirs. They place you in a big group with all your neighbors and I guess they hope you go to events and start meeting people. I put you in a small group, encourage you to do stuff together in a comfortable setting a couple times to establish familiarity, and then let you grow the group from there. Bottom up vs top down.
My neighborhood has 60,000 people living in it with ~600 people in the Nextdoor group. There's very little activity in the group, so I don't think people are really using it. I don't know what it's like in other neighborhoods so it may be that my neighborhood just isn't good for it, but if I had 600 users on Krewe from my neighborhood, there would definitely be a lot of activity.
Ok, so do you think you'd get more use out of those things now or later? (Maybe you're asking because you don't know, but I think it's useful to reframe it that way).
I've been following you and @paulg as well as many other YC members for a long period and I'm quiet confident that you'll adhere to the vision/idea behind a project that I'm about to start this year.
Do you recommend that I apply for YC really early, like now, just to present the idea ? Or should I develop it and apply with a prototype ? Or should I launch it and then apply ? In which case can YC help the idea to have bigger chances to succeed ? And in which case you do you most likely accept the application or at least give it a better chance ?
Apply now. Then immediately resume working on it. If you don't get in now, then apply with your awesome prototype that you've built over 6 months to the next batch. :)
You've mentioned many times, more so recently, that YC is committed to investing in hard tech problems. When considering companies solving these problems for the next batch, knowing that often times even getting a prototype ready is a massive undertaking, how much chance does one have applying with nothing more than an idea and some research? And the possibility that it won't generate revenue for 5+ years?
Being that this is true of getting anything done in the real world I was hoping to frame the question without needing to preface it with that, or listing any qualifications of my own or my team on a pseudonymous account, but needless to say we get things done.
1. I'm a little in the dark about what happens to applications that have already been seen (because they were submitted early) that are then edited pre-deadline. I've been putting off submission because I'm very close to having an MVP demo video, which I think would be strongly to my advantage to include, but I also know that early submissions face a strong advantage as well. Do you have any advice on the balance between the two, specific to the YC application process? Would it make sense to submit now and edit in the demo later?
2. Are you aware of any publicly available resources for founders to do their due-diligence on investors? I've met a couple of investors by chance (at bars, amusingly enough) that, after hanging out for a few hours, I knew would be a bad fit -- but it would be a waste of both the investors' time and my time if we didn't learn that until the first face-to-face meeting. Do you have any advice on how to maximize search utility (for both an investor and my company) when I'm building my list of potential investors?
1. Some partners may read the earlier version of your application. The advantage to submitting earlier is not so big, it just means you might get more reads. I'd for sure wait to submit until you have your demo.
2. We have an internal DB for this, but I'm not aware of a good publicly available one :(
Any comment regarding Jason Calacanis being banned from YC's upcoming demo day? Jason tweeted[1] his side but didn't know what the YC side of it was and was curious.
To be clear, it has nothing to do with all the shit he talks about YC. Though that's annoying, it's fine.
We collect feedback from YC founders on investors (we have a giant database of this). If you mistreat founders, we don't invite you to Demo Day. This isn't permanent--if you stop mistreating founders we start inviting you again. Also, it's possible that our founders are wrong in their assessment of how a particular investor is treating them, but investors have enough advantages in the system and we unashamedly take the side of our founders.
EDIT: I also never think these things are black and white, and that all of us have good and bad parts. I've heard from plenty of founders that Jason has been very helpful to their companies.
Excluding Jason is perplexing to me. For context I've started 6 companies, one went public and was a unicorn. I've worked with Jason as an angel in my companies and I've been on a board with him. Jason has been an awesome throughout several years of doing business with him. I can't envision a scenario where he wouldn't be founder friendly and I'd love to have him as an investor in any future project I pursue. Any first time founder would be lucky to work with Jason.
Since Jason gets a lot of flak (not that he cares):
Jason was one of the first and most helpful investors in Rapportive (YCS10, acq LinkedIn). He believed in us when there was no obvious reason to.
Jason was one of the first investors I went back to for Superhuman. (He negotiated hard, but then so do I — that's just part of each side getting what they want.)
I'd work with Jason again in a heartbeat for my next company.
Wait until you see the product -- it's AWESOME. I've been using it for two weeks and I'm addicted. I think this will be 100x bigger than Rapportive! excited for it!
This is not our experience. Actually, Jason is the most founder-friendly investor that I have ever worked with. He really cares about founders.
He was the very first investor that invested in us, and has become our biggest champion since our very early days.
Most investors look for traction and only decide to invest when you have traction. Jason sees the fire and the determination in us (first time founders), and decides to support us, and helps us grow as a person and as a company.
Some other investors just put in money and disappears. But Jason truly cares and whenever we need help, he's always there. He gives us frank feedback that we really need, he challenges us and pushes us to be better. He helps us with intros. He sends product feedback and recommendations without being asked.
I know dozens of other founders that Jason had invested in and I know that they all feel the same way I do about Jason.
The traction I saw in https://leadiq.io/ was NOT in the product as much as the founder... it was clear to me that you were a winner who knew how to execute at a high level -- even if the product was a little awkward and round around the edges when we met.
Truth is, we're all a little awkward at the start... Uber and Thumbtack were both a little awkward when I did those angels rounds too.
The job of an angel investor is to look at the promise of the startup -- not the problems.
Sam and Jason, this is something that should be done and resolved 1-on-1. The entire ecosystem collectively gets distracted when these happen. Imagine the cost of this (gazillion followers spending gazillion man-decades of brain cycles). Also this gets you and him to be distracted as well and compound it by NOT tweeting/snap chatting stuff that is net +ive.
Banning someone for calling YC out is bad enough, but bad mouthing him afterwards and claiming that he mistreated founders (or YC founders saying that he did) is such a cheap shot.
There is absolutely no history of Jason being known for mistreating founders. The opposite is true. AngelForum, free Launch tickets for founders and so on. He wouldn't get in the deals he's getting in if it were any different.
As it currently stands I'd never enter YC as a founder. Your comment cries of hypocrisy and falseness.
Either you honestly think he's mistreating founders then ban him and tell it like it is (and back it up with proof) or you don't think he's mistreating founders and think the feedback is unsubstantiated (if it exists) then man up and do what's best for YC founders.
I can confirm this is true, because YC staff members have explained to me that they bring in a small group of investors to mentor -- and because founders have confirmed it.
This is something I talked about on This Week in Startups, and frankly I think it has something to do with my "ban."
Jason is a bully. I've heard plenty of horror stories of people who have worked for him. I'm not surprised in the least and I'm extremely glad to see people standing up to him.
Just for what it's worth, as I know it isn't the same as working for someone - I interviewed for a position working directly for Jason and he was all class. I'm a designer and part of the interview process, as is often the case, was to complete a small design project. He flat out insisted on paying me for my time (nobody else in my career has ever even offered) and wouldn't take no for an answer, and was professional and courteous during both the interview and his eventual decline to hire me.
and i'll give a counterexample - Jason yelling down and belittling an entrepreneur and his team during prep for a conference presentation, for a totally unrelated reason and then cancelling their appearance because he was mad at something else. I have never seen anything like it.
Assholes are manipulative, it's how they get away with it.
The problem is silicon valley is self-reinforcing with positive feedback, nobody rocks the boat and speaks ill (the subject of Jason's abuse above would never come out and say it) of others.
It is 100x harder to give a negative public view of someone than it is to give a positive.
Investors have more power than most of your employees and they will freely speak about you, associate with you in good times, many will run away in bad.
You should run extensive due diligence across all of them, and with people who worked with them - not the type of Silicon Valley 'good friends' that involve spending 5 minutes in a conference hallway with someone 3 times a year, or having dinner twice a year.
I've seen Jason critique a lot of pitches. I have to say, it's hard for me to believe your description of the situation is giving the full story.
Yes, Jason probably had some brutally honest feedback about the presentation and how to make it better. But in my experience, his feedback is always spot on.
I've personally been on the receiving end of such feedback, and it can feel harsh at times. But this is one of Jason's greatest strengths: he has the ability to listen to a pitch once and then make it way stronger by improving a few key things. This is why almost all of the pitches at Launch are exceptional.
1. I always ask folks -- in private and group meetings -- "do you want the red or blue pill?"
2. Founders have asked for the brutal truth of the 'red pill 'every single time. No founder has ever asked for the blissful illusion of the blue pill. Not once!
3. I've coached 700 startups for TC50, LAUNCH Festival and the LAUNCH Incubator (27 and growing!)... never had a complaint. Not one. That includes Dropbox, Yammer, FitBit, CafeX, Clicker, Brilliant.org and hundreds more.
[ background: The person making these claims is close friends with my former partner on TC50 -- that partner was accused of some very nasty things. ]
That might make sense; strongarm negotiating doesn't necessarily mean you treat everyone like crap, but when there is more VC money than there are companies to invest in might cause you to lose out on deals.
Like I said, it was just my 2 cents for what they are worth here when Jason is being called a bully to people. I don't expect my experience to be analogous in the VC world or anything.
And it's interesting because the difference between "valid negotiating tactic" and "being an asshole" is so context dependent.
There are plenty of situations where flat out lying is not just acceptable, but expected as a bargaining tactic, along with other behavior that would be unacceptable in other situations.
Just thinking about the different ways I buy things at flea markets, the grocery store, and an auto dealership shows 3 very different behaviors.
When I was broke I would sometimes ask folks "hey can you should me how you would tackle this problem?"
It was then up to them to do the spec work or not.
However, when I was able to afford to pay folks, I was like "well, if I pay three people $500 or $1,000 to do a project and pick the winner as my eventually designer, that's a good use of $1,500!"
Thanks for taking the time to share this story. I'm far from perfect, but I work really hard every day to help as many people I can.... because so many people helped me get to the top of the mountain!
I worked directly for Jason for about 3 years, as a direct report. I never once saw him bully anyone. He expects and pushes people to be their best. Additionally he doesn't allow people to waste his time, or the time of others in his organizations. Both of these are admirable qualities.
Additionally after I left his employ, he was our first investor in a new venture, and relentlessly supported us along the way. Jason is the best possible investor you can have on your side.
I also worked directly for Jason for nearly 3 years and have nearly an identical story as Adam. The entire Launch organization was built around Jason giving back to founders. All of his actions during my time working for him reflected this mission.
I'd respect you sniping at people more if you did it whilst showing your true identity at the same time. If you're going to attack online from a hidden identity then that's just trolling.
I can't reply to your other comment as its nested too deeply, but I'm not posting to earn your respect. If you don't believe me that's fine, but equivocating anonymity with trolling is a strawman if I've ever seen one.
Jason is the only investor I've worked with that treated me simply as a founder, not a "female founder." This alone is a reason that new YC entrepreneurs should have access to working with him. He sets an example of how entrepreneurs should be treated.
Jason has seen me at my worst, when I was ready to throw in the towel and battling with my board and generally having a tough, tough time, and I left the meeting with hom feeling like a rockstar, that I COULD handle it, and could go on to succeed (which I am doing today).
He is such a founder advocate I would take $25k from Jason over $250k from a bigger VC, because when the going gets tough (and it will) Jason will ALWAYS have your back.
Sam altman tweeted this thread to his 149,000 twitter followers some of which would have worked with Jason, and won't have HN accounts.
Before Sam edited his comment, his comment implied that Jason had bullied founders, changed offers and shared founders confidential information.
> We collect feedback from YC founders on investors (we have a giant database of this). If you mistreat founders, we don't invite you to Demo Day. This isn't permanent--if you stop mistreating founders (i.e. bullying them, changing offers, sharing their confidential info, etc etc etc) then we start inviting you again.
I talked to Sam about his original comments and he said they were not fair and he corrected them.
Sam and I are actually, and I know this is hard to believe, fond of each other. We started as Sequoia scouts together and have both had great success being startup advocates.
It's nice that the companies I work with took the time to uncloak/create accounts to defend me. It's touching actually.
> Rather obvious what is going on here - and it is pathetic
Because having people create fake accounts just to leave positive comments is far more likely than thousands of people being exposed to this thread via Sam and Jason's tweeter feeds?
I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions with no data to back up your assertions.
For what it's worth, while I've never worked with Jason, I have met him once (briefly) and I have talked to many who have worked with him. I've only heard positive things. Everything being posted here are anecdotes from either one side or another; I wouldn't trust someone's anecdote to determine someone's character.
> All but one of the accounts was created before Jason tweeted about it.
What about before Sam tweeted? What about any other outlets that linked to HN?
> and i've been around here long enough to know that even when outsiders do link to threads you don't get 50%+ green comments without sockpuppets
Sounds like, instead of relying on data, you already have your narrative set so it doesn't really matter what anyone says. Do you have data that shows this has happened in the past like you claim? If so, what are the correlations between those instances and this one? How do you control between fake accounts and accounts created due to an influx of traffic regarding a topic many are interested in?
Yeah, I created a new account, WITH MY REAL NAME for this as I wanted to be super transparent. I didn't want to use a scrub account that I normally post under here. All of those except for one probably fall under the same situation.
This account, is over a year old. I created "vincentc" because I've trended to prefer first name instead, but didn't realize what an issue a new account would pose.
Anyways, what I said was true. I went through his incubator, and Jason has been nothing but supportive. Echoing what others have already said, he provides brutally honest feedback, which we all need. At no time was it ever mean-spirited or derogatory, or any of the other claims being made.
Jason has been nothing but encouraging and relentlessly supportive.
I saw the tweet and wanted to offer my POV. I created a new account because I couldn't remember the password to my old account (redtricycle) and was responding on the fly. redtri = founder of red tricycle(not fake/anon). Two sides to every story (at least!) and people are entitled to hear all ...
Seems pretty clear from the tweet. I've never applied to YC or don't know exactly how it works internally but it seems like they have a feedback form they give to founders to rate the investors that come to Demo day. Based on that they give a score to each investor and they have a threshold. If an investor falls below the threshold they are not invited to demo day. I think the system is a good one.
Jason's an investor in my company, http://dailydrip.com. we started out doing something entirely different. He told us from the beginning that he invests in founders. I got the chance to test that when a huge incumbent in our prior space released essentially our product at a better price, and we decided to pivot to dailydrip.
I was a bit worried about discussing it with him, honestly. I didn't need to be. He was extremely supportive, and our current business is doing fantastically; we're even more passionate about it. In addition, everyone I've met that ever had him as an investor seems to have the same experience: once he's in your court, he's ridiculously helpful.
Long story short, I maintain that getting into the launch incubator or getting Jason on your side as an investor is one of the best things an early stage startup can do. Have never met someone who had him as an investor who had a negative word to say.
If anybody has questions about what it's like to have Jason as an investor, feel free to message me. Jason was our first investor and I have ton of respect for him. Here's how Jason has been founder friendly for us:
* He always has your back — he'll encourage you even when times are hard
* He responds to your updates with thoughtful questions and suggestions
* He's happy to make intros and use his network on your behalf
Most importantly he's an entrepreneur and investor — and he knows about the hard times entrepreneurs go through. He'll always encourage you and you always leave a meeting with Jason feeling more positive than you did beforehand. He doesn't believe he knows the answer to every question, but he'll give you his advice. It's hard to over-state how important this is.
Again, I'm happy to jump on the phone if any founders have questions about Jason. Message me.
I'm a 45 year old entrepreneur. Not famous, but have done 11 startups, built some cool things, made money, lost money. I say that to put context to the vast number of collaborators I've worked with in my career. (I'm sure many of you have the same experience.) My latest venture was lucky enough to get into Jason's Launch Incubator class 1. And I have to share that the experience of being able to work with Jason on a product development level, a business level, as an investor, and as a person who subscribes to radical candor, has been nothing short of amazing. He nurtured us, encouraged, was critical, shared everything, wrote checks, asked friends to write checks, so we could follow our mission of building software for the world. That's all great, but the best part is he cares. Truly cares about us, what we're doing and where we're going.
thanks Sonny! It's been a pleasure working with you as well... So nice to see so many founders give details of what it's like in the launchincubator.co
I'd be glad to answer any questions people have about Jason as an investor and share my experience. He was involved in my second startup - the first was very successful, the second was a failure.
I had a great experience with Jason, even though the startup was shutdown. That shutdown was where Jason showed his true colors - he was always there, had great ideas, and was super supportive. When we did shut it down, the first phone call I got was from Jason, checking in. I still have the message in my voicemail.
After that, he continued to keep in touch and keep me "in the family". He had 100's of investments he could have been spending time on, but he never forgot. The idea that he is not founder-friendly boggles my mind. He's incredibly human.
I'm sure when you invest as much as he has, he has some things in the past he'd like to take back - hell, I know I do as an entrepreneur - but I can say he's on the list of people who I'd love to work with again and again.
You investors need to stop shit talking one another. Jason is super helpful to me, even though I've never got a penny in investment out of him. And Sam you've helped to build an ecosystem that is unmatched by any accelerators. I am looking at you guys for ideas to help my new venture, Angeloop, to add the same value to the companies that don't get into the program. We are bridging the communication gap that exists between startup and their investors so they can help each other scale. I'm hoping you guys can work through your issues because when you guys fight, it contributes to our fragile system further deteriorate.
not personally familiar with the YC process in the least here, but in our short tenure with him so far he has been a tremendous coach and evangelist for us. he's certainly tough, but also balanced. we are lucky to have him onboard.
If you ban Jason you are missing one of the most founder friendly investors out there. We were a part of Jason's latest incubator class and I have a close friend going through YC right now. Our experience with Jason was amazing and the access to top tier investors in a small setting with only 6 other companies on a weekly basis was an experience that can't easily be replicated. It definitely accelerated our business and once Jason is an investor he is on your side and will work tirelessly to give you the best opportunity possible to succeed.
Jason is our first investor in LeadIQ. We are very glad to have his help on our product and fund raising. I don't know enough about other incubators but my partner, Mei and me are very excited to be one of Jason's portfolio companies. Jason is a strong product person. He understands products and markets really well, and his feedback is always on point and help us to improve. I strongly suggest every founder to apply to his incubator if you have a very solid product.
Nothing but positives about Jason, I was in the last Launch class. I was away from my family for 4 months. Jason invited me to thanksgiving and when my family did arrive we had play dates with his family.
Post Launch he could easily cut us loose and focus on the top 1% of his portfolio. He doesn't do that, he is incredibly loyal and helpful. Some people just don't like that he likes to win but he doesn't do it at the expense of others in my experience.
Nothing but positives from me as well. I've been involved in 2 incubator classes now (1st and 3rd) and you always know where you stand with Jason. He is a relentless champion of the companies he's involved with, and will always give feedback. He's an amazing investor, mentor and someone whom I've learned a lot from.
you've worked really hard with Morgan Spurlock to get http://www.clect.com/ to launch. Marketplaces are hard, but it's clear you're making massive progress.
Jason was one of the first people to put money into Chartbeat. I've now worked with him as an investor for seven years and he's been consistently supportive and founder friendly even when it hasn't been in his short term interest to do so. He's also got incredible product intuition. I'd recommend him to any founder looking to work with someone who gives a shit.
Long time stalker. First time feeling a desire to post. Jason is an investor in my team's company www.zeroslant.com. We went through the LAUNCH Incubator. We went through a pivot. He has been a tireless supporter - no matter what. I'm not sure what caused him to be banned but I hope all the YC companies have access to him as an advocate.
Jason has been nothing but supportive, helpful, and encouraging towards us personally, and our business. He has made himself extremely available, and has invested much of his time in doing this.
I've found Jason to be an extremely supportive, honest and loyal investor. He is very supportive of early stage founders and excels at leveling you up to the next stage.
The first time I saw Jason in person was at a Founder Institute session. He told is own story of struggle/success/failure/success. It was one of the most moving things I've ever witnessed. This guy has heart and has been in the trenches doing the work.
Candidness is a virtue. Jason delivers it in a manner that motivates. I spent 4 months away from my family for Launch. Jason invited me to Thanksgiving. Post launch his support is unwavering despite having at least two of the 14 companies already flying. I found him to be a gentleman.
Jason is one of the most honest and helpful people I've ever met. Super happy that we met him and have his support. Never experienced any sort of bullying, offer changing and confidentially info sharing...
Jason is one of the greatest investor. Without him, we would not have moved to the Bay Area, would not have made great progress in product and strategy over 3 months. He is honest and helpful.
I'm not Sam but I wanted to talk about this anyway. I'm working on a side project that deals in the AI space (would like for it to become a business; we'll see how things go when I launch).
Anyway, Chris's article confuses accuracy with capability and is very strictly talking about synchronous AI agents. But I think there is a ton of space for AI related start-ups that don't fall into the trap he describes.
I'm working on a side project that doesn't work in most of the ways he describes (made it at the Launch Hackathon a few weeks ago if you're interested; website should be launched this weekend but this was my submission: http://devpost.com/software/sim).
Would YC consider subsidising child care costs for participating founders? At present, the infamously high cost of child care in the Bay Area makes YC out of reach for most founders with young children.
We used to give founders $20k. Part of the reason we upped it to $120k is so that founders with higher personal expense structures could do the program.
But we're an investor, not a company. It's important to us founders run their own companies and make their own decisions, and so we try not to build too much of our own infrastructure.
I've wondered about this for awhile. Obviously it's been a bit since I've been involved, but you guys have such scale now that solving some obvious problems for founders might be beneficial. Housing being the big one. It was merely annoying back in '07, but now I feel like it'd be a significant distraction and expense for anyone not from the bay area to find a place to live there. Maybe an official Y-scraper would make economic sense!
YC's done a lot to take the legal headache out of starting a company, raising funding, granting options, etc. I don't see how other things are philosophically any different.
This is also one of the big reasons why someone might choose to work for, say, Google X instead of found a startup. Google's famous for taking care of every detail of employees' lives - food, laundry, haircuts, oil changes, dry cleaning, gyms, social events, and child care are all available on-site, and it seems like they may soon offer housing soon. Many people who are highly proficient in their fields like to concentrate on their fields, rather than on extraneous details of their lives. When I've approached former coworkers about whether they'd be interested in founding a startup, usually the top answer is "I can have more impact at Google, because they take care of all the stuff I'm not good at so I can concentrate on what I am good at."
Something to think about, particularly if you want to fund more hard-tech. For soft-tech founders (marketplaces, delivery startups, etc.), it's often good to do the routine chores of life yourself so you know where the pain points of potential customers are, but for hard-tech, you really want to be able to concentrate on the technology.
It's definitely true, but anything you to make a startup feel like an undifferentiated cog in a machine (in the extreme case, throwing everyone into a coworking space) is really bad. We just want to be super careful not to break the important parts of what makes YC work.
You mentioned previously YC is after bio-tech startups. What traits would a bio-tech team need for YC consideration? And, what is an ideal stage for a bio-tech crew (long-term vision) to raise capital?
I'm from a team of first time startup doing a hardware medical device company. We have computer science, mechanical and electrical engineering background but very little experience with medical devices. Is this a big red flag for you guys?
Hope @sama answer this question. IMHO hurry up to get a prototype in the client's hands. there you will know how good your team is and if you stand a chance in the industry (afaik your team looks very good)
If relationship breakdown between cofounders is the reason for so many company failures, why does YC not proactively solve that by requiring all founders to attend weekly relationship counselling, for which YC pays?
Could such a thing prevent more breakups and therefore greatly increase chances of company success? And the cost is pretty small for YC to employ relationship counsellors.
We don't require many things--founders are not are employees.
However, we do offer cofounder communication workshops to the batch. Innerspace puts them on, and they always get incredible reviews--in fact, some of the most positive reviews of anything we do.
When doing a hard tech startup, how can you show traction/product-market-fit to investors before your product is being sold? The cost of going from crude prototype to sellable product can easily be in the 6-figure range, so how do you break this Catch 22?
That not a great example. A better one is to build a v0.00000001 that actually works but is obviously not the final product nor even an MVP. E.g. a technical demonstration of some component.
There is a real gap in the market and it is not limited to just hard tech. There are an enormous number of great businesses out there that can’t raise funds until they have a product and they can’t make a product without funds.
The solution is actually pretty obvious - investors have to start investing in businesses that are nothing more than a good concept, especially those of outsiders or non-serial founders. This is hard work though.
The issue is that the risk of investing in a startup is extremely high even if you do limit investment to serial founders or post-product, post-traction businesses. It's already very hard to generate a positive return even with those conditions, and impossible to tell with certainty which will work out.
Investing in random unproven founders with no product or traction (apparently) makes it practically impossible. Even fewer will work out than in the pre-screened batch, and the hit rate is already close to zero.
If it were at all possible, there would be no need for VCs at all. You'd just fill out some forms about your idea and then do an IPO.
Yes. Y Combinator, which (very unusually) funds people with no track records and just a concept, has had only two really big successes (AirBnB and DropBox) in 11+ years and close to a thousand companies in the program.
I think the answer is to become a serial founder. Elon Musk's career is a good model for this. He started with some kind of media/software company and then took on harder and harder challenges as he gained credibility.
Hey Sam, we have attempted to apply a couple times showing steady progression. Does it hurt to re-apply with same idea. To be fair, I know if I have seen a resume for the third time, I am conflicted with the applicants passion and my initial decision. How would say this can differ with your team or is it the same?
They've always said that it's good to reapply, which makes sense to me personally, because they say they need founders who get things done. Having a previous application to compare your current application with must be one of the best ways to judge that.
I'm intrigued by your comments that you're interested in funding social networks—it seems like a new one launches on Product Hunt every day, but few are able to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem and achieve scale.
What's your take on the best way to make the network useful on day one for a small number of users? What are you looking for in a YC app for a social network (with or without traction)?
The thing we look for the most is a small number of users that are super, super engaged with the product.
Most new social networks we see point to their top-level growth of new users. These usually eventually fade.
What you want instead is something that starts with a small number of users that use it many times every day. Snapchat is a good recent example of this phenomenon.
I recommend validating your market with a newsletter or some other channel that already has social engineering baked in. In the case of Product Hunt & Mattermark, this allowed them to demonstrate value with curation of highly valuable content for a particular group of people. Once you have validated it, creating the application seeded with those users will ensure you have the well in place. Spending time building the app without having the ability to iterate first on the differentiating aspect might be a waste or at least an inefficient use of early resources.
I never got tested but I think so. I had extreme lethargy, sore legs, and bleeding gums that got a better in a few hours after having a bunch of orange juice.
YC has a giant application pool. This makes it very difficult for very early stage companies with no revenue / users to compete in the application pool.
As a company with no revenue / users, How can we best stand out against those that do have growth / users?
I understand that companies can apply for the fellowship. But what does a company lose by getting into the Fellowship over Core?
It is interesting that on this AMA you say both "ideas are worth so little" and "a really compelling idea is more important to us than traction or revenue." Can you elaborate?
I think the compatibility of those statements hinges on the difference between an idea in the sense of something you could transfer in an elevator, and an idea in the sense of the culmination of an entire viewpoint on a topic, along with the mind(s) that developed that viewpoint.
Sam given the huge volume of applications you guys have to go through and the limited time you have to look at each one do you think that you are in a position to accurately judge if an idea is compelling or not? You can judge traction quickly, but it takes much more time to judge the quality of a pure idea.
Would you recommend getting cofounders first and then iterating on different possible ideas, or finding an idea that resonates with users first and then approaching people you know about founding a company around it?
I bet we have things that sound equally silly in American English when interpreted literally. Sadly, they're so invisible to me right now that I can't think of one easily...
What would you personally consider a good failure percentage of YC backed companies?
Is http://yclist.com/ a valid source of data? If so, it seems like YC could be at the cusp of a large amount of DEAD companies starting from S10 to current.
Hi Sam. Not sure if you'll read this, but thought I'd take a moment this morning on the off chance you might.
I just wanted to say hi, and say thanks. 5-6 years ago I came to realized how much I enjoy creating/making things, how little that process resembled work for me, and shortly later after reading Paul Graham's essays felt like I had finally found a community that who shares my interests and values.
Although my background is in mathematics I've spent much of the past 6 years in coffee shops during evenings and weekends teaching myself to code and bringing my projects to life. Equally important has been my business education during this time. I now view business as a means to spend more of my time in that creative space, and creating successful business as an equally enjoyable engineering challenge.
So thanks. Thank you to you for the countless videos, the (awesome) recent lecture series, the Stanford Entrepreneurial talks, and for curating this community. Thank you also to Paul and Jessica, from whom I continue to learn so much as I try to get to the essence of the deeper, most important questions in life. Thanks to you all.
Well, it's Saturday morning which means Pam and I are off to the coffee shop - her to write and me to code. Although my current project/business (that I'm super excited about!) doesn't lend to a startup-style investment growth model, hence no immediate YC application forthcoming, I hope one day some context will exist where I can thank you in person.
Is Hacker News comment history "private/free speech", or does YC use Hacker News comment history in judging founders, employees, business partners etc.? I'm not talking about the judgements anybody could make by googling, I'm talking about using your positions as insiders, is Hacker News a source of intel?
I am not a partner or potential partner, I ask because sometimes I see people write well meaning things that make me wince for them if they are being judged.
I'm actively working on data-based civics projects that should hopefully have positive individual financial impact - particularly for lower income households. It's very fulfilling work that perhaps comes close in addressing localized economic problems (eg, neighborhoods).
Problem with this sort of work is that it's generally incremental and has zero immediate effects. In other words, there's no way in hell anyone's going to fund me even on principal. Philanthropists? Nah. YC types? Nope. AVs? heh. Volunteers? Eh. The only way I've found to make it happen is to apply some sort of gamification (ads, app selling), which switches motivation from helping all, to only helping those with a smart phone or easy access to internet.
"No shit, you're asking for free work." is pretty common, but I have a persistently hard time believing it's 100% systemic.
Any thoughts on building capital for a company whose goal is in helping low income areas using YC-loved technology without any expectation of direct income?
Hey! I was replying to your comment on my other thread and then it disappeared :P You sound like you're going through a lot of the same stuff that I am. I'm 27 also and my mind is a maze of incomprehensible things. Let me know if you want to chat about it, my e-mail is in my profile. Might be something that we can both share insights on!
Never thought of that, honestly - I'll look into it.
I've had surprising amount of folk ask in seriousness why I'm trying to take money away from the budget starved city, though.. That mindset might push back. Still worth a shot! ;)
They're the ones who inspired me to start these projects and seek funding, actually. Half of that inspiration comes from a huge amount of annoyance in the ineffectiveness of most of their work, though. It's all very feel-good in the same spirit as building useless schools in Brown Country is. That's not to say all of their work is bad.
For example, their speaker this week was an "Opposition Contractor" whose whole dig was that he sells himself out to the highest bidder to use data in ensuring the other candidate doesn't get elected - no matter the party affiliation. All discussed in the frame of "civics".
Pardon the cynicism. :)
Thanks for the help and motivation to get me searching again, though! Hopefully there's something out there..
I think you should try grouping random individuals as an experiment. They should each already have a project, and be capable of implementing it, but obviously they'll have to choose one when they get together.
My two most successful lab final projects in college were randoms. One of them won the annual award for best undergrad lab project, and the other won the in-course competition. These were late-course groupings, after as many as half of each class's starting participants had already dropped out, so it was already pretty selective.
Bad: We didn't know each other ahead of time. There were always weaker and stronger participants. In one 4-person team, one teammate just completely flaked, but the rest of us stepped up.
Good: We didn't have relationship baggage that could have come from partnering with friends on a very stressful project. I think it really helped us focus on the projects. We were thrilled with any success.
I used to think it was just good luck finding outstanding teammates. But perhaps it was because they had already independently made it through the hard first half of the course without having close friends also enrolled in the class. As a counter-datapoint, another course had a lottery-based grouping, with no pre-harrowing, and my teammates and I never gelled.
My understanding (anecdote from a YC founder I spoke with) is that they tried this one year, and generally the outcomes weren't favorable.
Startups are fucking hard. A lot harder than school projects. And they last way longer. There are millions of dollars on the line and people's livelihoods. The people who run them, by nature, have a level of intensity that acts as an amplifier for wins and losses.
When you meet somebody, it can take a few months before they let their guard down and begin falling back into their "normal" behavioral patterns. Best case scenario, they were a pretty honest and secure person and not much changes (but maybe they're bad at remembering to clean their dishes). Worst case scenario, they miss a deadline, blame everyone around them and punch holes in walls. Likely somewhere in between the two extremes.
"Emotional baggage" of past relationships is a good thing, because it equates to trust, as long as the people are willing to work together. You usually have baggage because you've seen somebody at their worst. If you're still willing to stick around, that's telling. It means you have a better chance of being able to get through the next thing, and the one after that... and so on.
Would you be looking for anything different in people who applied with a video game versus a more traditional startup service?
Would you expect the game to be very different in some way from traditional games, or does genre/mechanic not really matter as long as a there's a small, passionate group of users growing quickly?
Every HN reader is an above decent potential founder or at the very least potential product starter/inventor/maker... That is 310,000 potential companies. I do not see anywhere else you could have that many of the same profile.
Small. In general, we just look for progress commensurate with resources. If you've raised more money and been working on the company for longer, we expect more progress than if you've just started.
thanks! We were wondering if it was worth applying.
We went from zero revenue to generating revenue after our old accelerator and was looking into YC to grow now that we had a solid, validated product-market fit.
Is it a strong criterion that applicants you admit into the program have a (clear) path to building billion-dollar companies? Or do you give more weight to solving important problems? In other words, does ROI trump problem-solving, and if so, are teams tackling niche problems at a disadvantage?
What are some actions people like myself can take to push our community, nation, and world towards Basic Income?
This is particularly important to me because of how fast Uber/Tesla are rushing towards fully autonomous vehicles. Over 4 million jobs in US alone are as drivers. They're all gonna be laid off soon.
If you live in the United States, you might want to connect with us at the Universal Income Project.
We have regular meetups in San Francisco, and are looking for more organizers around the country to collaborate with on Basic Income Create-a-thons. And if you're in a different country, we might be able to connect you with advocates closer to you. There are a ton of interesting, active projects going on right now around the globe.
We recently hosted a talk by Matt Krisiloff, who is managing YC Research's basic income program, and are really excited to see how it develops.
Shoot us an email at questions@universalincome.org if you want to learn more!
BTW: The application form has a really nasty bug. If you've just spent the last hour in writing some of the greatest prose ever written, hit save, and don't wait for the response in the top right corner and hit logout your work will be lost:( dammit! Sam I hope you fix that.
I wondered what your thoughts were on the apple / fbi situation ? How would you expect startups to act if they found themselves in a similar predicament?
Hello, Animex. I saw your question and I had this same question the other day. The average age of YC founders is about 29 (Source: https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/). I suggest you apply, what's the worst that could happen?
Not necessarily their first startups, but: Dre (Beats), Larry Ellison, Travis Kalanick, Phil Knight (Nike), Jack Ma (Alibaba), Sam Walton, Wang Jianlin (Dalian Wanda). Mike Bloomberg and Amancio Ortega (Zara) were nearly 40.
I thought about that quite a bit as well while writing the comment.
Since HN is US- and tech-centric, I added the company name for non-tech or non-US companies. Walton was an exception because everyone knows Walton/Walmart, Bloomberg was an exception because the company's named after himself (and it is technically in technology), and Dre was an exception because (a) most people know him for his music, not Beats and (b) it's more of a fashion company than a technology company. I was on the fence with Ellison/Oracle, given how old the company is.
We once tried funding companies with no idea. It didn't work. I'm not totally sure why. Perhaps the time pressure of YC is bad for coming up with a really good idea (the best ideas often start out seeming bad). Perhaps the best founders always have ideas.
Idealess-founders was an interesting experiment; that YC tries such things is a defining characteristic.
Theory: it's not the value of the idea in itself, but the motivating effect it has on the founder. An idealess founder goes nowhere. "Going somewhere" is necessary for exploration - even if your destination turns out worthless, you might find something better than you imagined along the way. But there's no serendipity without a journey.
- What is the current theory of the role of founder ideas at YC?
Are you at all concerned that the compressed timetable leading up to Demo Day contributes to founder burnout and unhealthy lifestyles? How do you know the program isn't inadvertently damaging some of its participants?
Yes, definitely. We do remind founders to sleep, eat well, and exercise, and we have recommended therapists available (and we tell founders this is one of things that it's good to spend money on), but it's definitely an intense program. We try to be upfront about that, and that it's not a good fit for everyone.
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I'm at a YC startup that's successful. How do you look at early employees of such companies, and how I tactfully apply? There is no way I could without it getting back to my CEO (or so it seems to me)
YC is so big and has so many (1) existing portfolio companies and (2) applicants to go through that they simply don't have the time to even care about this. We graduated YC in S12 and, outside of fundraising, talk with partners on average once a year. I don't think we've reached out to YC or YC partners have reached out to us in any meaningful way for the past year or two.
Perhaps counterintuitively, this is even moreso the case the more successful a YC company becomes. There's little to nothing that YC can do to help Dropbox, but there's way more that YC can do to help a struggling 5 person company get off the ground.
Working at a successful YC startup can only help your chances.
I don't know. Sam was at a bunch of our parties/events, and has tweeted about us. My CEO and cofounder are great friends with a lot of the partners. Hopefully you're right, I just don't want to apply without telling them and they find out from that. But also telling them I'm thinking of leaving is hard too
Sam would be doing YC a huge disservice if he told YC founders that their employees were applying to YC. First of all, it doesn't even mean that the applicant is necessarily leaving. Getting in is pretty hard to begin with. Secondly, he would probably be missing out on a very talented pool of potential founders, which at the end of the day would return YC far more than a few employees at already successful YC companies.
I find this interesting as I thought one of the benefits of YC was the community, and it seems there has been a lot of talk about the community tools available to alumni. Have you not had any benefit from these at all? Or do you mean specifically you don't interact with YC partners?
The community (other founders) is amazing. We interact with them all the time via YC forums, which is extremely useful.
We just don't have much interaction with the partners anymore since their focus is better spent on the recent batch rather than helping 4 year old companies.
YC founder here. From what I've been told, employees of YC companies get a slight bump in the application process because the partners expect those companies to have a similarly high bar as YC.
I think that's a good attitude -- to a point. Wait until the right moment, okay, but don't give up your own dreams completely.
I think you should go ahead and tell your founders about your aspirations. They may very well be supportive; I've definitely read that many YC founders encourage their employees to do their own startups. Telling them will give you and them a chance to work out a plan for what you should get done before you start applying to YC or other accelerators in earnest.
And if they're not supportive, well, maybe they weren't so deserving of your consideration as you thought. I find this hard to imagine, though. It's not like you're quitting outright.
What would you value more for the application: a potentially huge, innovative idea plus a weekend-hack prototype/demo but no market validation yet, or a more mature, somewhat validated product but with existing startups on the space, some YC-backed?
I have a very clear vision of what we want to accomplish, but we're selling a much more down to earth service to our customers and prospects. I do think there's a path leading us to our vision (think Netflix going from CDs to streaming). Should we describe our vision in the application?
Under what circumstances would you consider a company with:
- Solo founder
- No revenue yet
- 13-15k monthly active users and 1200-1500 daily active users
- Launched 6 months ago
Curious, why're you President of YC? Just to be clear, this is not intended to be why you vs someone, but if there's a story behind why you ended up where you are today. Thanks!
In management school there's a lot of flexibility regarding the nature of a leader. In your experience grooming founders, what has been the most efficient style of leadership?
The only universal job description of a CEO is to make sure the company wins. There are a lot of ways to do that. The one thing that doesn't work is trying to act in a way that isn't your natural style.
If you can figure out what to do, make people care, and communicate clearly, and not be a jerk, you'll be a long way towards being a good leader.
I am an international founder. I want to join YC and incorporate in the US. But to avoid wasting time on visa things, I want to return to my home country (India) after YC.
1) Should I mention this in my application?
2) From YC's point of view, do you prefer international founders who want to stay on in the US or those who want to go back to their home country? Assuming they would kill it either way.
(PS - My startup is COMMENT.ws whereas YTERMINATOR.com, UNICOCK.com are light hearted hacks to get YC's attention)
I honestly have no idea what this website does or what its purpose is. Is it for commenting? I couldn't figure that out. It seems like you've glued together various websites and search engines into a single page. Why would I use this?
Thank you for the feedback. Yes we are for commenting. We will try to make that obvious with UI changes. You are right that we are using Bing, Twitter, Youtube etc. They frictionlessly provide good content to users. We are also building our own features. Hopefully they will be our usp
It's not like I'm thinking "Ah, just remove that thing over there, move this little thing down a bit and maybe make that thing bigger." I'm thinking "What the hell am I actually looking at?". That's what difficult.
Hope you don't get offended, just being honest. Too many people are spending energy on useless things instead of working on real solutions to real problems. That is a problem.
I'm not entirely sure what comment.ws does from the website. Its a bunch of vaguely familiar faces and logo. A page that gives a 1 sentence explanation of the site will be cool. Hope that's helpful
Your website seemingly doesn't load at all for me. Firefox on Win7 with uBlock Origin and Disconnect plugins. Just shows a search bar that doesn't work and the rest of the page is blank.
Hey Sam! We're disrupting a $3.2B information market, full of old slow tech. We've received encouragement from YC alum to apply and had help with our application, but warned that what we're doing might be too difficult for the average tech person to grasp and be vetted out for this reason. We have 11k in revenue from our first sales cycle and 200% mom user growth. Any recommendations on how we can make sure we get heard?
What kind of security companies do you look out for? How much importance do you place on technical certifications when it comes to founders in security?
Security is one of the areas we're most interested in, but we leave it to founders to show us the most promising sub-areas.
We don't care about technical certifications. I forget which company it was, but some large tech company found that the only negative predictor of success for its employees was technical certifications...
Would this include companies that play offense, selling to government? If so, does it matter if they sell to many governments (as did Hacking Team and VUPEN, selling to places like Egypt and Sudan) or if they only sell in the USA to the NSA, CIA, DoD, etc.?
Sam if you are a semi technical founder (you have coded before but not recently enough to build your product) and you have to get a cofounder but have the choice between one you know and will be able to climb mountains with but has the same dilemma vs a technical cofounder/employee. Who would you choose to go with? The one you can figure it out with or the one who can basically do it for you?
Having a cofounder you don't know well is usually a very bad idea. It's much more important to trust someone and know they are great than to 'hire' for a specific skill.
I am planning on applying this batch, however; I have a friend who just finished his Ph.d in Computer Vision. I want to work with him on a different idea than the one I applying for at YC(robotics). It's in the "other interests" category, he is not a co-founder for my current application. If chosen, can a founder be added iff you don't like the initial idea?
Sam, thank you for taking some time to answer our questions. Mark Suster and other VCs have recently expressed distaste for convertible notes and SAFEs. Are you still in favor of SAFEs? In general, what are your thoughts on seeking seed funding for super early stage startups when determining a valuation might be problematic?
I think SAFEs are good. I think uncapped SAFEs/convertible notes are very bad and misalign founders and investors--they punish early investors for helping the company to be worth more.
Sam, I know I'm late, but what a pain it must have been to reply to those questions with so many messy comments with such crappy interface.
Don't you think the time has come to stop to fake advertising the success of simplicity and to build a proper HN interface?
(Just looked at the sources to collapse all subcomments, and I found `<table>` tags, OMG)
We are 4 cofounders, 3 of us are brothers and the fourth one is my wife. We were accepted to W16 without any problem, they did not even questioned us about this. I believe that there has been several other husband - wife teams.
Hi Sam, Two of my college buddies and I applied to YC this week, we're looking forward to growing our startup idea. What do you think is the number one thing that most founders don't think about that ultimately hurts their company?
I would have to say asking Sam Altman for advice. Most founders simply don't think to do it and it ends up hurting them tremendously in the long run. You're on the right track.
How do you evaluate companies that are more technically ( hardware, computing) challenging? If two founders have been working on a hard problem for ~6 months, what are the things you look for since there isn't any revenue or growth?
Sam,
I know you've commented that valuations are generally meaningless re early stage start-ups. I don't disagree, but there are a lots of funds with holding in early stage start-ups....in some fund formats (not trad'l PE/VC funds) they collect management and performance fees based on "fair market value" of fund assets. Agree true valuation is best determined at a realization event, i.e. An ipo or other form of exit, but what are your views on determining fair market value marks along the way...last round pricing, market comps, dcf models, or none of the above.
Sam, Energy has the #1 position on your RFS, but energy companies are typically slow moving and capital intensive by nature. Can you give us a bit more insight into the kids of energy companies you are hoping to find?
Any plans for YC to get into seed rounds e.g. both to support startups with high potential as well as to potentially offer some of the benefits of YC connections to those who might've gone through another incubator?
(I know YC's policy on incubating startups which have already been through other incubators, which I believe if I recall correctly is a very data-driven "no." My question comes more from the standpoint of whether any YC benefits might be available to startups which already have some success but are still very much in the early stages)
Thanks. There are plenty of others trying to apply the YC model in other more niche areas (Mach37 comes to mind here in DC), so it's neat seeing the direction you and the team will continue to take.
P.R.China has a strong policy to control information and policy restriction. What do you think of the possible problems for YC to cooperate with Chinese companies? Does that impede the growth of a startup?
Also interested in this... I am working on my second mainland Chinese startup right now. But honestly, there's easier sources of capital in the country than outside that sidestep this problem. In my previous experience, seeking foreign VC is difficult from China due to investor fear and unfamiliarity with the regulatory environment.
What are the pros and cons of Silicon Valley being the VC capital of the world? How do you feel about it on the whole? Do you guys ever talk about diversifying, either inside the US or out?
Hello Sam. I'm a Software Engineer at a Big Tech Co. I've been ambivalent about going back to school to do a part-time master's degree in AI, or just do self-studying. Creating a startup in the US is not an option for me yet since I'm on a TN visa (hoping to get a green card in the following years). What do you think is the best investment of my time, and how far ahead in the future should someone plan to start a "hard tech" startup? (I'm on my mid 20's)
Things are almost never as risky as they seem to a recent graduate. This is one of the best times in your life to take a risk and do what you really want.
Hi, Sam! Don't you think that AR/VR is overvalued by large companies? Microsoft has not created Google, Wal-Mart has not created Amazon, Ford has not created Tesla.
An enterprise software company (Microsoft) made the most popular video game console. A search company made the worlds most popular navigation and email tools. A consumer e-commerce company is the the biggest supplier of enterprise cloud services.
There are more people working on 'x' outside of big companies then there are people working on 'x' inside of big companies. So really, it's surprising that big companies break in to new verticals as often as they do. Anything could happen.
A startup is best suited for new product categories/new business models. (Nobody does a startup to directly compete in an established market)
VR is just "gaming, but more", and requires enormous piles of cash to spend on the hard technical challenges it poses. (1000dpi displays with kilohetez refresh rates) Big companies are fairly well suited to these "build me a faster horse" problems, I'd say.
Hi Sam, you just replied to a question with this : "Having a cofounder you don't know well is usually a very bad idea. It's much more important to trust someone and know they are great than to 'hire' for a specific skill."
What do you recommend for someone who isn't a friend with a good developer ?
Is it better to subcontract the development of the site/app to a good software development company ?
What do you think about Social Media Apps that do not use traditional "follow my profile" as a way to share photos, videos and texts?
Do you believe that dividing the profit received from the ads, a model similar to YouTube -unlike Instagram, Facebook and Twitter where the company takes all; can be used to attract content creators in direct competition with these tools already established in the market ?
>Startups are very hard, and very emotionally draining...
emotional draining is not that much but since you are alone, you do not know 'how' bad a situation is and you kind of overthink it and think its very bad and breakdown. While it really might not be that bad.
As YC's portfolio of established companies gets bigger (and more valuable), do you think YC's focus will eventually shift from "facilitating innovation" to simply "maintaining the status quo" (particularly if the latter becomes more lucrative)?
What measures do you have in place to make sure that YC's financial interests remain geared towards innovation?
What are your thoughts regarding the effects venture capital strategy (game theory) has on the compute markets, specifically the creation and acceleration of bubble phases? Do you believe venture capital, beyond the obvious benefits for investors and founders, actually provides a heathy, sustainable ecosystem for innovation and advancement of humanity and the planet?
With respect to reputation of YC, what happens if the pitch although being amazing in an application could be a conflict or add on to one of your existing already funded groups ?! Wouldn't there be a conflict while you reviewing an application for it to be judged faily ? And also the pitch idea is compromised against the benefit of the founder ! Please advise
Hi Sam!
Would you consider to add preserving wild life and animals to YC https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/? After all, animals also live here with us, humans. And we need them too. Maybe startups and innovation can help?
Hardware startup question / both yc programs: How many "devices" would you expect an applicant to have in the field w users falling in love for you to feel they had sufficiently demonstrated "customer love traction". Just asking in light of the complexities with small batch hardware. Thanks!
So far we have supported AI and basic income research. We plan to do one more group soon, and then potentially one other later this year. We'll share more about them as we get closer--we advise startups not to pre-hype what they're going to do, and try to follow our own advice on that :)
Earlier this week, you listed your specific investment interests.
If we are working on one of those tough problems in regulated environments, what is the best way to get a serious consideration from Y Combinator (apart from continuing to build as fast as we can & talking to our initial users)?
I think I recall seeing something about the Fellowship and Summer programs being the same application but last I looked I couldn't find where that was mentioned. Is that still the case?
I feel like I'm a bit between in that I have a product but haven't closed my first customer but hoping to real soon.
Hi Sam, I'm a young entrepreneur who is really passionate about startup and SAAS. For one man SAAS B2B startup with limited funds is there any advice on initial growth? I have used Twitter with some success and used Adwords but had little success (could be due to not enough budget)
Hi Sam. What are your views on a venture that would take some reworking or coaxing of the state laws in order to be successful? Example- the law has gotten more relaxed over time and would probably be where we'd need it to be in 5 years or so. Not marijuana related.
PG in some of his older articles was really big on Lisp being the most powerful programming language and instrumental to his success. His writing actually inspired me to learn Clojure.
In your experience, does the power of a programming language, in a software business, matter as much?
Hi Sam, qq from my side. If you are not programmer, but want to become one, what would be area, programming language and industry that you would suggest to focus on that will allow you to grow fast as a product and company? Thanks!
Hey Sam,
For a non-technical founder interested in building tech products; is it more important to learn how to code (well enough to build a prototype) vs understand software architecture (to manage the building of the product)
I would argue that learning how to code well enough to build a prototype is the same thing as being able to understand software architecture to manage the building of the product. A better question would be learn how to code vs be able to lead and manage a team.
I'd read from various sources that a team and their execution are more important than ideas, but wondered how would you handle a startup with a (hypothetically) brilliant idea, but with less than brilliant team performance?
Thanks for doing this. Accelerators like StartX at Stanford have programs where you can volunteer to work for the entity itself. Is YC open to having volunteers in this capacity? Do you hire often for the entity, YC, itself?
One of my friends is a tenured professor and leading researcher on mental trauma, specializing in PTSD. YC Research piqued his interest when I mentioned it to him. Are you open to receiving research proposals?
Hi Sam. Ours is an education marketplace (Pyoopil), still looking for a product market fit. Any advice for us? -- now that you guys have acquired imagine-k12. Will there be a special focus on ed-tech startups?
What should we (smart, technical people) be doing to stop Trump if he makes it to the general election? While it might not be the best fit for YC, have you thought about adding this to your RFS page?
Couldn't agree more. I can't believe how little support there is for ideas like free trade, where academics of every political stripe agree it's good, but the candidates don't.
As a SF tech person, I feel pretty homeless in today's political climate. Tech indeed does need to run a candidate, and not just in the national election, but locally as well, so we can get some housing built and no-nonsense public school reform.
Thanks, Sam! I'm hopeful too, but prediction markets still, distressingly, give Trump a 20% chance of winning it all. I'm sure there are a lot of people in CA who have skills that are in short supply (familiarity with stats, social networks, programming, etc. -- think Nate Silver), and who would want to volunteer on a part-time basis. It's not clear at the moment how they could put these skills to good use, other than by maybe volunteering for the Clinton campaign (which sounds to me like the non-profit equivalent of working for Microsoft). Probably there is room for small, technical non-profits with creative ideas.
Some things are more important than political positioning. Even an incorrect belief that leaders are corrupt will influence culture, making corruption more acceptable to society. Laws can be changed back and forth, and walls can be torn down, but corruption is mighty hard to fix once it has solidly taken root in society.
Hey how do you talk about a culture-centric problem to a foreign investor/accelerator. By culture-centric I mean in terms of the festivities and celebrations that's localised to a place.
What would a YCombinator look like if it was for projects aimed at moving human society to a sustainable footing? what features of YCombinator would you keep, and how would you modify it?
Hi Sam. The social graph, interest graph, and professional graph have all been successfully mapped online. When do you believe the location graph will also be mapped at scale, and by whom?
Are you excited about any specific ideas for the S16 batch? If so - what and why? (genuinely curious. Already applied... so I can't go and change the idea now :) )
Are educational projects viewed mainly by IK12 or by all YC partners? What about hardware educational startups, do they stand a chance? IK12 only got software startups so far, so...
VR, AI, etc are really cool. But how about normal markets and solving usual problems?
We're working on a service on top of any possible static website generator (from jekyll to hugo) (i.e. yet another website builder) that brings total freedom for artists, musicians, photographers with complete syncronization with dribble, soundcloud, dropbox and so on giving universal content editor and marketplace.
Much cheaper, simpler and easier than other (will not count names), schema.org out of the box, blah, blah, blah — really a lot of features.
Sounds easy, but internally it's a bunch of cool technical solutions.
Any chance to be a part of YC Core/Fellowship family? If yes, we'll definitely try to set-up a demo asap and apply.
Hi,
we gave up with sending our application, because we weren't able to validate our idea with customers. Is it better to send application despite it or wait until autumn?
What do you think is the best way for someone to express the challenges and circumstances in life they deal with and work to overcome. These typically aren't things one would list on a resume.
I've heard a lot about the areas you're most passionate about and YC has the famous list of markets, but what areas are you least excited about and why?
How important are brilliant technical founders in non technical startups (by which I mean the main problem they're trying to solve is not a technical one)?
Was there a moment in your life that created a sense of urgency to live life to the fullest? From the looks of things you're doing so many (cool) things.
Hi Sam, I always wondered how someone so young could become president of YC (and do an awesome job at it). Or would you say it's actually a prerequisite?
My cofounders and I believe CRM is broken... With a heavy emphasis on management and not the customer... What other areas of CRM do you see need improving?
How would YC help an accepted application of just an idea in a technical point of view ? Will there be developers to build a prototype to present during Demo Day ?
I had to stop and give a response. As a fellow entrepreneur/founder I'd say if you're building a startup to get into YC, you're not worried about the right thing. The metrics I've found most useful in building a startup/company in general are
1. Are your users happy?
2. Are your users happy enough to refer other people to join?
If you nail those, then what does anything else matter?
I'm sorry if I gave the wrong idea, but no. We are not building our company (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vz7QpBub6fo) to get into YC. Not sure how you deducted that. Trying to apply several times was something that made sense for us at that time and nothing else.
But it would be goog to know if YC is not interested in our company at all.
Once you get accepted to YC you need to incorporate in the US to get funded. Its not that difficult and they have a very clear process for all of the companies from other countries (we were a Mexican company).
It will still be months at least until we've made research breakthroughs, but we've had incredible success on the recruiting side. I think we're building one of the strongest teams in the field.
I need a technical co-founder to build a platform and I don't know any developer, what can I do ?
1- Search for one ? Any recommendation for the steps to make in order to find the right man ?
2- Or ask a web/mobile development company to build the platform ? What do you think are the +/- of this case ?
Sam has answered this question in various forms and fashions on several past occasions and I thought you would like to know what he said at those times. But feel free to be snarky and swear at us instead.
Last March, you mentioned on twitter that you are a customer of/financially support Shanley Kane's organization, Model View Culture. Since since then (and before then too), she has made a variety of racially and sexually charged statements, such as, "fire some fuckin white guys to get it done" ( https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KtAdEv... ). Do you or Y-Combinator still patronize or support Model View Code after these statements? (A pure yes or no is fine, I don't need a big discussion, I just want to know where you and YCombinator stand.)
This seems reasonable if (and only if!) people who match you on sex and skin color are unfairly overrepresented, and if the meaning is to fire those who aren't qualified, not to indiscriminately fire to meet a quota. I read both of those things as implied by that tweet and its context, but I can see how they're not obvious. Without that context, I admit the sentence is racist and sexist, but in context, it seems like a reasonable response to existing racism and sexism that has given employment to unqualified white men more than to unqualified people of different race/gender. (It is sort of like "black lives matter": shorn of context it seems to privilege one race, but in a world where black lives seem to matter less than other lives, it is a response to that existing racism.)
I am a man but not white, so perhaps this does not sting as much as it stings you, in which case I apologize for not being able to fully empathize. Anecdotally, the vast majority of the underqualified and incompetent people I've worked with in tech have been men, even taking into account the general proportion of men and women in tech. Without thinking hard, I can name underqualified men, qualified men, and qualified women that I have worked with, but would have to think hard to remember underqualified women. So I'm okay with focusing any attempts to fire unqualified people on men, or, at least, making sure that any efforts to fire unqualified people end up firing at least some men.
> This seems reasonable if (and only if!) people who match you on sex and skin color are unfairly overrepresented
Asian people are more overrepresented in tech than Europeans. If Shanley said to "fire some fuckin asian guys to get it done", would you support this comment? Why / why not?
Well, I think the context was management, where IIRC Asians are if anything underrepresented. And I anecdotally don't think I've seen as many underqualified Asian people (relative to the number of Asians) as white people -- but that anecdata feels very iffy to me, so if there's reason to believe that that's wrong, sure, I'd think that comment was reasonable. (It also gets more complicated if they're on H1-Bs or something; however disruptive firing a citizen is, firing someone on a work visa is a hundred times worse. And they have fewer options for finding a job that fits their skill level than people not constrained by a work visa.)
I would absolutely stand behind "fire some men to get it done". Or a simple "fire some people to get it done", if I didn't have strong reason to believe that tech's performance-evaluation practices are unduly harsh on women. (Which is, incidentally, why I think I see unqualified women so rarely.)
I can see the doxxing being an issue (although, if you're referring to Milo Yiannopoulos, I think the case might be more complicated), but I think anyone who reads 'kill all men' as a anything more than a rhetorical flourish is being a bit over literal.
It is AMA. Not "ask me what I'm comfortable answering". In such a forum there is always some controversial discussions. Being trapped might not be the right perspective. And at this time Sam has answered.
Do you only invest in single product companies? what if a company have multiple rebranded products (3-5) based on same code and at the end adds up to respectable revenue figures and very good ROI?
Does this statement risk a tortious interference with business relationship suit?
You have published a statement that could reasonably interpreted as Jason Calacanis mistreats founders by bullying them, changing offers, sharing their confidential info and other things.
That intentionally obstructs Mr. Calcanis from entering into valuable business relationships with startup company founders.
It seems very risky unless you have at hand specific evidence that Mr. Calacanis had done each of "bullying them", "changing offers," and "sharing their confidential info."
Of course I totally believe you and wouldn't be keen to do business with him. But, that's exactly the point.
No, sama is not obligated to censor his honest opinions about random people he doesn't like. The First Amendment (and in some states, SLAPP statutes) protect him from legal threats of censorship.
Interference with business relationships is only a thing if (among other conditions) the two parties already have some type of agreement. It does not apply to investors approaching founders they don't even know yet.
Slander/libel is only a thing if (among other conditions) the statement is of fact ("Bob is an asshole" etc. are considered opinion and not fact), the statement is false, and the author knows it is false and publishes it anyway.
The issue here is that the way Sam originally wrote his response, he was clearly saying I leaked information and changed a deal on a startup -- two things I've never, ever done.
There really is no upside to leaking information on a startup if you're an investor (all these leaks come from employees typically).
On changing a deal, I'm really blunt about what I think a startup is worth... I just tell folks "I would value the company at X, if you can get 3X I suggest you go for it!" In fact, my candidness on this issue has kind of gotten me into this mess with YC to begin with (they haven't appreciated me saying stuff like "only an idiot would do an uncapped note" and "paying a $15m cap to a company with six weeks of data is just dumb." ).
> Allowable defences are justification (i.e. the truth of the statement), fair comment (i.e., whether the statement was a view that a reasonable person could have held), and privilege (i.e., whether the statements were made in Parliament or in court, or whether they were fair reports of allegations in the public interest).
> An offer of amends is a barrier to litigation.
> A defamatory statement is presumed to be false, unless the defendant can prove its truth.
> Furthermore, to collect compensatory damages, a public official or public figure must prove actual malice (knowing falsity or reckless disregard for the truth). A private individual must only prove negligence (not exercising due care) to collect compensatory damages. In order to collect punitive damages, all individuals must prove actual malice.
In the UK truth is still a defense, but the difference is that the burden of proving truth is on the defendant rather than the plaintiff (like in the USA).
Sam changed his original statement. I forgive him for saying I did those things and believe it wasn't his intent to damage my reputation (which he is doing by banning me from YC -- it's a harsh move that I'm having to do a lot of reputation damage prevention on).
I know this is an exaggeration, and I'm fully aware the current visa situation in the US could be better, but I really take issue with the sentiment of your statement.
You're being afforded an enormous opportunity here, and should not compare it with being in a prison.
Think about it -- you clearly decided your home country was not as conducive for building your future as the US may be, and therefore applied for (and accepted) a visa. Now it's up to you to prove value in allowing you to remain in the country. A visa is a privilege, not a right.
Literally billions of folks around the world are never given this opportunity.
Think about it -- you clearly decided your home country was not as conducive for building your future as the US may be
Hi, as a Canadian, I also take issue with your statement. Your ancestors came here for the same reason as him, and with far less scrutiny, same as mine, and were provided many benefits not recieved today, including land grants.
Why does a person migrating today deserve to be treated as second class?
They have not become a citizen just because they have a work visa. If they become a citizen, of course they shouldn't be second class. They've been given a visa for a specific purpose, and in the eyes of the law are not "first class citizens".
If your argument is that we should grant citizenship to anyone that wants it: OK, vote for it.
Well, as a H1B visa holder paying same taxes as citizens, I either need the country to provide me a path to citizenship or stop taxing me like citizens. I can go either ways. Your ancestors fought for taxation without representation. I come from a democracy too and yes my country is not as conducive as United States for starting businesses but I just won't be made feel inferior to citizens because I was born elsewhere. That is against the promise of the constitution especially when I live in continental United States. Also, seriously, if I can work indefinitely on a visa without citizenship, I am 100% happy to do that. There is a 6 year cap unless you express willingness to migrate or stay in home country for a year before getting another six years. So your government is disrupting my life in many ways that they don't to the citizens. It seems unfair.
I can see why it's better for you if the US government doesn't tax you, but why is it better for the US? It is a nice place, and I hope you're able to become a citizen at some point if you desire to, but until then the priorities of the US are with its own people.
"Taxation without representation" doesn't apply here, because you aren't forced to live or work here. You do have representation in your own government, which is exactly what the founders of the US fought for. They did not fight for the right to go work in other places, like the UK, untaxed.
> Your ancestors came here for the same reason as him, and with far less scrutiny, same as mine, and were provided many benefits not recieved today, including land grants.
There has been a dramatic change in economic and social climate in the Americas. Our vague "ancestors" entered Canada and the US in times where it might not have been so magnificent to immigrate, and as such they were presented with incentives to immigrate and contribute to a growing economy. Never mind that some of our ancestors came in as refugees fleeing war and communism.
Today, both Canada and the US have the right to protect their national interests and prioritize the development of their own citizens above the interests of foreign nationals. All countries do this, even those perceived as the most accepting.
Canada just accepted 25,000 Syrian refugees fleeing war and something much worse than communism.
The social and economic climate has changed dramatically, you're right. We no longer have a climate condusive to a free-for-all exploitation of Aboriginals, Africans, and the environment.
> Canada just accepted 25,000 Syrian refugees fleeing war and something much worse than communism.
This is to my point, there is less scrutiny for immigrants in 'dire straits'.
> The social and economic climate has changed dramatically, you're right. We no longer have a climate condusive to a free-for-all exploitation of Aboriginals, Africans, and the environment.
Unclear how this goes to show that anybody should be allowed to immigrate anywhere under any conditions.
> How long did it take for us (the West as a whole) to recognise the situation in Syria, and how many Syrians died in the meantime?
Should probably recognize that civil wars, genocide, and humanitarian disasters are occurring all around the world, right now, and no nation is doing anything about it (nor does the average person even know about these).
Nations of the world have no real obligation to do anything... which is why nothing is done majority of the time. When the interests of "the west" coincide with stopping an atrocity, then "the west" intervenes.
Further, it's fairly naive to believe freighting a few hundred thousand people thousands of miles away from anything even remotely familiar is doing anyone a service. It seems the help Syrian's are getting from "the west" has boiled down into a singular mindset of "just ship them someplace else", never-mind all of the long term issues that arise from this half-hearted solution (housing, income, food, work, cultural assimilation, transportation, etc...).
Bringing these people to the US or Canada doesn't solve any of their problems really - it only trades some problems for others. The real solution is obviously to stop the civil war... and work is being done to accomplish this.
> That's the best euphemism for bombs and sponsoring what we would otherwise consider terrorist organisations I've ever heard
I do believe you have inadvertently made my point.
"The west" (including Canada) doesn't care about any global issue unless it conflicts with their interests. In this case, the Assad regime was/is uncooperative with the US in particular, which is why the US seized the opportunity to topple his control (via many methods, including funding known terrorist organizations which just happen to also be against the Assad regime at this moment in time).
"The west" is not involved in any other civil war or genocide at the moment, although there are many active around the world.
> >and work is being done to accomplish this.
Perhaps you're not current on events, but non-military options are being taken right now, and are looking somewhat promising.
We've gone far into the weeds here and gotten even further off-topic than we already were. I, however, feel you're the type to want the last word, so feel free.
You suggested that those in 'dire straits' are treated differently, and I responded that, yes, they are, however it takes a significant amount of time and lives lost for us to recognise this.
> both Canada and the US have the right to protect their national interests
The unstated premise is that the current structure of our immigration system serves any national interest.
Let's set aside the fact that immigration creates more jobs for natives than it displaces (turns out immigrants buy things just like natives do),[0] and that there's near universal consensus among economists that restrictions on the movement of goods, people, and money invariably hurt a state more than they help, and that we clearly agree with this philosophy when moving these things 3,250 miles from Anchorage to Albany, just somehow don't for the 210 miles from Ottawa.
Let's set all that aside and assume there's some coherent and humane rationale for telling people who they're allowed to do business with and where they're allowed to walk based on the random accident of what hospital they were born in.
Even then, the current administration of immigration law is nonsensical in several ways. If a citizen's brother was born in the Philippines, they would have had to apply 23 years ago for the State Department to even read their application.[1] We have a bunch of categories where we've picked quotas out of a hat that have no meaningful relationship to the country's needs. Quotas are a particularly terrible approach to rationing, especially when you have to apply in a single category, so there's no extra consideration for someone who would be valuable for multiple reasons (ie, someone who holds a unique advanced degree, is a family member of a citizen, and is fleeing persecution in another country).
The fact that all countries do something does not make it right, or even necessarily rational.[2]
N.B. - Thank you for your civil comment on a difficult topic, this is exactly why I like discussions on HN, so upvoted even though I'm adding a counterpoint.
Yeah I'm with you. My argument was regarding the reasons behind why immigration policies might exist, and why I think it's ok for countries to say "sorry you can't just come in whenever" if they want.
The concept that immigration policies are usually very flawed is real, and also has been a source of frustration for me personally. I however do not expect things to change quickly at least in the US.
Worth noting that very conservative immigration policy seems to be the most "safe", the strict policy of "nobody can enter, ever" is very easy to understand, predict and monitor over time. I can imagine a situation where immigration policy is too lax, and yield unforeseen badness.
PS: thanks for being equally civil, and for a very relevant comment.
> Why does a person migrating today deserve to be treated as second class?
You don't go into someone else's home and then expect to be treated like family. I don't think immigration policy is really centered around morality or what people "deserve" but, like with most government policy, looking out for the interests of the country.
Firstly, do you know the individual concerned? If not, the assumption about someone's motivation for living and working in the US is problematic.
Secondly, I find a contradiction in these remarks. You "take issue with the sentiment", which is clearly one of feeling trapped by the visa rules. But the line of "it's a privilege, not a right" and the demand to "prove value in allowing you to remain" simply reinforces the systematic entrapment, by threat of withdrawal of privilege. In particular, it denies the individual any moral right to change the system.
So I suggest those remarks actually reinforce the sentiment, rather than challenging it.
Such a scenario is commonplace in many jobs, and the more toxic the boss, the more likely it is to occur.
A more creative suggestion out of that logical trap might be that a visa should be a right, not a privilege, since it permits a broader range of contribution towards both GDP and cultural wealth. But now I betray my own leaning towards high levels of international migration for all.
To use your phrasing, literally millions of Americans don't even meet the minimum quality bar to even qualify for a TN/H1B if they were to do it from scratch.
Maybe Americans will be well served to understand that the current visa regime is severely dysfunctional, and that it serves to boost egos of more incompetent and uneducated Trump-ians, and less the interests of US in obtaining talent and even less in giving brilliant minds all over the world an equal playing field.
+1 from someone who has been on H1-B, I recognize it as a great opportunity and privilege.
The option to return to my home country was never taken away from me, and at every step I knew I retained the freedom to simply quit my job and leave; I did not do that.
No, an H1-B does not afford you the privilege of switching jobs or careers easily. There's no reason to think it should, and that is made very clear during the application process.
I agree that with your sentiment about it being a privilege, not a right. As an immigrant right now, out of school, even getting an H1-B is so hard, that I'd do anything just for that visa. You can at least join a program like Unshackled or become a Global Entrepreneur in Residence at a University while working for you startup. However, the metaphor about it being a prison isn't so farfetched either. It's likes writing book in prison, vs writing it not in prison. You can still write the book - They are just different scenarios.
This is going to sound crass, but if a founder can't make the sacrifice to spend 3 months in SV for YC, are they really prepared to build the next billion dollar company?
If that founder is a director of engineering/product in an enterprise software company in Atlanta, has a spouse, two kids and a mortgage, and the health insurance is dependent on her/his employer, then they will probably have a higher sacrifice than if they are a single Stanford grad living in SF with a year of saving after working at Google. They both need to make a sacrifice but it's not the same scale. If you make it easier for the enterprise founder to go and do it, and they know their industry and customers from the inside out, I think YC are increasing their odds a little bit of getting an enterprise software unicorn then if they don't. Nothing is guaranteed, and that enterprise person will have to make even worse sacrifices probably if they gets funded, but I'm pretty sure it will increase the number of them who will make the leap.
However as Sam said he doesn't feel they are underrepresented, and that they can use the fellowship which sounds great :)
Can anybody name a few successful high-growth startups that were started by people with these kinds of family obligations?
If it has happened before, that's evidence that it can happen again, but if it's never happened before, that's evidence that it may be harder or impossible to form a high-growth startup under obligations like those.
(Disclaimer: high-growth startups are not the only kind of business worth forming. The director of engineering of a slow-growth enterprise software company may have a higher quality of life than a co-founder at an unprofitable unicorn.)
Why doesn't a director have enough money saved up to support their family for at least three months? And I knew Navy folks who were away from their families for months at a time, so it is definitely possible (if not fun) to do this. But if you're becoming an entrepreneur for the fun, it's time to question your motives.
I'm guessing you don't have a wife and children. It isn't about the money, it's about not seeing them.
You are also forgetting that it isn't just your sacrifice in terms of the time you are giving up with your wife and children for three months, but also that you are forcibly restricting them from being able to see you too. They didn't choose that.
Once you have a family you have a bunch of responsibilities and you've signed up for life. You can't just pick and choose when it suits you.
I realise that there are a lot of young folks on HN and probably not so many parents, so I'm expecting a barrage of down votes, but maybe in ten years time when you've reached my perspective you'll come back and upvote me!
I was raised by a single mother, in part because my father didn't want the overhead of raising kids. I know many other people like that (or other similar situations like parents voluntarily enlisting in the military). Obviously an anecdote with sample size n=1, but different people make the choice of prioritizing different areas of life based on what makes them happy.
But I think for you it is clear that family comes before business. Which is a fine personal choice for you, but is it the kind of choice people putting their money in your business want to see you making?
> You are also forgetting that it isn't just your sacrifice in terms of the time you are giving up with your wife and children for three months, but also that you are forcibly restricting them from being able to see you too. They didn't choose that.
“He who would accomplish little need sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much. He who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.”
I wouldn't bet on a founder who is not willing to take on risks. I am not being judgmental, I'm just saying whoever complains about this should face the reality--The reality is that there are tons of other people who are as qualified as this person who ARE willing to take that kind of risks. All things equal, there's no reason why VCs should fund people who don't want to take risks.
Leaving your area for three months isn't taking on risks. I'm sure YC would be foaming at the mouth to take basecamp and if they could start over with the ability to apply to YC I'm sure DHH and Jason would still turn it down if they were required to go to SF.
If you think you have enough knowledge and insight to criticize me, criticize my main point instead of trying to take things out of context to make your point. My main point was "There are tons of other qualified people who are as old as you and has as many children and wives as you, who are also tied with as many obligations as you. AND they ALL are willing to spend that 3 months in the bay area. Why would an investor choose someone who's NOT willing to do that over someone who is?"
I was criticizing your beliefs that moving to the bay area for 3 months is "taking risks".
Taking risks is building a COMPANY while having obligations such as a family, and mortgage.
I could be building the next most profitable company in the world for all you know. The bay area isn't the be all end all for internet based companies. It's foolish to require that they be there. That's like requiring your staff to be in-house when you run a software company.
I will tell you this right now, my obligations mean I can't leave my small town in Iowa. I don't care if you write a check for $10M on the spot for me to move to the bay area. My family is worth more than anybody can ever offer me.
Btw, I didn't down-vote you I think it's a valid question.
To your point:
>> The reality is that there are tons of other people who are as qualified as this person
I think this is where industry veteran may have an edge compared to "other qualified people" as you put it. Yes 20 years old founders are great for many reasons, but experienced veteran that know the system inside-out may have competitive advantages and know-how that younger ones don't have. And if that's right, I think it would be silly for YC to not invest in them because they can't move for 3 months. Actually, some people just travel a lot during those three months (I.e. going to dinner and stuff), but still run their company in their city. Keep in mind that not all companies in YC are two guys in a garage.. some of them have 50+ employees, you can't just leave for 3 months.
I see where you're coming from, but environment has many subtle factors that lead to, I believe, missed opportunities if they aren't taken advantage of. For example, what would a Houston Oil startup gain from spending a few months of critical startup time in a city with high rent, drastically different driving culture, little access to oil companies, services, equipment, fields and etc, and a completely different set of laws regarding their practice? Better to be spending their after-hours times mingling with the oil folks in Houston bars than the tech folks in SF bars.
Just to clarify my statement - for some companies, it makes complete sense to stay in their local territory (think a young Alibaba). For some others, it doesn't. It's case by case.
Are you prepared to miss out on the next billion dollar company because they happen to have a family and a job while they're hacking away on a revolutionary project?
