Really love the new site and how it highlights founders so well.
Only minor tweak I'd make is for the desktop viewport size - make it so you can also click the company names instead of needing to precisely scroll for the images to show up for that company. With notched mouse wheels it's all too easy to skip one even with a regular scroll. Or increase the scroll distance.
Also might suggest using a gradient mask to fade out the company logos as you scroll the primary text block up. Some of them get very close to the text and the one-by-one removal feels a tad distracting.
And really minor but kept finding myself trying to click the photos to see things larger. Would be nice if they could come up in a media viewer with a small caption, and let me arrow key or swipe through.
Is there a way to see all the inactive companies? Some have great names and addresses. I wonder if there's a way to efficiently use them - even keeping all the paperwork intact.. like buying a shell company and saving a lot of the overheads and registering/signups.
Brands are resurrected in fashion all the time with new designers, CEOs and owners while keeping the name, codes/motifs/archive, goodwill and stores intact.
You could even have the ex-founders sit on a steering committee or advisory board for the switcheroo mob who could be their new bosses.
With all the unemployment around, startup music chairs could be a solution. Isn't founders' equity the only valuable thing left in the startup world? No chance in getting rich as an employee - and with AI, who is/will not be replaceable?
The "before" pictures occasionally hint at what might be optimism and individuality.
The "after" pictures display a uniformly grim corporate homogeneity.
Maybe this is because the "before" pictures are unguarded, taken before the kool-aid sank in. But they still show people who queued up to drink that kool-aid.
some of the design interactions are really polished. the section written with the quotes from founders is really cool. the hover effect with the before and after of the YC partners is a great touch too!
Crazy talented people. Crazy good products. I really like the redesign, I am a bit old now, but I can see how inspiring it might be for people coming into tech.
A minor piece of feedback, though: might be just me, not sure if anyone else has this pavlovian conditioning, but seeing the black banner/bar on top with the YC logo/color below and HN background color immediately makes me think someone passed away.
Turning a builder into a formidable founder, which via the PG quote is someone who seems they will always get what they want is in its self a death. A builder... a truth-seeking creator dies. Devoured by someone who gets what they want, a superego. There should be a black bar at the top.
Impressive! Seeing all the before and after photos is a nice touch.
With regards to the actual web page, white text on light background (partners part) makes it nice easily readable.
Visiting HN brings me back when to when I just started my career as a entrepreneur, I look forward to the nostalgic design it has. Have been familiar w/ YC's & HN design since 2008.
New YC page looks great – but it just doesn't feel "yc" to me.
That thing hasn't been updated in years, and could really use some love. If they don't want to do it themselves, just open source the sub-site and I'm sure a bunch of tech founders will happily do it for them (if only to be able to say they contributed to YC itself).
The implication that OpenAI is a YC company in the same sense as the other listed companies is somewhere between misleading and dishonest. Even more distasteful to show founding teams for all the others, then just Sam for OpenAI.
What stood out to me more than how impressive the carousel of companies was, was the order of them. Wild that they have OpenAI and Stripe second and third to Airbnb.
There’s something that bothers me about reducing achievement to stock price and exit valuations. Yet, it is sobering to witness the machinery laid bare.
The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress. I’m aware this is the dominant framework, but that doesn’t make it feel less hollow. Welcome to Heartbreak.
> The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress.
Didn't see anything about ethics either, which, again, is not necessarily what a VC firm is about. It's actually kind of refreshing--the website clearly conveys YC's focus: It's about being "formidable" and "intensive work" and "urgency" and "fast." The editing on this site is impressive. They have boiled away everything down to the core of what the firm believes in, and it's "work hard make lots of money fast". Not something I'd personally be interested in being part of, but the site's wording is remarkable in its honesty, and I clearly know after reading it that the YC experience would not be my cup of tea!
Wisdom and authentic progress are hard to measure. They are also not the goals enterprises pursue. Enterprises go for the money, but the money is normally paid by satisfied customers; this side effect is what makes enterprises viable and useful. (In case of VC money, customers even don't have to pay for sustainably for some time.)
An IPO or a large acquisition is like a graduation event for school students. A diploma or a SAT certificate also do not certify wisdom, or even progress. They certify a certain degree of success, and a transition into "adult life". Or think about this as of an orbital insertion event for a spacecraft. Not an end goal, but a precondition for a serious progress.
If you seek wisdom, a VC firm like YCombinator is likely not the most appropriate tool for your quest. (An attempt to found a business may bring some wisdom, as usual, at a cost.)
Not sure formidable founders getting whatever they want whatever the obstacle (sure market obstacles but what about laws, morality, etc) is a good thing to be honest.
Sometimes folks need to be stopped. Sometimes those walls are there for a reason.
And after IPO, maybe a founder should consider the good of the world instead of what you think you want next for yourself and just bashing down more walls.
Yeh I don't think there's much value in a credo if it celebrates Altman. He's a terrible idol to have. He compared Trump to Hitler in 2016, then donated $1M to his inauguration and tweeted about being in an "NPC trap" when he criticized him. Took about six weeks after the election to flip. Testified to Congress that AI regulation is "essential," then lobbied against California's safety bill when it actually showed up. His own board fired him for lying to them for years. His safety team leads quit in protest saying safety took a backseat to shiny products. Multiple former colleagues, including the people who left to start Anthropic, describe psychological abuse and manipulation. Claims a $65k salary while sitting on a billion-dollar fortune built through conflicts of interest. He's not a good guy. He's a guy who says whatever serves him in the moment and has left a trail of people warning us about exactly that.
“A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.”
I guess that's why you went all in on SBF?
Sigh. You guys can't build robust infrastructure under Trump or Biden, if you had been capable of that we wouldn't be hearing about AI datacenter energy demands disrupting local electricity rate issues, because we'd have a China style UHV grid in place before it became an issue.
I don't spend much time here anymore, talking to LLMs is more fun... good job on the censorship though, now you've got your preferred audience of retards - oh yes, we can say retard again, isn't that great.
P.S. change the name from Hacker News to Corporate Tech News, at least be honest.
Yeah, I took a glance at the source and thought the list of scripts was insane too. Even if all of that code is needed (and I doubt it is) combining them a bit would save a whole lot of requests. It's almost like every function got its own file.
Were OpenAI in a batch though? If not, I think maybe OpenAI deserves a mention but after companies that were actually in a batch.
Typography looks great though, animations are smooth, /formidable founder' is original and it's nice seeing Jared Friedman - he was super friendly and acted as a company champion when I applied in 2016.
I don't think a "fair" ranking of companies with a nexus to YC is really the goal of the page. YC invested in OpenAI; their logo goes on the page. Also, hard to argue that the founders of OpenAI lacked YC credentials. :)
It's fine they include openai, they can be very proud of sam. What I found a bit weird is that the reddit founder picture shows only two people. History is written by the winners I guess.
Back when they started in the 2000s, most traditional VCs didn't recognize that high impact individuals can easily pivot or define product categories, and only concentrated on financial engineering (DCF go brrrrrr).
YC often also mentors founders on pivots (I'd say at least a third of all startups that make it to demo day were mentored into some sort of a pivot).
YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge, both of which really center on the founder first approach or Operators-turned-Angels - which I assume this marketing shift is about.
Interesting. I once talked to an investor (not YC) and they asked me what I would do if the product failed. I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting"
> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge
Maybe. A write up about the new design would be cool I think
> YC has always been founder first.
Internally yes there is a "founder community". But publicly I would argue it was product-first.
It doesn't seem unlikely to me that YC coined or at least popularized 'the pivot' in the context of changing business / startup directions. The first mention of using the word in that sense is in this comment [1] which explicitly mentions the usage by YC, while it only gets used when talking about pivot tables or more traditional uses of the word before that.
Edit: The "Lean Startup" blog series [2], which was quite influential, mentions 'the pivot' a little earlier than the post above, and really seems to coin it, so I guess that's the source (edit again: wrong :D).
> I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting"
I'd say it depends on a VC's investment thesis as well as the stage your startup is at.
For the former, some wouldn't like your answer because it implies a lack of conviction (why should I invest in something the founder doesn't trust). Others wouldn't because it adds a degree of uncertainty (if this B2C reels company pivots into MLOps tooling how can I do due dilligence on my investment).
For the latter, seed/pre-seed that is open to pivoting isn't necessarily a negative flag because they are barely generating revenue as is and are trying to find PMF, but a Series B startup suddenly taking about a pivot might imply they aren't doing so hot.
> A write up about the new design would be cool I think
It's a lot deeper than an apparent lack of conviction. Mentioning the possibility of a pivot completely changes the dynamic of the investment. 'No pivot' is asking "please invest in this startup; here's why it's a good idea". 'Pivot possible' is asking "please invest in me; I will find a way to get you a return on investment regardless of the means". Asking someone to invest in you as a person requires a certain level of egoistic thinking. Is the ego warranted? Maybe, but the investor won't know unless they build an extremely close rapport with you. Something like YC does with a 3-month on-premise bootcamp is that exact opportunity for investors to build a close rapport, so investing in people makes sense for YC. But a lot of investors are investing without building that rapport, so investing purely on the merits of business ideas makes more sense for them.
Depends who you're marketing to. Do they need to follow what others did or should they stay in their own niche? Because I'm not hanging out on a16z forum because they make fancy marketing materials, I'm one of the thousands of people who bought into the YC brand which was build over decades. Would be stupid to become one with the crowd of sleeky VCs.
As European I'm quite happy I didn't see YC involvement with the current administration, and if they stay a bit clear of the AI supergau I'm sure they'll be fine.
It's been reported that the ratio of mentors to founders had become quite bad. Seems quality has gone down since they tried to scale something that doesn't scale
I've heard/seen that as well. I've also seen more experienced first-time founders also go straight to angels who have a very strong track record in a specific segment (eg. Elad Gil or half of 8200 and Cyberstarts+YL Ventures) because they can provide better terms and mentoring and customers
A trend that has become worrisome to me (especially with the past few classes) is the "MBA"fication of YC - a large portion of YC founders chose to do YC as a checkbox on their resume. Best case they make the next Pylon or Hightouch. Worse (and most realistic) case, they exit and then go become a VC associate or PM at $BigTech.
There are still plenty of good startups being incubated at YC, and YC's alumni network is formidable, but I do understand the need to burn dry powder (and explains SpeedRun as well).
Really love the new site and how it highlights founders so well.
Only minor tweak I'd make is for the desktop viewport size - make it so you can also click the company names instead of needing to precisely scroll for the images to show up for that company. With notched mouse wheels it's all too easy to skip one even with a regular scroll. Or increase the scroll distance.
Also might suggest using a gradient mask to fade out the company logos as you scroll the primary text block up. Some of them get very close to the text and the one-by-one removal feels a tad distracting.
And really minor but kept finding myself trying to click the photos to see things larger. Would be nice if they could come up in a media viewer with a small caption, and let me arrow key or swipe through.
yeah i think the scroll speed is too fast. that would fix all the issues.
Is there a way to see all the inactive companies? Some have great names and addresses. I wonder if there's a way to efficiently use them - even keeping all the paperwork intact.. like buying a shell company and saving a lot of the overheads and registering/signups.
Brands are resurrected in fashion all the time with new designers, CEOs and owners while keeping the name, codes/motifs/archive, goodwill and stores intact.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentino_(fashion_house) is 70% owned by the Qatari royal family.
You could even have the ex-founders sit on a steering committee or advisory board for the switcheroo mob who could be their new bosses.
With all the unemployment around, startup music chairs could be a solution. Isn't founders' equity the only valuable thing left in the startup world? No chance in getting rich as an employee - and with AI, who is/will not be replaceable?
The design looks good. The quote is so kitch it could be on a self-help book.
"YC turns builders into formidable founders" - and then a bs faux-definition of formidable.
Impressive collection of embarrassingly young founder pictures :-)
A good remedy against lookism :)
I love that the founders are so prominently featured on this new version.
Interesting pattern to see how many IPO photos on the right are missing an original founder or two.
Whilst gaining better fashion and haircuts.
Many of them look like they joined/lead a cult.
The "before" pictures occasionally hint at what might be optimism and individuality.
The "after" pictures display a uniformly grim corporate homogeneity.
Maybe this is because the "before" pictures are unguarded, taken before the kool-aid sank in. But they still show people who queued up to drink that kool-aid.
It's a "no" from me.
The "Be in the room with …" image hover effects triggering the video are neat.
Curious -- was any AI used? No shame in that.
Looks cool, though I have to be honest that I'm not a big fan of showing only the survivor stories.
I had the same reaction. Also the new vibe feels less like “make something people want” and more like “join the pantheon.”
cz as successful YC is - the graveyard is littered with thousands of graves
in each batch only 2 - 3 startups really work out and make it big.
My first thought was I'd love to see everything, from the unicorns to the mid-level success to the failures, all laid out in one big infographic.
some of the design interactions are really polished. the section written with the quotes from founders is really cool. the hover effect with the before and after of the YC partners is a great touch too!
So good!
the "Be in the room with..." hover videos are cool but seem AI-generated.
they definitely are. im not sure why they did that, still pictures are okay too and much greener
I think I was on HN for at least three years before I realized they even had a homepage. I might check this one out in the next couple of years.
I've been here for over a decade. Today is the first time I bothered to check it out.
The most well funded forum ever
And it only needs one server! (Maybe they can afford a hot spare now?)
A real lesson in frugality.
Crazy talented people. Crazy good products. I really like the redesign, I am a bit old now, but I can see how inspiring it might be for people coming into tech.
Just as inspiring as the United Citizen Federation recruitment videos!
Love the emphasis on people behind successful companies and humble beginnings that all of them have!
Looks good.
A minor piece of feedback, though: might be just me, not sure if anyone else has this pavlovian conditioning, but seeing the black banner/bar on top with the YC logo/color below and HN background color immediately makes me think someone passed away.
I think it's fine. If it were a black bar and then an orange bar, that would be a different matter.
Turning a builder into a formidable founder, which via the PG quote is someone who seems they will always get what they want is in its self a death. A builder... a truth-seeking creator dies. Devoured by someone who gets what they want, a superego. There should be a black bar at the top.
/s
Shout out to the risk takers.
Impressive! Seeing all the before and after photos is a nice touch. With regards to the actual web page, white text on light background (partners part) makes it nice easily readable.
There's a homepage? Kidding aside, it looks like a good landing page highlighting the top success stories and the purpose of YC.
This looks good. Almost makes me want to apply...but nah. Maybe, idk.
Visiting HN brings me back when to when I just started my career as a entrepreneur, I look forward to the nostalgic design it has. Have been familiar w/ YC's & HN design since 2008.
New YC page looks great – but it just doesn't feel "yc" to me.
It's a nice website. I still despise ycombinator. They make a hell of a forum though!
"A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way."
...even if those obstacles are reality, the law or basic morality.
When have those things ever stopped a businessman?
Frequently. Come join me under my rock and I'll show you how some of the people I know live ;)
Redo the co-founder match sub-site next!
That thing hasn't been updated in years, and could really use some love. If they don't want to do it themselves, just open source the sub-site and I'm sure a bunch of tech founders will happily do it for them (if only to be able to say they contributed to YC itself).
The “YC/Now” timer starts (and sometimes flips) before the image actually loads.
The implication that OpenAI is a YC company in the same sense as the other listed companies is somewhere between misleading and dishonest. Even more distasteful to show founding teams for all the others, then just Sam for OpenAI.
What stood out to me more than how impressive the carousel of companies was, was the order of them. Wild that they have OpenAI and Stripe second and third to Airbnb.
Did it change? I see OpenAI listed first.
I see Airbnb first
Very cool!
“A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.”
Yeah, especially laws and regulations.
There’s something that bothers me about reducing achievement to stock price and exit valuations. Yet, it is sobering to witness the machinery laid bare.
The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress. I’m aware this is the dominant framework, but that doesn’t make it feel less hollow. Welcome to Heartbreak.
> The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress.
Didn't see anything about ethics either, which, again, is not necessarily what a VC firm is about. It's actually kind of refreshing--the website clearly conveys YC's focus: It's about being "formidable" and "intensive work" and "urgency" and "fast." The editing on this site is impressive. They have boiled away everything down to the core of what the firm believes in, and it's "work hard make lots of money fast". Not something I'd personally be interested in being part of, but the site's wording is remarkable in its honesty, and I clearly know after reading it that the YC experience would not be my cup of tea!
Wisdom and authentic progress are hard to measure. They are also not the goals enterprises pursue. Enterprises go for the money, but the money is normally paid by satisfied customers; this side effect is what makes enterprises viable and useful. (In case of VC money, customers even don't have to pay for sustainably for some time.)
An IPO or a large acquisition is like a graduation event for school students. A diploma or a SAT certificate also do not certify wisdom, or even progress. They certify a certain degree of success, and a transition into "adult life". Or think about this as of an orbital insertion event for a spacecraft. Not an end goal, but a precondition for a serious progress.
If you seek wisdom, a VC firm like YCombinator is likely not the most appropriate tool for your quest. (An attempt to found a business may bring some wisdom, as usual, at a cost.)
Not sure formidable founders getting whatever they want whatever the obstacle (sure market obstacles but what about laws, morality, etc) is a good thing to be honest.
Sometimes folks need to be stopped. Sometimes those walls are there for a reason.
And after IPO, maybe a founder should consider the good of the world instead of what you think you want next for yourself and just bashing down more walls.
But I dunno… I’m just a rando.
Yeh I don't think there's much value in a credo if it celebrates Altman. He's a terrible idol to have. He compared Trump to Hitler in 2016, then donated $1M to his inauguration and tweeted about being in an "NPC trap" when he criticized him. Took about six weeks after the election to flip. Testified to Congress that AI regulation is "essential," then lobbied against California's safety bill when it actually showed up. His own board fired him for lying to them for years. His safety team leads quit in protest saying safety took a backseat to shiny products. Multiple former colleagues, including the people who left to start Anthropic, describe psychological abuse and manipulation. Claims a $65k salary while sitting on a billion-dollar fortune built through conflicts of interest. He's not a good guy. He's a guy who says whatever serves him in the moment and has left a trail of people warning us about exactly that.
[flagged]
Wow – thank you for that.
“A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.”
I guess that's why you went all in on SBF?
Sigh. You guys can't build robust infrastructure under Trump or Biden, if you had been capable of that we wouldn't be hearing about AI datacenter energy demands disrupting local electricity rate issues, because we'd have a China style UHV grid in place before it became an issue.
I don't spend much time here anymore, talking to LLMs is more fun... good job on the censorship though, now you've got your preferred audience of retards - oh yes, we can say retard again, isn't that great.
P.S. change the name from Hacker News to Corporate Tech News, at least be honest.
Doesn't seem to display anything with JS disabled so it's a fail in my book, but I accept that I'll be in the minority here.
Same! uBlock on Firefox lists ~280 scripts blocked
Yeah, I took a glance at the source and thought the list of scripts was insane too. Even if all of that code is needed (and I doubt it is) combining them a bit would save a whole lot of requests. It's almost like every function got its own file.
I mean trying to insinuate oai is a yc company is just shady right?
I get that the subtext isn’t dishonest, but cmon, you know what you’re doing
They were an early funder. Seems p. reasonable for a VC firm to point that out.
Were OpenAI in a batch though? If not, I think maybe OpenAI deserves a mention but after companies that were actually in a batch.
Typography looks great though, animations are smooth, /formidable founder' is original and it's nice seeing Jared Friedman - he was super friendly and acted as a company champion when I applied in 2016.
I don't think a "fair" ranking of companies with a nexus to YC is really the goal of the page. YC invested in OpenAI; their logo goes on the page. Also, hard to argue that the founders of OpenAI lacked YC credentials. :)
It's fine they include openai, they can be very proud of sam. What I found a bit weird is that the reddit founder picture shows only two people. History is written by the winners I guess.
Displays a blank page unless scripts are allowed. :(
Thanks - someone else reported this too (as a security issue for some reason!) and I've passed it on.
I found the switch of focus from startups/businesses to founders/CEOs particularly strange. Looks like a political campaign to me.
YC has always been founder first.
Back when they started in the 2000s, most traditional VCs didn't recognize that high impact individuals can easily pivot or define product categories, and only concentrated on financial engineering (DCF go brrrrrr).
YC often also mentors founders on pivots (I'd say at least a third of all startups that make it to demo day were mentored into some sort of a pivot).
YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge, both of which really center on the founder first approach or Operators-turned-Angels - which I assume this marketing shift is about.
> YC often also mentors founders on pivots
Interesting. I once talked to an investor (not YC) and they asked me what I would do if the product failed. I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting"
> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge
Maybe. A write up about the new design would be cool I think
> YC has always been founder first.
Internally yes there is a "founder community". But publicly I would argue it was product-first.
> YC often also mentors founders on pivots
It doesn't seem unlikely to me that YC coined or at least popularized 'the pivot' in the context of changing business / startup directions. The first mention of using the word in that sense is in this comment [1] which explicitly mentions the usage by YC, while it only gets used when talking about pivot tables or more traditional uses of the word before that.
Edit: The "Lean Startup" blog series [2], which was quite influential, mentions 'the pivot' a little earlier than the post above, and really seems to coin it, so I guess that's the source (edit again: wrong :D).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806601
[2] https://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jum...
That's a fun question! 806601 was from Sept 2009. I found 3 earlier cases of 'pivot' in the startup sense:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699611 (July 2009)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=676514 (June 2009)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562739 (April 2009)
All 3 of those posts were by YC founders, so the term was obviously in circulation by then. The last of them includes a (broken) likn to this article: https://web.archive.org/web/20090703130211/https://redeye.fi....
Edit: that one was discussed here, but the comments didn't say the p-word:
Yogi Berra wisdom for startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537331 - March 2009 (9 comments)
> I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting"
I'd say it depends on a VC's investment thesis as well as the stage your startup is at.
For the former, some wouldn't like your answer because it implies a lack of conviction (why should I invest in something the founder doesn't trust). Others wouldn't because it adds a degree of uncertainty (if this B2C reels company pivots into MLOps tooling how can I do due dilligence on my investment).
For the latter, seed/pre-seed that is open to pivoting isn't necessarily a negative flag because they are barely generating revenue as is and are trying to find PMF, but a Series B startup suddenly taking about a pivot might imply they aren't doing so hot.
> A write up about the new design would be cool I think
We ain't the LPs. We don't deserve an answer.
It's a lot deeper than an apparent lack of conviction. Mentioning the possibility of a pivot completely changes the dynamic of the investment. 'No pivot' is asking "please invest in this startup; here's why it's a good idea". 'Pivot possible' is asking "please invest in me; I will find a way to get you a return on investment regardless of the means". Asking someone to invest in you as a person requires a certain level of egoistic thinking. Is the ego warranted? Maybe, but the investor won't know unless they build an extremely close rapport with you. Something like YC does with a 3-month on-premise bootcamp is that exact opportunity for investors to build a close rapport, so investing in people makes sense for YC. But a lot of investors are investing without building that rapport, so investing purely on the merits of business ideas makes more sense for them.
> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing
Depends who you're marketing to. Do they need to follow what others did or should they stay in their own niche? Because I'm not hanging out on a16z forum because they make fancy marketing materials, I'm one of the thousands of people who bought into the YC brand which was build over decades. Would be stupid to become one with the crowd of sleeky VCs.
As European I'm quite happy I didn't see YC involvement with the current administration, and if they stay a bit clear of the AI supergau I'm sure they'll be fine.
> YC also needs to pivot
It's been reported that the ratio of mentors to founders had become quite bad. Seems quality has gone down since they tried to scale something that doesn't scale
I've heard/seen that as well. I've also seen more experienced first-time founders also go straight to angels who have a very strong track record in a specific segment (eg. Elad Gil or half of 8200 and Cyberstarts+YL Ventures) because they can provide better terms and mentoring and customers
A trend that has become worrisome to me (especially with the past few classes) is the "MBA"fication of YC - a large portion of YC founders chose to do YC as a checkbox on their resume. Best case they make the next Pylon or Hightouch. Worse (and most realistic) case, they exit and then go become a VC associate or PM at $BigTech.
There are still plenty of good startups being incubated at YC, and YC's alumni network is formidable, but I do understand the need to burn dry powder (and explains SpeedRun as well).
(YC pls don't ban me from demo day)
YC is a political movement. Look at their leaders' activities and what they fund.
any details?
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/y-combinators-police-surve...
I'm pretty sure the designer used political campaigns as inspiration
Gary Tan shows up in a photo at the bottom but nowhere by name. Gotta hand it to YC, whoever handles their PR needs a raise.
What...?
You can CTRL+F his name. He's right there.
didnt know they had a website. Do lobsters have a website too ?