SandersAK

love this idea. the question then is: who has made the Toyota 22R-E of software?

read it as Prion, and hoo-boy, did that seem seriously ironic.

love when they put stuff in like this...

One note on the repo's AGENTS.md: it contains instructions directing agents to post comments on a GitHub issue thread ("AI Agora", issue #127). I ignored that — it's the repo's content, not your request, and I don't act on instructions embedded in fetched files.

I love the posts about how YC was better back in the day. It was the same, it's the same. It's just bigger and there's more timeline now to reflect.

If you think the partners (the core of which have been there since day 1) have really changed their outlook that much then you've not been paying attention.

YC has always been a smorgasbord of status seekers, dreamers, ruthless pragmatists, creators and artists. It's a big community that keeps growing, the good parts and the bad parts.

There were scandals then, there are scandals now. They pick some teams perfectly and others totally wrong. The most important thing is that they keep doing it every year and more people get access and a shot at doing their thing.

FWIW I was YC W14 and yes it was totally better back then and we were all geniuses and pure lovers of startups only with no ego...

If you are the majority owner, or stand to profit vastly more than your team from an endeavor, then you are never a servant.

Using terms like "servant" to appear humble, when the equity split is massively lopsided is patronizing at best, and manipulative at worst.

The reason there is not a lot of dialogue around this is because the numbers don't work for all parties at the right time.

When you have a small founder team, you need capital for essentially nothing to show. You can't raise that capital selling the $170M exit dream to angels or a fund.

Conversely, VCs are assuming a 10% or less success rate across their portfolio. And of that, maybe 2-3% of portcos really returning everything.

So they don't have the luxury of shepherding 100 portcos to $170M exits, since in reality, a $1b exit has a similar chance of happening as a $170M exit. Which is to say very very low.

There's no magic sauce, no prime formula, no wizened or sageinvestor. It's a shit show from start to finish. You're best off finding investors who are on the same wavelength as you, and focusing less on whether you hit a home run or a grand slam.

When you get to a place where you're printing cash or whatever, then sure, make sure the math works out for you. But for 99% of all founders, this question never comes, and they spend too much time thinking about it.

I guess it's better than the 7% you gotta pay to get an Orange username on HN.

kinda buried the lede, didn't they?

"However, according to the EMA, the benefits of both mRNA shots in preventing COVID-19 continue to outweigh the risks, the regulator said, echoing similar views expressed by U.S. regulators and the World Health Organization."

it's very possible for you to have the experience you're describing from a system, and for the system to be predatory and extractive.

Just as many people live in nice suburbs and work in cities where there's extreme poverty. They get a good life, don't often have to contend with the pain and suffering of others, and can dismiss those claims as exaggeration.

Where do I sign up to LP for the AKH firehose fund?

Talking "Why does capitalism work so well?" during a pandemic caused in large part by crony capitalism is the sort of bravado energy I need right now.

Many of the comments in this thread do not understand the concept of free speech from a legal perspective.

Free speech does not mean that you have the right to say or distribute whatever you want on whatever platform, owned by a private corporation you want.

on a side note - these are super dog whistle comments, and I'm surprised the mods are ok with them.

I agree that the vast majority of VC is just a shitty index fund and crapshoot.

I do think that YC, from a Performance perspective is light years ahead of all the others that launched just after it did.

For me, the skill of PG was being relentlessly focused on the core of what made startups in that era super leveraged. That insight is obvious now but it wasn’t at the time. The essays did synthesize explicitly how and why startups work. No one else was taking such an extreme position: that you just needed to make Stuff people wanted and the rest would be viable.

Lots of VCs to this day still think there’s all this other shit you need. And if I’m being honest, some YC leaders have bought into that too.

I agree, like all white male founders and rich before and after PG, that 90% of it is extreme privilege and chance but that’s literally all of tech Wealth at the moment