localcrisis

bank account. tech startups have huge balances compared to lifetime

I was in YC >5 years ago when batches were in person and in the large-two-digit range. The experience of YC is completely different. The class sizes are in the hundreds and many times I've spoken to founders who didn't know another company in their batch existed.

It's a highly optimized assembly line for getting a company to give a 1 minute pitch. They said they'd never do remote, for good reason, then (understandably) flipped when the pandemic happened. But the downsides of remote didn't disappear when covid appeared...

This doesn't mean that founders don't love YC or that it's not worth it. It doesn't mean that parts of YC haven't gotten better over time. Again, highly optimized. It doesn't mean YC isn't a huge boon to your company's reputation.

But if you're looking for small, focused mentorship then YC is no longer the same place.

You can, but when you're making that much above what a series A or B company pays, it's not a useful number. Having multiple offers that are comparable is what matters. A company can go ±5% but it's not like they offer you $180k and you give them your $800k Facebook total comp then they're like, "oh, I guess we'll give you $800k then."

> I also talked to a few fintech companies. I entered the discussions with pre-existing biases that these places are stressfull, not innovative but well paying. The conversations confirmed these biases (except the salaries, which were lower than I expected).

That's interesting. I wonder which companies these are?

I agree. We tried using TripleByte for hiring but what they screen for and what matters are entirely different. A founder we knew got an angry missive from one of the TripleByte founders because they’d rejected candidates during a final culture screen. Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!

I have had this exact experience with Triplebyte both as an engineer and as a hiring manager.

I simply do not care about things like, “what does malloc return”. I do not care what people know about bloom filters in Postgres. The 99.99% of web developers don’t have to know these things. I do not care if you can implement Tic-Tac-Toe.

It’s poor interviewing, which is the entire product they’ve been offering.

Not to mention the preceding paragraph:

> When I started at Stripe, I asked to delay my start date until after a family vacation, but my manager just told me to start sooner and take time off later (Stripe was just shy of 100 employees and moving incredibly quickly). I now had an artificial deadline of one month to ship my first project.

That’s a reasonably sized red flag. Asking someone to miss a family vacation so they can go after some arbitrary deadline?

Yikes.

His reply is after hours upon hours of getting torn apart for doubling, tripling, twenty-times-ing down on his power trip.

And he still believes that some ethical line was crossed.

What IP was stolen? The idea of running code from a web editor? The _button placement_?

There’s nothing here that says he’s stolen code or any IP. The CEO doesn’t even claim that he’s stolen real IP. Everything that’s similar is public knowledge and the burden of proof is to point out what’s been stolen.

Which the CEO could! Because the work was open sourced. So he could reply and say, “hey, you implemented this part in a way that is in code you worked on. It’s also a pretty atypical solution to this problem, so it seems reasonable that you took that from us.”

He doesn’t.

Instead, he gets insecure that a kid implemented a similar product in a couple days and decides to rail on him, then offer a half-apology well after it has blown up.

had the same experience with Aileen.

Many VCs, founders, and DNI leaders have echoed that All Raise is primarily a way for VCs to improve their personal brand around women in tech. They don't make investments, don't run substantial programs, and spend much of their time/money on PR.

If these VCs were serious, they would commit X% of investments or X% of investment dollars to the groups they publicly support in panel after panel after tweet after TechCrunch interview.

All over this thread you are responding about the details not being public.

The existence of the job search itself is the issue. I'm not sure what's not getting through about that.

Opt-In doesn't help them achieve their product goals.

Triplebyte as founded isn't working so they're trying to take a valuable asset they have (engineers looking for jobs) to compete with linkedin

The problem with bootstrapping a linkedin competitor is the same chicken-and-egg problem with networks generally. You need people on it for people to join it.

What Triplebyte wants is your identity public. That's the product goal. The problem is that opt-in won't get them that. What are the incentives for anyone to make theirs public?

How many people who were searching for a job without telling their company are going to opt-in to make that public?

Most certainly not enough to bootstrap a LinkedIn competitor.

So someone had the idea to move fast and break things, either:

a) hoping no one would notice

b) hoping the fallout wouldn't be bad

c) not caring that the fallout would be bad

d) not knowing that there would be fallout

none of the above are particularly inspiring. It does seem hard to miss this coming

I tried "find hot local singles in your area" and the top result was /r/vinyls

actually very impressed

As a VC, marketing is part of the job. Perhaps the most important part of the job.

Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building.

Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building.

In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies.

You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done.

By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I.

What does it take?

Good marketing.

It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers.

Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)