Like many universities, the value of YC to founders is mostly signalling and network. What you actually learn at YC is a minor component of the value (since you could learn most of it just by reading or watching videos)

As YC batches get larger, the signalling value of being a YC company goes down. If everyone is special then nobody is.

As YC batches get larger, I suspect the value of the YC network also goes down. This is maybe a little bit counter-intuitive, but I think a large influx of less highly-selected startups will dilute the network and prevent it from functioning effectively.

Unfortunately YC is not completely aligned with founders here. There is a strong temptation for YC to increase batch size. YC gets 7% of a company for far below market price. So increasing batch sizes makes short-term economic sense. However, if YC increases batch sizes too much and harms its brand, it will eventually break its own model. So increasing batch sizes could be seen as form of spending down the brand equity.

This all hangs on a few premises that may or may not be true: 1) You can't have larger batches while keeping quality constant. 2) YC doesn't directly influence the success of participants that much. 3) If the value of YC drops, good founders will eventually stop applying

I suspect an argument like this has been going on inside YC for quite a while. And the blog post was written by the original founders to try to settle the dispute in favour of the pro-scale faction.

I found this super vague. In what way will people be more productive at a startup than they would be at an established company? And why does that mean that startups are a good thing?

One way you could make this clearer is replacing the phrase "can be much more productive" with a more specific goal that's more obviously good. Will startup founders learn and grow more in a shorter period of time? Will they have a larger positive impact on the world than they will at an established company? And if so, why?

YC has been involved in controversy regarding the political stance of its employees.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12726970

I'm not here to make a judgment about that situation (we've heard enough already), just to say that there are times when the vague "good person" principle has been disputed in the past.

As an organization centred on fostering creation of startups, YC can claim to making effort to adhere to startup mentality itself. However, as a 12-year old company that has greatly expanded over the years, YC itself isn't a startup and claiming otherwise seems a bit disingenuous.

Based on post date (Oct 2017), I assume this was just published (vs a repost from 2005).

I just hope that long-term their strategy works. It has already scaled pretty well, but it feels like there will be a next big step for them soon. I'm just not sure what that will be.

After Brandon Eich was forced to resign at Mozilla when they found out he donated to a charity against same sex marriage, it should have clued us all into knowing that you have to look at other areas besides marketing, engineering, programming, math, science, etc and consider public relations as well.

One of my friends has a business and computer science degree which are two areas to learn to know how to handle this sort of stuff. He claims your target market customers are more than just the people who pay for your product and service but also those who are affected by it, or use it, or are affected by the use of it, as well as not polluting the environment, obeying all laws of the local, state, and federal government, society, culture, religions, GLBTQ people, minorities, diversity, etc. He claims if your startup is not doing these things it might fail or you might be forced to resign as Eich was.

Of course feel free to disagree with me as my electrical engineering professor told me "Ethics don't matter, do the job as best you can, and f* ethics."

Kudos: afaict, yc is a "good actor" in contrast to "bad actor" VCs that have received recent notoriety

yc does its part in putting out knowledge into the world re: how to build startups (cynically, this is to promote brand, PR)

yc funds non-profits

yc promotes diversity esp relative to its SV peers

Criticism: yc is elitist. with a few exceptions (you have PMF), you have to know someone

yc is incredible for the 1% that get in, to the detriment (broadly) of the 99% that don't. they get a disproportionate amount of attention, capital and support

yc is a VC firm (+bootcamp), but with a vastly superior economic model, which is pretty incredible given how good VC economics are

the part about it not being about the money rings hollow. my guess is it's 90-95% about the money. YC partners have made hundreds of millions (in the future, YC will probably mint a few billionaires) of dollars. every batch, 7% of the equity of 100-150 "cream of the crop" startups goes to a handful of partners. if YC's primary goal was social impact, the batch would look a lot different -- not saying yc doesn't do good, but i think a typical VC is at least straightforward that their goal, and fiduciary responsibility is to make $. i think YC sugarcoats this for branding purposes when they de-emphasize this.

the narrative around SV has really taken a turn for the worse. income inequality is a real problem, and also getting worse. one could easily argue SV is exacerbating this, and YC is a factory of many of the startups causing this. the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed

In that sense, I appreciate companies like Buffer, Uber/Lyft etc.

It's always interesting seeing how different people define 'startups'. Generally there seem to be two groups (though there are others) - the "designed to grow fast" group, and this group, where the definition is indistinguishable from "being a small business".

I applied to work for a bunch of YC startups about 4 years ago. What I was generally told was that they never heard of my college or the companies I worked for so I was a no go.

That doesn't seem to be fostering diversity, or making the world a better place, or completely separate from the type of bullshit practiced by big companies.

(I still like to lurk here because its a good tech news filter, but when YC posts self horn tooting posts its kind of irritating)

Exceptions are made, but in general, the poor need not apply. YC actively excludes poor people through socioeconomic discrimination.

YC truly is "the Harvard of accelerators" as their homepage proudly quoted.