The long term effect is that, owing to the costs of the compute hardware all this runs on, all of these services become profit centers for Google, Amazon, and Microsoft who control the cloud services backend world.

And

There really is no counter-theory. “The knock on YC,” Andy Weissman, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, told me, “is that on Demo Day their users are just YC companies, which entirely explains why they’re all growing so fast. But how great to have more than a thousand companies willing to use your product!”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...