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).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806601
[2] https://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jum...
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'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 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
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.
I get that the subtext isn’t dishonest, but cmon, you know what you’re doing
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.
In addition YC Research didn’t send their pledged funds to OpenAI:
https://archive.ph/20230518211335/https://techcrunch.com/202...
> According to federal tax filings, at least one of the named donors, YC Research, never gave a single dollar
New YC page looks great – but it just doesn't feel "yc" to me.
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.
I turned my phone to landscape and the scroll "sensitivity" no longer felt wrong, but then a new bug was revealed. It chooses to put focus on the right-most item in the carousel. Now the animation doesn't play for the first item.
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.
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.)
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!
Real world metrics would feel slightly more on brand than valuations
Right?
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).
You can CTRL+F his name. He's right there.
in each batch only 2 - 3 startups really work out and make it big.
A real lesson in frugality.
Yeah, especially laws and regulations.
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.
...even if those obstacles are reality, the law or basic morality.
Brands are resurrected in fashion all the time with new designers, CEOs and owners while keeping the name, heritage (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 musical 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? Also, finding the right people from the get-go is another significant challenge, and users of course.
Why don't those inactive companies share their failure stories to find some value-add? It's 2026: they could be mere hours away from an IPO horizon :)
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.
"YC turns builders into formidable founders" - and then a bs faux-definition of formidable.
Dictator is another name.
Isn't there something better to aspire to?
But that’s just how the world is. Capitalism is optimized for the bullies to be on top.
That’s exactly why Trump is the most powerful man of the most powerful country.
I hope it changes someday.
One suggestion: adding a quick filter by batch year or industry would make it easier to browse. Sometimes I want to see what's new in a specific space like AI or dev tools.
Not particularly easy when you've been funding the likes of Flock(YC S17).
This is followed by a series of before and after pictures. YC offers not money but personal transformation. Their standard offer of $500,000 for 7% is not mentioned on the homepage, maybe because it would invite comparison ... when you see numbers like this your first thought is: I wonder what other accelators offer? The before and after pictures are something no other accelator can compete with.
Love this quote
(I know the previous deal was different but just to get an estimate ...)
500k to each of 5,000+ startups = 2.5 billion
in exchange of
7% of 1.3 trillion = 91 billion
~36x return.
It's even better than that as they invest, on average, less than 500k and get, on average, more than 7% equity. (But they also get diluted, so, who knows).
Of note, that 1.3 trillion follows a comically long tailed distribution.
OpenAI is 500B.
Stripe+Doordash+Airbnb+Coinbase+Reddit+Scale is 400B.
The remainder is 5,000+ companies.
Obstacles are also any legal constraints that will break and pay later in fines, like Airbnb.
Notice how they omit any mention of Loopt, and almost try to imply that he's famous for founding OpenAI, when the trajectory was really Loopt -> YC President -> other stuff -> OpenAI, and Loopt was a failure that was acquired for barely more than it raised in VC money, and spent its waning days as a seedy gay hookup app.
Sam's success was preordained, and failure, for him (and his VC backers), was never an option.
This is rather dark actually. True, too. Props to Y Combinator for not trying to sugarcoat things!
EDIT
The downvotes are interesting. Do people think the world will just give them things? I'm reminded of a quote I keep nearby from a book I read many years ago.
“His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
No. But just that more and more people are more and more fed up of collectively paying/enduring the consequences of the ambition of a few people that do. not. care. about. their. fellow. humans. neither. the. planet.
> When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.
Indeed. And if you act "regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way", without discernement, that tells something about you that you may, or may not realise.
You added this part. In my mind I add discernment to do right by others among other things.
Unfortunately when we distill things down to quips nuance is lost. Maybe it's my optimism, but I tend to read things charitably. Nothing I've ever accomplished has been without obstacles, some that were seemingly impossible to pass at the time.
We do not have to be charitable with people that have such financial and industrial (hence political) power over our lives, and that do not display obvious and verifiable signs of charity upon the human kind either.
When you reduce it to that tagline, what other people want or need is an obstacle.
When you see that quote, you apparently focus on the "if I want X to happen, I need to create the circumstances that will lead to it".
When I read that quote, I immediately think of a long list of people who choose actions with complete disregard to the consequences of those actions. Mass unemployment? Destroy local communities? Poison the environment? Surveillance states? Hey, as long as they got what they wanted...
At least we got some decent side discussions in the small spaces during the interim
Put another way, the ability to accumulate resources, is not a reliable indicator of the "good" being created in the world.
When the quantitative metric of "Money" is used a a proxy for value creation, it creates serious and dangerous side effects.
This is a fundamental failure mode of modern capitalism.
Capitalism requires ethical discipline. Without it, we get runaway resource accumulation, that rationalises actions and strategies (externalisation, extraction, optimisation-at-all-costs) which cause more harm than good.
The techno-optimists (See e/acc/Marc Andreessen)[0], frame progress as intrinsically good.
I believe a more prudent approach is needed, one that is wise and looks at business from the perspective of:
STEWARDSHIP & BALANCE,
rather than
RESOURCE ACCUMULATION & PROGRESS.
While I do not disagree with all he says, and do not think technological progress is bad, you will notice there is no mention of ethics in the entire manifesto other than as an "enemy".
Philosopher Charles Taylor argues that a defining feature of modernity is the rise of what he calls “disengaged reason” [1]:
> Contrary to a Platonic understanding of reason where a meaningful order exists in the cosmos and in the soul that serves as a source for the highest good for reason to discover and conform to, disengaged reason "is no longer defined in terms of a vision of order in the cosmos" (Taylor 1989, 20). This disengagement allows reason to look at the world from an 'autonomous' viewpoint, leading to the abandonment of all 'horizons' > or frameworks "within which we know where we stand, and what meanings things have for us" (Taylor 1989, 29), thus rendering any inquiry to be independent of an overarching telos.
> The great innovation with modernity was to convince people that money is *GOD*. With the enlightenment *MONEY* replaced *GOD* for a lot of people
This is not to say I am arguing that money, profit and competition are morally wrong, but rather the way it is packaged. It is often elevated to the ultimate end (telos), rather than the means.
The fundamental category error is making the assumption that:
VALUATION (or Money in the bank) = Value Creation (For The Greater Good)
As you have rightly pointed out, the "It started here, now it's worth $xB" is an indication of this worldview, where the telos itself is "MONEY"
[0] https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[1] https://www.academia.edu/26548899/Disciplinarity_and_Islamic...
The movie posters behind look like garbage, and what's wrong with that Return of the Jedi poster? Why is there a random blob and a broken face at the top instead of Darth Vader?
And why is there a random Google+ logo on the left?
And why does Fred Ehrsam have a huge thumb and silky smooth legs?
[1] https://bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/beforevs...
"Here is an awful photo of our star founders. Look at how terribly they looked and what awkward nerds they used to be, when they came here."
You need to fire whoever green lit this.
Why would they be embarrassed?
(I do sense artifice. Possibly wrongly.)
YC turns builders
nto formidable founders
And a little dirt next to founders.
TheCoreh•2w ago
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.
wizzwizz4•2w ago
0003•2w ago
/s
Shout out to the risk takers.
BoorishBears•2w ago