Y Combinator

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The platform's own early signals for this company — hard-to-fake, and where one preceded a real raise, the measured lead.

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• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  we've now gotten it to 200 applications to one investment yc is investing in one percent we're now into 0.5

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  our deal flow is second only to y combinators we're getting 20 000 applications for funding now

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  you got my combinator over here doing 500 bets and then they've got like a little bit of like they put their extra 350 in at the note so they're kind of getting themselves 10 12 of a company it seems like

• bullish assessment Dave Winer

  Y Combinator is a, I would say net net is a positive thing. I always thought that incubators were a good idea. I really did. I wrote about it when they were out of fashion.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  I think it's, you know, I think Y Combinator does get credit, Paul Graham, for saying we're going to invest in developers and they're going to be the, the tip of the spear.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  And the idea was you're going to work on it for three or four months. You're going to have 3K each. It was ramen. He called it ramen funding. I'll pay for your ramen and part of your rent. You guys work for three or four months. If it works and it works out great. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  In the early days, he had no money. I think he gave 8K per founder. So if you had two founder team like Reddit, he would give them 16K. If you had three people, he would give you 24K. If you had one person, he'd give you 8K.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Y Combinator had a massive influence on the startup ecosystem. I give Paul Graham so much credit.

• bearish criticism Courtland Allen

  a bunch of sycophants at Y Combinator who have now decided that the only way to define success is if you beat whatever the previous high score was. It's literally like looking at the Donkey Kong machine and going, okay, this person hit this high score. Anything less than that high score equals failure.

• bearish criticism Courtland Allen

  when I was in Y Combinator, someone in my batch sold their company for like, I think, $2 million, like a few months after starting it, which I thought was amazing. Like, holy crap, you could start a company and make millions of dollars in a few months. That's life-changing. Doesn't happen anywhere else. And everybody else around me was kind of like, oh, they sold out way too early. I can't believe they didn't have the right ambition. And that was bizarre to me. And I didn't want my values to bec

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  you're basically dilute 7% with the accelerator deal, 6% or 7% common.

• neutral fact_claim David Hsu

  when we went through YC, YC gave us 120K, whatever it was.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  And he is the CEO of retool.com backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia. What a great group of backers.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  It's also a negative signal, right? I mean, I've, I've talked to venture capitalists who discovered this sort of Y Combinator playbook.

• bullish assessment David Hsu

  we went through the accelerator Y Combinator. We initially started by selling to other batch mates and that was pretty effective. Um, and so if you're thinking about doing the accelerator, I think if you're a SaaS company, this is one huge advantage is that, uh, you get sort of this, uh, uh, ready and sort of willing, uh, audience of other startups, uh, that think alike, uh, and are ready to purchase software because they don't want to be spending time building internal tools either.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  Congrats on almost $70 million in funding for going through Y Combinator, the best accelerator in the history of Silicon Valley.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  yc people had to fly to mountain view spend 10 12 weeks there in like a physical location and yc is totally virtual now and from what i can tell is as good as it was when it was we went fully with the launch accelerator it's

• bullish assessment Garry Tan

  today we talk about uh creator economy and things like that but i actually think like paul graham figured out a lot of the stuff early right he did his essays his essays were the top of the funnel it was like you weren't meant to have a job and then i read those essays and i'm like no no no no oh my god this is great like this is me me yeah totally i mean i was working for peter teal's uh you know startup palantir which is public now which is insane and i read his essays and i was like oh my god

• neutral fact_claim Garry Tan

  i mean i would argue paul graham was one of the first people to add some software where it's like apply on this website and like two percent of people can actually get into y combinator and right you showed that oh there's actually a lot of space for adding software and then when i got there i built you know their social network which like one in three i see people use every day so i'm like that they're like software things right yeah book it's a joke on facebook it's actually from the office

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  I would if I really wanted to give credit here, I think Naval and Angel List, and Paul Graham and Y Combinator into a lesser extent.

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  it's basically one percent of people get into y combinator and so i said listen you know all due respect to y combinator the truth is uh because i do this for a living as well we can't tell the difference between the one percent and the 10th percentile probably even the 20th percentile if i'm being honest which is to say 9 out of 10 or 19 out of 20 people are just as good as the top one person or startup and because companies pivot like i i think uh paul graham said like 50 of people in why come

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  gary said he gets 45 000 now 40 45 000 applications so we're kind of right behind them they accept one percent i think they do 450 startups a year still 200 something per bat and we do a fraction of that we do 25 of what they do we're 50 basis points of application pool they're one percent that kind of i think is the right number

• neutral assessment Elizabeth Yin

  y combinator certainly has a strong brand but you've even seen them rise in the number of positions they've had and then pair it back down

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  uh for a a venture firm it is possible for uh somebody who has programs like y combinator 500 startups tech stars or launch and what we're doing with founder university so we're trying to have enough of a base of companies that we can hit unicorns early early in the life of uh startups maybe you could predict that one in 100 one in 50 perhaps

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  TopTal is the Y Combinator company. I think it was a YC company that used the safe created by YC. And YC knew that this was an edge case. There was a possibility, which is you never convert the equity. You just pull all the money out of the business. You build a giant business. And then those investors are screwed. And the TopTal investors got screwed really bad.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  that's when y combinator had their um fund which was their um growth fund continuity right they came up with the term continuity for it weird terrible name actually um because it gives the impression that it's not as cutthroat as it is and that everybody gets one which i think is why gary probably got rid of it

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  it's just a y combinator knockoff

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  The vast majority of YC startups are just an idea with no revenue, just an idea with no revenue. 25 million is a pretty crazy valuation to ask for, for just an idea with no revenue.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  His response about don't worry about YC 7% equity take is a good comment... any of these programs that 7% gets made up for in the valuation you get, if you go raise money after, whether it's our program or his program or any program

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  Gary Tan... says that the vast majority of YC startups start with just an idea or with no revenue, meaning that they are younger at Demo Day age and the other startups raising similar rounds. So he thinks that the ARR comparisons that Nicole put up are a little bit specious... but no matter how you slice it, you're still paying quite a lot for not a lot of revenue.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  If you're raising a $25 million valuation caps, if this data is directionally correct, and I believe it to be, with 100 in ARR, it's 250 times revenue. So if you wait one year, that company will have spent that $3 million or much of it, they'll have gotten to 300K in revenue. And if they do a $25 million round, now they're still at 100 times or 90 times revenue, which is still extraordinary.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  People like Nicole do not have a big enough staff to sort through the 20,000 applications we get, the 50,000 that Y Combinator gets, the 40,000 that Techstar gets.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  If you get accepted to Y Combinator, go. If you get accepted to Launch, go. If you get accepted to Found University, go. Antler, Techstars... if you can get into one of these programs, they act as a filtering mechanism for people like Nicole.

• bearish assessment David Friedberg

  You will pay 5X net net on the valuation to the ARR performance.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  The majority of unicorns in Silicon Valley did not go to Y Combinator. They didn't get backed by Sequoia and they didn't get backed by me. That's just the nature of how big our market is.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  You're going to get essentially here, half the price for triple the performance, which is six X leverage, but let's just call five X leverage on every dollar invested. This is why a lot of folks have opted out of the YC game because there are a lot of dentists and a lot of folks coming to Y Combinator demo day who are, you know, maybe not as entry price discerning.

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  What Y Combinator has done is what Harvard has done. They've created incredible brands that people are willing to, um, pay for value or proceed value.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  This is like literally the top 10% or 5% of startups, you know, coming out of Y Combinator, Launch Accelerator, Techstars, et cetera, Antler.

• mixed fact_claim Unattributed

  She grabbed some data from the Y Combinator spring 2025 batch. And then she looked at a number of non YC pre-agency companies from around the same era. And she found that from the YC cohort, the average round size, 3 million average cap on their safe notes was about 25 million and their average AR just over a hundred K for non YC precedency companies at around the same time, average round size, 2.4 million smaller average valuation cap on their safe 15 million, much lower. And their average ARR

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  There's very few J-Cals and Y-Combinators out there taking flyers on teams. I'll just be totally honest about it.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  it's my job to find companies before they go to Y Combinator and the ones who are in that second, third, fourth, and then be able to buy three companies for the price of one YC company.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  they have a selection process that only accepts 1% like Harvard. So if you're only selecting great founders, you know, you do get less, I think, you know, mistakes in the portfolio as it might be like people who just aren't cut out to be a founder. So there is that. So you are paying for value.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  a lot of these Y Combinator companies are coming in only having raised YC and maybe like a hundred K in angel checks. And so like you're paying up for like their velocity as well. It's like, they went through the YC program and like got to 200 K in ARR in like a much faster time period than another company.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I think that they have built such an incredible brand in the ecosystem. Like YC is like, you could go like talk to someone in the Midwest and they'd be like, or like a family office in the Midwest and they'd be like, yeah, like I know YC, like I, you know? And so I think that there is like a global brand element that they've done like an incredible job building.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  this basically shows 5X leverage to invest in seed, seed companies, pre-seed companies that don't go to YC. That actually tracks my lived experience.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I would say the other piece of this puzzle is that nobody ever talks about the bottom third of Y Combinator companies that don't clear market. So all these statistics are so massaged. I trust none of them. I don't trust any of this data that we pull up here because the game I see on the field is selective, um, data sets.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  nothing against YC. We, we don't really compete with them because we accept less than 1%. They accept less than 1%. You know, we, there's just plenty of people. If you want to make 125 K bet on them in an accelerator.

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  The issue is if the valuations are that overpriced, which you have to ask yourself in one year, when they come back to market to raise their next round, what will the valuation of those companies be?

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  I just don't think the math at Y Combinator mats for seed funds

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  YCs, I mean, depending on like how you think about YC, I kind of consider is like premium pre-seed, I would say.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  I'm going to YC demo day later this afternoon. And they, I think most of the companies in the batch have been told to like, you have to hit like 200K in MRR... they're like a pretty good signal to look at for like how the market is moving with regards to the targets that they're setting.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  which is why I think Y Combinator has done so well with technical founders, because people can just get stuff working, and it's just extreme advantage.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  maybe they own like 450 million, I mean, that's extremely ballpark on YC, but obviously, it's a great return.

• neutral assessment Eric Newcomer

  I think the standard YC is like owning, like three and a half percent, probably

• neutral fact_claim Eric Newcomer

  this guy Casar Unis at YC, I think, you know, was sort of a big proponent of theirs there. And he introduced this. So Ben Ling was at Coastal Adventures, and he was sort of just, you know, going through the YC portfolio.

• neutral fact_claim Eric Newcomer

  GitLab comes out of Y Combinator, you know, years after the founding of GitHub.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And remember TopTel, they never raised another round of funding. This was something that was pointed out to Y Combinator when they came up with this safe, which is not safe for investors. And investors never got their money back. They never converted into equity. And it's just sitting out there. And this was always the criticism of the safe was this is kind of like a made up instrument that has some flaws in it. And at some point, somebody will abuse it because it won't have a conversion date, c

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  So a safe was made by Y Combinator. It's very founder friendly. It's not very investor friendly. There are some flaws in it around the conversion date. So this was introduced by YC back in 2013.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  But you're going to that 12 week program six in our case 16 weeks, and you're getting that halo of hey, Y Combinator or J Cal or whoever has invested in the company, Techstars, they had a filtering process. So downstream investors go, Okay, if you've been through Y Combinator, we'll pay a little more for those companies.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  come to launch accelerator, we'll give you $100,000 for 6%, or it's I think 125 for 7% at Y Combinator, that implies about a $2 million valuation, which is very low.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  So when somebody graduates from Y Combinator, you know, they're gonna be worth 12, 15, $20 million, and they probably have unpaid pilots.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  dishonest argument or a poorly constructed one

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  in emerging markets they raise at lower valuations okay so now if they raise at 4 million in that example ycombinator owns 15

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  here's ycombinator saying we're gonna put this money we're gonna make that bet

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  you got to give them a lot of credit for going international

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  yc has pretty good diversity stats compared to where they were and they started in the valley started actually yeah and their international stats are tremendous so like people never want to give yc credit because they're so successful but man i give them a lot of credit for giving more money to founders at whatever terms the best terms they can

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  yc entering that market creates more competition now the local people

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  the fact that yc is so aggressively going to india and africa

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the fact that yc is there is a huge net positive for those founders in those emerging markets

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  what if they never raise and then you got the safe sitting out there forever that creates problems and what if they can only raise at a very low valuation then this takes up a lot of the rounds and that can cause a screwed up dynamic so if they can only raise that four million and yc is getting 10 well the other investors got to get 10 or 15 or 20 so now the cap table is really getting watered down at a young age for the company so that's a little bit of a trap there

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  in a way yc is copying what i did six years ago i said we'll give you 25k now 25k when you graduate at whatever valuation you can get and then i'll put you out to my new syndicate which will raise 125 to you know 350k depending on how good you are and a lot of companies actually did that so and people picked us because of that

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  now we're seeing not just seven percent of it go to yc but you know 10 to 15. what that means is who was getting the numbers between 7 and 15. it was friends and it wasn't friends and family typically it would be seed funds power angels uh you know people putting in 100k check a 250k check and so yeah they they are knocking one or two of those if there were three or four of them in a round out

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  y combinator partners y combinator alumni friends of y combinator pick off the top 10 percent of graduates before they go to demo day

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  full stop because they didn't put a number on it and you can go to market with 375 of your million dollars 37 percent already accounted for and once you have over 50 60 of your round full man does it close quickly because people start to realize the train is leaving the station

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  so that's what's happening here um and for if you're a company it's a great deal

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  okay so first of all i would say why is y combinator doing this this is an ownership play

• neutral fact_claim Molly Wood

  y combinator announced they will now invest five hundred thousand dollars in startups this is an increase and it has caused a little bit of friction with seed investors

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  everybody who's in the venture community who's jealous of them getting 7% of a company for 100 grand.

• bearish criticism Chamath Palihapitiya

  I will come out in the coming months, and I'll announce, we have a better deal than Y Combinator.

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  with Y Combinator, with them doing like this $375,000 blind bet, like we had done that previously, I think we influenced them. And now I'm looking at it going wait a second. Okay, now they're making that guaranteed.

• mixed fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  competitors of people they've already invested in. They do it on the regular. So the evidence is different. Now, if you look at Hacker News, if you consider Hacker News, the YC alumni social news site, it's like a subreddit of YC founders. That's what it is. It's 70, 80, 90% YC founders, they all know each other. It doesn't say Y Combinator on the site, really, except for the URL. But you can be sure the mods, it's run by YC, it's controlled by YC. So yes, anything with Stripe. Now, is it coordi

• mixed assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  Now why Combinator? Actually, it's kind of false why Combinator wanted to accept in the second time why Combinator bets on all kinds of conflicting people. In fact, that's created a little bit of controversy. So if you're Airbnb or Stripe, and 20 different people come in who want to compete with Airbnb, Stripe that why Combinator is going to accept you. And if you create the why the companies in outside the US that compete with Airbnb and Stripe, they'll bet on you as well. And that has been a p

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  and of course you're going to get some company to come along and buy your company that's not doing that well so you can get your returns and i mean look it's a whole it is no conflict no interest no conflict no interest this is the opposite of everything you

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  and yc is an accelerator that works for some companies and not for all of them

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  i had a venture capitalist years ago be like i think you should take a look at why combinator and whether it's a net negative for the valley in general because every once something has enough influence yeah and power then of course they can seem like the bully in the room and it doesn't mean they didn't build that influence legitimately

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  if you do drill in on a yc company and they have 10 customers and you find out seven of them are from yc i would discount all seven yeah okay so i would say those seven don't count baby mob it'd be like it's not much just a club look it's a club let's call it what it is

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  when people do diligence on a yc company it might be wise and people have told me to discount their sales numbers or to drill into them and find out if there's a little favor bank going on here where let's say 10 yc companies pay for your product you pay for their product this is called round tripping in the industry

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  but what i will say is they because of their reputation a lot of the new investors uh not the old investors get kind of sweeped up in it so if you're a dentist or a lawyer somebody from outside the industry you kind of have felt like over the last years it's a safe bet to bet on a yc company and so you'll pay a higher price you won't review the documents and you make a quick decision so he's absolutely correct

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  y combinator will put you in front of hundreds of investors at demo day that's true he's like yeah sure that happens but no it's not unique nearly every accelerator does this including for example ours and there's only seven of you so he says sure yc might have more investors but it is simultaneously the hardest accelerator to stand out in given the outlandish batch size the demo day is kind of a joke

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  valuation by more than 10 to 14 percent that part of the problem is the batch size is 400 which seems to get to both of those issues right potentially the valuation thing because they're just pumping them out by the hundreds literally and how could you possibly give personalized advice

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  just diluted so this is probably true

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  he's being intellectually dishonest on that one so in that first one he's saying yc's name will raise valuation by more than seven percent is the most accurate not the 10 to 14. it's a subtle point but that last 375k is that market rate not at the seven percent rate

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  i can tell you as a first-time founder you're going to have a much easier time raising money and your company will become worth more than seven percent more valuable so that's a pretty easy calculation to make

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  oh yeah absolutely i mean someone's going to own 10 to 15 percent either way this way the funding is guaranteed you know exactly who owns your 10 to 15 percent correct you're off to the races the only question i guess i i have and maybe ryan has too is could you have gotten more money for the 10 to 15 percent if you went to the open market is this like the easy choice that's a bit of a discount and

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  You might've noticed why Combinator did something similar six years after I came up with this concept. ... a lot of seed and angel funds that were, you know, feeding at the trowel of Y Combinator. You saw them all freak out when that announcement came out. Like, oh, wait, I'm putting 350, 500 K in. Now, if there's four of those slots and Y Combinator just took one, I now have a 33% less chance or a 25% less chance of getting one of those slots.

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  founders they should play these uh programs off of each other you should try to get into techstar sequoia yc uh and launch accelerator

• neutral prediction David Friedberg

  yc you know investing more money in these companies is going to be the future

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  no one is immune, right? Like Y Combinator is not immune.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  apparently the summer 2022 batch only includes about 250 startups. YC said the reduction in batch size was due to the macroeconomic downturn changes in the venture funding environment.

• bearish prediction Jason Calacanis

  But maybe they're looking at it saying, well, will we be able to raise another billion dollar fund and keep up this pace, right? Because if they were going at this pace, and they had the budget to fund 1400 startups under the new standard

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  And then when they raise the minimum investment, it got more expensive, you know, the way that works is you get 125 for 7%. And then I think they put the other 375 in at whatever your terms are when you graduate, which by the way, is what I created, you know, seven years ago with the launch accelerator. So they got that idea for me. And it's a great idea to give myself credit for it. Because a lot of times when you graduate, giving them more money, you know, helps grow the company, and you can g

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  it was clearly way, way too big, right? I mean, 800 out of every single possible startup all year long is still probably a relatively small number. But it's not it certainly doesn't feel like wildly exclusive at that point. So it sounds like they got too big, maybe unmanageable.

• neutral assessment Sebastian Mallaby

  the effect of the tech bubble in the 90s was... and so founders ages went down right at the same time that funders ages went up and that i think exacerbated this culture clash uh which was expressed both through the founding of y combinator which was a sort of revolt against the big check vc dim

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  there's no difference between the 1.5% they accept, and the next 15%. Probably the next 50%. If I'm being honest, nobody's that good of a picker. There's no difference between the 1% that get into Harvard and the top 50% that apply. We all know that, right? I mean, it's, we all can agree on that. Like the top 50% of people applying to Harvard, they're all excellent. They're all extraordinary. And they all deserve some investment and support.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  So this is not true what Gary Tan is saying. Product market fit is the most important thing in startups. But it doesn't trump valuation.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  If you raise 5 million on 25 million, aka a YC company, that's I'm adding that part, you have to smash it and really smash it to get 1.5x on that valuation within 18 months.

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  you should be thankful to YC for starting these companies. And then you should deploy strategies for investing in them when you think the price is appropriate. If the price is too high now, they're going to raise money five times more. So build a relationship with the founder, and then play the long game.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  Whereas people who are normal startups, non YC startups, that don't do this high pressure tactic have the demo day thing, do the party round where there's no VC setting the price. So you don't know how the price discovery happened. If you're at five or 10 million, you get the product to market, you get to a couple 100,000 revenue, now you're gonna get 20 million. So you're, let's call it $7 million valuation, you get 500k revenue, now you command the $20 million valuation. So you tripled your va

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  if Y Combinator is bringing you pre vetted companies, remember, they only accept one and a half percent. That's like going and hiring people from Harvard Business School, or Stanford GSB, you've used Stanford or Harvard as a filtering mechanism. So you don't have to, but it's the person coming out of Harvard GSB or Stanford, I'm sorry, Stanford's GSB program, or Harvard's MBA program, are they the same price as somebody coming out of Fordham's MBA program, or an MBA program from a university in

• bearish assessment David Friedberg

  you would be able to invest in five companies at, I would say, on average, half the valuation of a YC company, which means you would essentially be like investing in 10 companies. So you can invest in 10 companies for the price of five YC. And I can tell you, in that process, you would find companies that are equally good

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  And I'll be honest, a lot of neophytes, when I've gone to demo day, it would be like, maybe 20% people in the industry, and then 80% people who are somewhat new to the industry, and those folks are going to make bets in a pretty frisky way, I would say it's kind of like new poker players, they can play a lot of hands, they, you know, they're kind of predictable, they may not be as savvy.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  they all put out the front that hates closing, and they do some unnatural acts in terms of getting people to close, they might do increasingly high valuation.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  on demo day, they do this thing called a handshake protocol. It's kind of I wouldn't say high pressure, but it's high pressure.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  YC is now a worldwide program, we do English language startups, because they don't have many multilingual people. And we don't have people on the ground and other regions. So we don't do startups in India, or Japan, or China.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  they claim YC and I don't have any reason to doubt them 20,000 applications, the most ever 1.4% accepting rate, so it's actually gone down and 52% accepted with just an idea and no product 77% accepted without revenue.

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  In truth, the amount of work it takes to run accelerator is I kid you not 20 times the amount of work it takes to be a seed investor, an angel investor, or a venture firm 20x, the cost, the time, the effort, it is a massive amount of money.

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  the investment community resents Y Combinator because they get to invest at a $2 million valuation, right? They put in this money at a $2 million valuation. It's a great deal for YC.

• neutral assessment David Friedberg

  Y Combinator has had an ethos of being a little adversarial on the margins with the investment community.

• neutral fact_claim David Friedberg

  Y Combinator companies getting $20 million valuations when non-YC companies with the same amount of traction are commanding $5 or $10 million valuations.

• neutral fact_claim Brian Chesky

  we were voted by Y Combinator. So each batch, they rate like the best company like halfway through and at the end, and we were rated the best.

• bullish assessment Brian Chesky

  I also want to give credit to Jessica, because I think Jessica thought, I remember Paul and Jessica said later, they thought we were like cockroaches. And I think they mean it in a good way, that it was like an investment nuclear winter. And in a nuclear holocaust, the only thing that survives are cockroaches. And the only thing that would survive an investment nuclear winter would be the founders of Airbnb, we said we won't die, no matter what happens. And so they basically funded us because we

• bullish assessment Brian Chesky

  He said something like, I guess if you can convince people to pay $40 for a $4 box of cereal, then maybe you can convince at least some people to stay in each other's homes. And he ended up admitting us to Y Combinator.

• neutral fact_claim Brian Chesky

  And then Justin Khan says, I'm going to email Paul Graham. And he ends up emailing Paul Graham. And he goes, is this deadline? Definitely, definitely over. And Paul Graham says, I will extend it to midnight tonight.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  A lot of folks, including YC, they don't want people, they don't want the investors to have ball control. They would rather see you do smaller rounds. They kind of advise against this.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  In our accelerator, we take great pains to explain to our founders, and we love a good hacker. We love somebody who can, you know, bend the will of the world to their vision. But we tell people, when you are doing something for a selfish reason, so for your own gain, like, you know, there was an issue where Zenefits was helping people hack their insurance licenses, right? And this was like the big battle at that company. And the founder, Conrad Parker, I got that right? Yeah. He got ousted. He d

• mixed criticism Unattributed

  Uh, the area of Y Combinator specifically, um, and, you know, startups generally can attract hackers. In fact, Elizabeth, on the application for YC, they asked this very specific question, which is like, tell us sometime you hacked something. And when Paul Graham talks about, you know, uh, Sam Altman, he was like, oh my God, he was such a hustler, a hacker, you know, got through all these things. There is a hacker culture, white hat, black hat, gray hat in between. So I guess we have to also thi

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  Therefore, who does invest? Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, A16Z, Pear, has a great summer program. Sequoia has ARC. I have Founder University, Launch Accelerator. Go to those programs first.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  You were brain dead by 50. You were about to shoot yourself by 75, and the last seven were just, you know, whatever.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And I don't think it's good for them. Zombie companies, people would call them. Yeah, zombie companies with $150,000 in the back, yeah.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  The issue, though, as more and more cash was made available to YC companies and ended up with $150,000, you know, free money, no questions asked, is that you started having startups that were just, you know, two people and lasting for a year or a year and a half, iterating on their ideas. And, therefore, a bunch of YC companies became, like, not really dormant, not really doing anything.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  At the same time, if you look at the performance of YC as an investment, it's actually been really, really good. And the guys who invest in YC are going to make, you know, bank.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And so the whole notion of funding by default all those companies was sort of strange.

• neutral fact_claim Jessica Ma

  Like Y Combinator, Incubator that I went through, they set this up and I think over time we'll get more people looking at this, but it's still kind of new.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  the most elite startup accelerator incubator

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  And literally Michael Siebel at Y Combinator told people that great investors, the opposite of what you're saying, don't think about it, shut up and send their money and move quickly. And don't think about returns. Just think about, this is literally what Michael Siebel said at their angel thing. It's like the worst advice I've ever heard. Just think about how great it will be to brag when you put a 250 K check into a company. And I was just like, this is terrible advice. And I realized everythi

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  here, you've got YC, and they've locked up the early part, we're picking off good chunks of the early part.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  In the early days, it was very easy to criticize Y Combinator. And I said this to like, zero public companies. So let's pump the brakes on like, why how important Y Combinator is until, you know, they get some companies and some numbers on the board. And they have, you know, you can't have 3500 companies in the game we play and not have some big wins.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  And to be clear, it's working. They've invested in over 3500 companies. They've got eight unicorns. I think it's way more than eight.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And that's why people get so bent out of shape about Y Combinator. They have control. They're locking up deal flow, you know, and that's it.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  I saw in my feed when I woke up, a new CEO of YC, friend of this pod, Gary Tan.

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  the most cynical thing I've heard people say is that they manipulate investors. And so how do you do that? We have a demo day, you put high pressure tactics on people, you have to sign or the valuations going up and teach founders how to manipulate investors.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  YC's got a much more well known brand

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  I think the big innovation for Techstars and for Paul Graham's YCombinator and David Cohen's Techstars was they didn't come up with the ideas, and they took a very small percentage of it.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Techstars and YCombinator started at the same time, they both get equal credit for this revolution.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  people complaining about YCombinator generally is people being jealous of the fact that YCombinator gets to invest at a $2 million valuation, and they get first bite of the apple with a lot of great startups.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  YC, of course, incredibly influential.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  people seem very excited that Gary Tan is going to reinvigorate it in as much as it even needs it.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  When so much money came into the system and YC, in some ways, a victim of their own success because so many people want to go there with status, that it became a bit of a competition to see, and I've got to be, you know, judicious here with my comments, but I think the posture changed from, wow, these angels really are angels in that sense. They're putting their money on the line. And they know it's a 90% chance they get nothing back to, hey, how can we manipulate a bunch of dentists and high ne

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  when I did Segment, for example, Y Combinator was itself brand new. There were like 30 metal chairs that were folding chairs. And Paul Graham, he would open them up. And Paul Graham was running it. And I did Segment at a $5 million valuation. So YC deals were priced that way, so much cheaper.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And that maybe the class size at YC has expanded a whole bunch. And maybe that's part of the problem

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  And you'll notice there's not a lot of companies from the recent cohorts out of the 50 companies featured. Only three are from the classes after 2020, most of them being from the early 2010s.

1. 2028-02-11 But maybe they're looking at it saying, well, will we be able to raise another billion dollar fund and keep up this pace, right? Because if they were going at this pace, and they had the budget to fund 1400 startups under the new standard · Prediction · pending