Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator

https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1899092996702048709

by btilly • 1 year ago

1421 271 1 year ago

It seems the first few batches of YC were VERY successful. But, the number of successful YC companies I can think of from the last 10 years of batches is very minimal despite them investing in thousands of companies.

Makes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype wise).

Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out

Invictus02• 1 year ago

You might find this blogpost eye opening: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pulling-back-the-curtain-...

ant6n3• 1 year ago

Wow, there's so few solo founders, and so few non-US companies. I bet nowadays, there's very few non-AI companies. So if you aren't a US-based AI-startup with multiple founders, perhaps ycombinator is not for you.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 1 year ago

I do think YC has become chasers of the latest trend rather than creating the trend. That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.

Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing.

Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care.

I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a passion.

I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that YC has not had a success for a very long time.

It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen to the tech industry.

Isamu3• 1 year ago

Well it’s a function of those that apply and are accepted, and pitches are going to reflect the current hype. YC occasionally puts out a call for applications in areas they think are interesting but perhaps they haven’t seen many compelling pitches for. Have they recently put out a call for specific areas of interest?

huang_chung• 1 year ago

That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.

Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums.

All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky, made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same way on AOL 15 years before.

Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an existing idea or resell polished turds as new.

bbor3• 1 year ago

A) Very true!

B) peaked* :)

C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place."

EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely massive wins that they have yet to (and shouldn't expect to!) replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.

FinnLobsien4• 1 year ago

Yeah it's a good question to ask:

Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it actually due to YC selecting so well.

Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article and a few social media posts.

But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for a few people.

= Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity infrastructure company.

tyre• 1 year ago

Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?

OpenAI and Anthropic come to mind

fragmede5• 1 year ago

tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?

Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak, Marshmallow.

FinnLobsien4• 1 year ago

There are many factors (YC needs to allocate more capital, not founder-led anymore, needs to fill more batches...) etc.

But another one is that the first batch has had 20 years to grow and compound while the rest has had less time to become massive.

I'm not saying YC is perfect now (though it's still great). But I think a simple factor could just be time for many portcos.

listenallyall• 1 year ago

Or that most of the largest opportunities have been filled and newer companies are aiming at much smaller niches, or to be alternatives to well-established competitors.

Isamu3• 1 year ago

Agreed, to compare you would have to not just look at current magnitude but rather compare the historical trajectories of growth

philipwhiuk• 1 year ago

The alternative is that it takes x > 10 years to become very successful. But that seems somewhat doubtful.

shawabawa3• 1 year ago

Well Dropbox (ycs first big success?) was founded in 2007 and only went public in 2018

Reddit (yc 2005) only went public last year

I know "going public" doesn't define success, but it does show that companies can still be growing after 10+ years

nostrademons• 1 year ago

It's because every market inefficiency eventually disappears as entrepreneurs capitalize on it. It's like there's an optimal architecture for the economy at a given technology level, and the job of the entrepreneur is to find that architecture and refactor the economy, piece by piece. And if they're successful, they get to take everything of value in the old, obsolete parts of the economy that get destroyed.

When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for disruption.

Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and less successful. The big successes already happened. I could see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999 entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3 technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he was totally on point.)

RGamma3• 1 year ago

And when the new equilibrium point involves a huge amount of centralization and off-shoring and therefore wealth concentration and loss of livelihood, the proletariat becomes angry.

In that context it's a fiendishly genius move to atomize and distract the "obsolete parts of the economy" and have them vote for their own disempowerment.

It's maddeningly obvious and feels unrelentingly deterministic. If the plutocrats fail to properly cement their position however, we already know what happens next.

hn_throwaway_99• 1 year ago

I'm always surprised people just seem to discount timing.

The mid/late 00s came with the rise of "Web 2.0" and mobile that was a gigantic technological shakeup, and YC was definitely in "the right place at the right time", and their Web 1.0 pedigree and expertise transitioned perfectly to these new technologies. Importantly, these technologies required relatively little capital for new startups because all the infrastructure in terms on the Internet, GPS, mobile, etc. had already been built.

I'd just argue that in the past 10 years there simply hasn't been nearly the "greenfield" tech landscape that existed in the mid 00s. AI obviously has been a tech sea change, but so far the contours of that change just look much harder to monetize. The frontier models are becoming more and more commoditized, and everyone else is just trying to figure out how not to get shoehorned as "just an OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper". Looks like there may be some winners that are really putting all pieces together in an attractive package (Cursor and Glean come to mind), and it's fair to wonder why YC doesn't have one of these "AI app winners" (and maybe they do, or will, I don't know), but in general, I think there is just nothing like the opportunity there was in the late 00s/early 10s to gobble up a big part of the new tech landscape.

astonex3• 1 year ago

I think all the recent AI slop dominated batches will be their downfall in 2-3 years time when they all become junk and the AI-hype is over.

ilrwbwrkhv2• 1 year ago

Ya that is my fear. Just like the whole crypto dominated batches. My fear is Garry Tan is leading YC and he falls for every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing.

jarsin• 1 year ago

Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out

Most of their recent communication is going all in on AI. Saying stuff like this batch prefers hiring devs that use AI, and 95% of their codebases are all AI generated.

tasn• 1 year ago

Companies take time to become successful, so the verdict is still out on most of the companies that started in the last 10 years. Time will tell.

Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top companies")

pclmulqdq4• 1 year ago

I believe median time to unicorn status is now about 7 years, so this is not as uncertain as you think. In other words, 50% of YC's 7-year old unicorns have already showed up. The number is higher for older companies.

scarface_742• 1 year ago

Just looking at how most have done since going public , most VC backed companies including YC are just exiting and finding the “bigger fool”. YC has done phenomenal for itself. For the public that bought at IPO - not so much.

https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report

If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of the S&P500! 14 of the 17 companies lost money for the investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO value. Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500 benchmark

flaque• 1 year ago

Of course? On average, companies that are still standing after ~15 to 20 years are going to be a lot larger than the companies who started more recently.

Diederich• 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 is always fun to look at, 18.5 years ago.

jessekv• 1 year ago

Huh. I upvoted it.

giancarlostoro• 1 year ago

Fun there's enough posts in HN you could type your DOB (no leading zero) and find a submission for it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52590

Arubis• 1 year ago

It took me a moment to think through what a leading zero on a DOB meant and that it wasn't a Long Now foundation thing.

TeMPOraL• 1 year ago

52950

What format of DOB is that? M/DD/YY?

btilly• 1 year ago

There are actually enough that you can type your DOB in the format YYYYMMDD and find a submission for it!

This has been true since https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=20190615 was posted on June 15, 2019.

matsemann• 1 year ago

1 indexed?

Edit: HN is apparently written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp.

redox992• 1 year ago

Almost all DBs have a default starting ID of 1.

eru2• 1 year ago

And Arc is (or was?) implemented in Racket, another language in the Lisp family and closely related to Scheme.

dnissley• 1 year ago

Crazy that there was no original iphone announcement post. Would have happened between

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=62

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=63

arjunaaqa• 1 year ago

Jessica is my hero. Paul is a guiding force.

Every effort has some defect but it’s intention and effort which matters.

World would be a very different place without YC.

Thank you all !

dowager_dan992• 1 year ago

> but it’s intention and effort which matters.

I think I understand what you're saying, but this is a very dangerous generality. I think the HOW matters more than the intent.

nine_k• 1 year ago

The idea here, AFAICT, is that the right intention matters even if the implementation is lacking and imperfect. If the intention is there, the implementation will improve.

The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.

milesrout3• 1 year ago

Intent is the only thing that ever really matters.

Apocryphon2• 1 year ago

Did Stilgar write this

EGreg• 1 year ago

Haha wow, good one

dredmorbius7• 1 year ago

On Twitter, with all that's going on?

jeffbee• 1 year ago

Garry Tan and the rest of YC leadership are 100% aligned with Musk's goal of crashing the American economy so they can subjugate labor and buy assets cheap. It can't be a surprise they post on X.

femiagbabiaka• 1 year ago

Ultimately that will be the legacy of YC.

briandear2• 1 year ago

What’s going on?

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

One of the things that makes HN great is that it largely avoids the Current Thing discussion.

There's plenty of places to get into that. Can't we have one that's focused entirely on hacker news and not any political news?

dang12• 1 year ago

(hmm that's a frequently asked question; I wonder if we should have a list of such things)

If you want to know how we think about this, here's a pointer to a bunch of past explanations:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

dredmorbius7• 1 year ago

HN is increasingly a significant participant in current US politics. Attempting to pretend otherwise really doesn't work.

HN has a policy of moderating discussions of YC companies less than other threads (and yes, "less" != "not at all"). There's a strong argument that a similar policy should apply to HN-adjacent politics and political acts.

Posting to what was once called Twitter today is an increasingly political act. and a strongly anti-democratic one. Yang (as evidenced by his Wikipedia bio) is a political actor.

Starlord2048• 1 year ago

[flagged]

dang12• 1 year ago

We're getting complaints from users that your comments are LLM-generated. Of course it's hard to say for sure, but if they are (in whole or part), please stop. Generated comments aren't allowed here; HN is for human conversation.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

What you have identified is nurturing tech development and this has become easier. But more complex tech development should now be the next focal point of incubators. And this means founders who have more speciality in the work they do.

There is still a gap that needs fulfilling. YC is one player who can fulfill it. Late-stage startup development is a business structuring problem and the biggest blank slate for new founders. From term sheets to understanding convertible debt to navigating VC maze.

jedberg• 1 year ago

Happy birthday YC! YC has created a ton of value, and I can say is responsible for the major inflection point in my career. I'm forever grateful to Paul, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor for seeing the value in the reddit team before anyone else did.

Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )

alberth• 1 year ago

"Founders at Work", written by Jessica is what got me into HN (and I was an initial lurker for quite sometime).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_at_Work

Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007).

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg

wheelinsupial• 1 year ago

In case you’re not aware, there is a podcast by Jessica Livingston and Carolyn Levy called “The Social Radars” that interviews founders.

azhenley• 1 year ago

Downloading it now. I didn't know about it. Looks like there are a lot of big names!

lobsterthief• 1 year ago

Thanks for the recommendation; I’ll check it out!

I love that this podcast only comes every two weeks. Some (like Software Engineering Daily) are far too often so I either feel the paradox of choice or that I’m missing out.

hakaneskici4• 1 year ago

Such an inspiring book - I still have it by my desk :) I bought it because they covered Joel's FogBugz and 37Signal's Basecamp (I was building a competitor product back then).

sturadnidge• 1 year ago

It’s the book that started it all for me. The Hotmail story is one of my favourites.

light_triad3• 1 year ago

There's going to be a lot of "the big successes already happened" type comments about YC but I think they're wrong.

Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship & web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe, or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important ways, but huge successes will surely happen.

borski• 1 year ago

When YC started, people were saying literally the same thing; the dotcom bust had already happened, and the era of big internet companies was 'dead.'

As usual, the death of entrepreneurship and startups has been greatly overstated. :)

ant6n3• 1 year ago

I‘m not so sure YC is really targeting industry experts in their fields who are doing startups, or?

pclmulqdq4• 1 year ago

YC wants to target established industry experts (every investor does), but I am not sure their median founder is over 25.

JambalayaJimbo• 1 year ago

Doesn’t YC still predominantly fund young men who aren’t at all industry experts in some mature field? It appears like the majority of startups I see are “AI for X” type applications.

light_triad3• 1 year ago

I think this is more a reflection of the applicant pool. It's easier to put together a team when folks are early in their careers - also if you've been in industry for some time you might know VCs and are already an 'insider' to that industry

ellis0n3• 1 year ago

The business is built on the fact that young founders have an extra 10-15 years to learn everything compared to older ones. I think this will soon change when older people start rejuvenating and extending their lives. Also, it's just a trend like TikTok and startups founded by 25-year-olds sell better. Given the startup maturation cycle of 7-10 years, the founder will be 32-35 yo and they'll need another 10 years to present a success story for the system to work

CSMastermind• 1 year ago

I remember the initial PG announcement about the founder's summer program and wanting desperately to be a part of it. I wasn't at a place in my life where I ever could join YC but the tribe that's been built by everyone involved has added tremendous value to my life. I'll always be incredibly grateful that this place and YC exists.

_sentient• 1 year ago

YC changed my life, and I'll be forever grateful to PG, Jessica, and the team for taking a chance on a homeschooled, GED-wielding solo founder.

rrr_oh_man2• 1 year ago

It's really good to read those stories.

I applied twice (once alone, once with a really amazing co-founder) and it felt like applying to a large faceless corporation, both times.

Automatic rejection after 30 days with zero feedback.

Kind of sucky, to be honest.

I'd just love to hear that the idea was shit, the application was shit, that my face was ugly, or anything, really.

TechDebtDevin• 1 year ago

Probably hard to give valuable feedback on tens of thousands of rejected applications.

firefax• 1 year ago

I keep forgetting there's a front page to this website. What a cool story!

whiplash451• 1 year ago

Quick bump for The Social Radars which is an amazing podcast co-led by Jessica. A treasure trove of true startup stories.

urda• 1 year ago

I thank dang for putting up with me.

ok_dad• 1 year ago

... with all of us.

bloomingkales• 1 year ago

I confess.

ryanisnan• 1 year ago

Happy birthday YC!

npodbielski• 1 year ago

Hacker News is just 19 years old? I remember my professor at university mentioning it when I told him I am using .net for my project. According to him I should use OS language like Java and recommended me to HN. I thought it is much older. Time flies.

I wonder if he is raeading HN still...

weinzierl• 1 year ago

Y Combinator is 19 years old. Hacker News was launched in February 2007, so it just turned 18.

For the longest time I thought Hacker News must have been some proof of concept for Reddit and must pre-date it, which is not true. Reddit was launched in June 2005, shortly after Y Combinator.

paganel• 1 year ago

As I remember it HN was initially a “response” to Reddit written in Arc, as by that point Reddit had already become focused on politics and some other more general stuff and had left its programming focus behind. HN was meant to fill that gap, with the important addition of the “entrepreneurial” / start-up business mambo-jambo behind which I could never get, but there were a lot more people that did get it seriously back then and which now have a lot more assets than people like me (didn’t care about start-ups, we were in here only for the programming stuff) now happen to posses. Lesson learned, I guess.

DiggyJohnson• 1 year ago

Appreciate this community. HBD Y!

bdamm• 1 year ago

HN has been an outstanding corner of the Internet, seemingly invulnerable to all the trash that has consumed the rest. I'd love to know how HN has avoided the bots and the spam, while retaining a simple and elegant login process.

IsopropylMalbec• 1 year ago

A benevolent dictator.

light_triad3• 1 year ago

dang is an amazing moderator

zfg11• 1 year ago

Nah, he's become a cynic. dang thinks Hacker News is a "swamp of amnesia". It's not a great attitude.

xkbarkar• 1 year ago

indeed

keybored• 1 year ago

I sometimes forget that this is a venture capitalist website with a weirdly computer science name. Okay fine. You can have this one day, main YC website.

scubadude• 1 year ago

It really is the strangest community. Clearly an ex-slashdot flavor to it like free the penguins and then someone will make a comment that right-to-repair "increases costs and reduces profitability" and shouldn't be allowed. I don't think these people would naturally have a beer together.

thom• 1 year ago

Founders - what would the ideal accelerator (or call it what you like) look like today?

0xCE02• 1 year ago

I'd say the only real reasons any founder needs "accelerator"/any kind of VC firm is lack of money and/or domain-specific professional help/mentoring when encountering a problem that seems to be too hard to overcome by yourself.

So, ideal accelerator/VC would be one that would want to fund your (ad)venture without taking too much motivation off by having large ownership/control, and have connections/pool of domain-specific professional expertise. And wants to believe in you.

jandrewrogers• 1 year ago

I’d suggest more specialization to reflect that some domains have materially different execution models, evolutionary timelines, and product playbooks when done optimally. There is some of this but it feels like there is often a tacit default model that every startup is social media, simple SaaS business, or similar and is biased toward what works in those domains. There are VCs that specialize in less conventional startup domains but the accelerators that teach people how to quickly and effectively execute some of these domains are limited when generic startup advice no longer applies.

If you are doing hardcore data infrastructure software, some kinds of defense tech, et al the startup building process is sufficiently different that first-time founders would benefit immensely from accelerators that really understand from direct experience what those startups need to do to be successful.

0xCE02• 1 year ago

HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.

I love the near-non-BS nature of it. And even though the techland changes, HN itself has had very little change, so it acts somewhat safe stable ground/forum/club for observing the ever changing techland. Although I recognize there is somewhat minimal degration in comment quality (less professional pragmatic comments over the years, at least so I feel), it still trumps every other alternative there is.

So, thank you PG/HN, and of course the HN community that makes most of it.

PS. I have been read-only mode for the past ~15y (and there was nothing valuable for me to comment on anything), but now I created account and this is my first comment :)

cobbaut• 1 year ago

HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.

I bet a lot of people here would say the same thing about Slashdot ten to fifteen years ago. @HN: Thanks and please don't change.

echelon• 1 year ago

HN has outlasted Slashdot by a wide margin at this point.

IIRC, Slashdot stopped being great around the same time as the decline of the Digg era. It started to sink in quality around 2007, which gave it ten years at most of being a central part of the online tech community (1997 - 2007).

I started reading HN in 2008. It's lasted nearly twenty years as an incredible community.

Here are some graphs:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/01/slashdot-fail.html

redox992• 1 year ago

You visit every day for 15 years and never left a comment? That's kinda crazy. It makes me wonder if this is actually common and we don't realize.

mamurphy• 1 year ago

I remember reading a stat on reddit that 10% of users upvote and 1% of users comment. So if my memory is (near) accurate, that's very common behavior.

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

If you comment once on HN you are easily in the top 5% of users by comment count.

hakaneskici4• 1 year ago

I'm at ~19 years - HN as daily home page since inception :)

Before HN, I used to hang out on Joel on Software and Eric's Business of Software forums; I occasionally used to post there and here but lost old accounts. If you have friends who have friends who has HN archeology skills and access, maybe I can recover my old account :)

miki123211• 1 year ago

I have plenty of semi-technical friends that do this. Some of them only look at the links (e.g. via social media bots), and aren't even aware that HN has comments.

They're the kind of people who consider themselves "tech enthusiasts", they can install a nifty tool via pip if the instructions are clear enough, maybe even figure out what's wrong if there's an error, but they're definitely not programmers by any means.

Quite a few of them speak "tech English"; they can figure out a settings window or a signup form, they know enough tech vocabulary and basic grammar to mostly understand manuals, maybe with some help here or there, and can barely string an English sentence together. Ask them to define "lettuce" or "salmon" and they're lost.

kbenson• 1 year ago

Probably. I created my account almost 13 years ago, but I read for years before creating it. I didn't create a reddit account until 2014, or a twitter account until 2015. I was reading Slashdot in the 90's though, to give you a sense of my age and how long I've been following stuff. I'm just a very late adopter...

nniroclax• 1 year ago

Absolutely. Some of us see (or at least I see) the level of discussion and feel it would be hard for me to say something worthwhile that sounds kinda smart. So I mostly lurk while being grateful for those who do write incredibly insightful comments.

romanhn• 1 year ago

Very common. I was a daily reader of Slashdot for ten years without ever creating an account. Took me only five to create one for HN :)

mezi• 1 year ago

Same here. I have been reading this site for 10 years and even though it got a bit worse, it's still the best source out there. Keep it up everyone.

simonebrunozzi• 1 year ago

Me, too. It took you a little while to make that jump. How do you explain it?

HPMOR• 1 year ago

YC built the culture of the valley, community and startups <3

thomasfl• 1 year ago

My HN account is 18 years old. Still no successful businesses to speak of after a few attempts. Have started an NGO instead to promote better urban planning and design.

hypertexthero• 1 year ago

Happy birthday, YC!

There isn’t a website on the internet that I’ve learned more from than this one.

Thank you.

computerex• 1 year ago

Long live Y Combinator, the source of endless inspiration and innovation.

agluszak• 1 year ago

HN is cool, the startup factory - meh

paul7986• 1 year ago

Been and enjoyed HN since the launch of Justin.tv ... 2006 / 2007.

This exact username Ive used on and off from 2007 to 2013/2014 then solely since then. My karma is low for such an account but my thoughts are odd lol ..i guess

codr7• 1 year ago

Been here since day 1, I was already semi-following PG because of his writing on Lisp.

7e• 1 year ago

YC has been exploiting naive founders for 20 years. Congrats everyone.

submeta• 1 year ago

Started reading HN nine years ago, when I screwed up my third startup the year before, was devastated, and needed some inspiration. And among the shared news were stories that inspired me again, that made me come back to this site every single day ever since. I like the cultivated discussions, like the things I learn about, and I feel like I never miss any tech trend. Excellent community. Love it.

Thank you PG, thank you Dang! Thank you to all the contributors for the high quality content.

itsthecourier• 1 year ago

what happened next!?

dwaltrip• 1 year ago

You only discovered HN after your 3rd startup? :p

lisper2• 1 year ago

I screwed up my third startup

You're half way there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42771676

very_good_man3• 1 year ago

Hey as a 20th birthday gift to the internet, why not stop censoring comments?

dang12• 1 year ago

HN has always been a curated/moderated site. I'm not really sure what "censor" means other than that, at least in the context of an internet forum like HN.

We basically moderate posts that break the site guidelines (the ones that we see, at least).

Is there a particular post that you feel was censored that should not have been? I'd be interested to take a look.

very_good_man3• 1 year ago

The censorship is almost non-stop. And no, it wasn't "Always Like This!"

octernion• 1 year ago

why on earth did they not post this directly to HN? who goes to twitter in 2025

mrguyorama• 1 year ago

HN's higher level folks like Gary Tan are uh, very friendly with Elon and his ways. They consider the current state of twitter a success.

antirez• 1 year ago

[I guess the tweet refers to YC the incubator, not the web site of news, but I want to focus on the latter]: I registered on HN a few days after it was created. The HN community was incredibly instrumental to my career, my ability to keep up with the development community, with like-minded people, and to have a voice, the times my posts and projects reached this home page. Thank you, for for all of that. Now, I see that, inevitably, as this place becomes bigger and bigger, there is no longer that strange, odd and wonderful "90s News Groups" alike quality. Despite the decline, I still find quite some value visiting this place every day.

Karrot_Kream2• 1 year ago

Agreed. HN was how I learned about tech growing up in poverty (back when I used to think Googlers all wore lab coats!) and gave me the inspiration to both study CS and pursue the career I was lucky enough to end up in. The bigger HN gets the more it has qualities I don't really like, but it's also the last text platform I consume without curation on my part. (I know dang and the mod team do a heroic job, but I do very little curation of my own here, unlike Bluesky, X, or Discord where I do a lot of things to keep my feeds/channels useful to me.)

sam0x17• 1 year ago

I agree. For me though it was only when slashdot started to shrink that I heard about HN, so I was a bit late to the party. To be fair, I still check slashdot almost daily!

manoweb• 1 year ago

ciao

I still use newsgroups (NNTP) and IRC everyday, hackernews is pretty good considered it's HTTP based

fsckboy• 1 year ago

https, if we're goin oldskool

callc• 1 year ago

HN is the only internet community I’ve found to be largely good. Thank you to everyone for all your kind posts and comments, and intellectual discussion. Love to you all.

Freedom2• 1 year ago

Agreed. Thank you to all for the endless curious discussion.

999900000999• 1 year ago

It’s the only place where you can causally talk to multi millionaire startup founders and CS legends.

It’s also amazingly inclusive. There was a poster here who complained that they were effectively homeless and upset their Pixel phone would no longer hold a charge. Someone offered to send them a used laptop.

I think we thoughtfully discuss issues related to tech, even though we don’t always agree.

mempko• 1 year ago

It's a good community. The part I struggle with is the anti-science trend I've seen here over the last 10 years.

tempaccount420• 1 year ago

For me, it's the politics. There's a certain kind of user that keeps pushing them here, to people who don't care about them, and which are barely related to technology if even. If you point it out, they will say "everything is political"...

scubbo3• 1 year ago

I like it enough to keep coming back, but lobste.rs is slightly preferable in my experience; more goodwill/less pedantry, and less Trumpelon apologism.

(If you are gearing up to reply to the last three words of the previous paragraph, I can promise you I'm not interested in hearing it. You have your preferences and priorities, and I have mine)

lisper2• 1 year ago

Thanks for the lobsters link. May I request an invite?

milesrout3• 1 year ago

I found that lobste.rs had a much narrower range of views on every topic. And the intolerance of other views is presented far less eloquently than here. People just get hard downvoted or banned. Not just the obvious political ones but technical views too: dynamic typing is rubbish, cryptocurrency is rubbish, etc

harryquach• 1 year ago

I love this community, the only social media worth investing time into. Here's to another 20 years.

bflesch• 1 year ago

Thankful for this nice community.

Also thankful for demonstrating that investors are just lucky humans and there is no secret sauce to all of this. 20 years of YC, nearly the same time frame as the low interest rate policy (started at 2008). The rising tide lifted all boats and thanks to social media we can also see the magic go away in real time.

Razengan• 1 year ago

and still none of the people in the charge have decreased eyesight for the site to have a more accessible theme. Amazing

jaza• 1 year ago

Thanks for existing, HN! And thanks to everyone that makes it awesome. My no. 1 stop on the interwebz for going on 10 years now. Please keep being the only not-s** online community left standing.

trainspotter• 1 year ago

While I've never worked with YC directly (though have lots of friends who have been involved with YC in one way or another), I found HN during the pandemic and it has been my favorite place on the internet ever since. I have learned so much from this community, across so many different disciplines. I truly cherish the community we have here and I thank Dang, PG and others for maintaining this gem in a hidden corner of the internet. And while I agree there have been some changes even in the time I've been a part of the site, it's still the best online group of people I've ever come across. Thank you also to all of you who make this such a great, informative, inclusive community.

Clubber• 1 year ago

Thanks for making HN, the best forum since the old slashdot. Thanks for moderating it for us, dang.

xingwu• 1 year ago

Happy birthday and thank you!

Deprogrammer9• 1 year ago

COOL, maybe update the site now? Just sayin....

b8• 1 year ago

Thanks PG, and daang. HN got me my first real job in security.

idomajid• 1 year ago

Happy birthday and thank you! I am really lucky to find this community.

rootsudo• 1 year ago

Happy Birthday! I'm happy to be a part of this community - it's the only real place nowadays on the Internet outside some financial forums where you can really chat with founders, startups, and see the converge of business and tech!

eointierney• 1 year ago

Thank you to PG and dang. I reckon this is one of the best places on the Internet.

Thank you everyone. I come here to learn and I do. The standard of discourse is heightening.

You're amazing

ellis0n3• 1 year ago

Happy Birthday, YC! I've been a regular participant in the HN community since 2012. All these years HN has inspired me and during this time I've learned a lot. I started back in the days of building FIDO, when the first point networks appeared. Of course, I’d love to see more communities and fewer bots, but progress is unstoppable. I wish the HN community to thrive and remain strong for many years to come.

I'm creating a mobile reader (iOS app) specifically for HN and if you want to join to speed up the process, you're Welcome!

https://www.acpul.org/blog/yc-happy-birthday-20

For those who don't have iOS, I started a Twitch stream for the vibe.

https://www.twitch.tv/guynpc

PS: I fear that I’ll never get into YC and in the future there will be no more startups, only an AI, and I’ll have to work as a battery cell in the Matrix.

lamuswawir• 1 year ago

This community provides the most informational value to me. Thank you people and long live.

russellbeattie• 1 year ago

Congratulations HN! (And @dang of course).

Can we please add target="_blank" to the links now?

(Seriously, I've got a crisp new $50 bill for whoever takes 30 seconds and slips it into prod. )

subless• 1 year ago

Also, thanks to @dang for keeping the community in-line with the rules/guidelines.

dang12• 1 year ago

I wish. But thanks!

jppope• 1 year ago

nah its true, this is one of the few places left on the web thats friendly and thoughtful (most of the time at least). That is directly related to your work keeping things civil. thank you

raldi• 1 year ago

My list of "greatest all time community-runners" is pretty short, and I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone I'd put ahead of you.

Melatonic• 1 year ago

Hell yeah !

rossant• 1 year ago

Yes, thank you @dang. HN wouldn't be HN without you.

junon• 1 year ago

@dang is far and away the best community manager / moderator I've personally seen or interacted with on the internet. Nothing is ever black and white, but he makes managing that look easy. Huge respect.

eru2• 1 year ago

Dang is great!

Btw, Scott Alexander also does a pretty good job.

monkeydust• 1 year ago

Echo this!

Somewhere in the multiverse a universe exists with HN died a horrible death because Dang made alternative life choices.

october8140• 1 year ago

He should get a bsky

nullbyte808• 1 year ago

Why did they post on X? Most of the people on there probably think HN is a Soros front. Also, why does it say twitter.com and not x.com? Would have been better just to post a link from their blog.

dang12• 1 year ago

Also, why does it say twitter.com and not x.com

HN's software rewrites URLs back to twitter.com for two reasons: (1) people still call it Twitter colloquially, which is the real measure of what a thing is called; and (2) anything else feels weird.

jtbaker• 1 year ago

Thank you for this.

Dave_Rosenthal2• 1 year ago

I worked with pg in a three-person startup in a basement in Harvard square just before he started YC. I was an undergrad at MIT and met him after arguing with rtm (who was a TA for my class) about TCP backoff. It was called Aspra and we were trying to build an app development platform for mobile phones. The idea was that you could build an application that could "render" to either an IVR system, for dumb phones, or the kind of web page that a Motorola "smartphone" of the day could view. Ahead of its time, like Paul. It didn't go far, and not long after he started YC. Good thing he did, for the industry and many of the folks here! Anyway, the "20 years" got my attention because I didn't feel that old, and thought someone might like the little story.

jimhi• 1 year ago

Wow! I've read all the essays and thought I knew all the startups ideas he had tried by now. This is a new one.

racedude• 1 year ago

Love this story. Thanks for sharing. I learned about YC/HN via my tools course at Purdue, and it continues to be a great resource.

knuckleheadsmif• 1 year ago

In the mid 90s (1996?) So myself and 3 others worked for Intuit and we traveled, from Mountain View CA, to your tiny office near Harvard to look at acquiring the company. I believe Intuit made a lowball offer and eventually you sold yourselves to Yahoo for twice the price. At Intuit we did not offer you guys money for the product, it really was not that special at all, but for the people—I thought only 3 folks at the time? The product was a web store front builder (Viaweb?) I don’t think we actually talked to Paul that day but I remember Trever and the tiny ‘server’ room.

It possible we may have met you too. It was a long time ago.

Dave_Rosenthal2• 1 year ago

You were talking to a slightly earlier company--this was post Viaweb.

captnphilip• 1 year ago

Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator!

In 2008, I transferred schools and moved to San Francisco with just $600 and a dream. Soon after, I started my first design agency, Badaboom Labs, hiring my college roommate and friends. With no company formation experience, I had no idea how to get clients either, so I walked to every coffee shop in the city, hoping to land my first gig.

My break came at The Creamery in SoMa. They were still remodeling, but I was determined to talk to the owner (shoutout to Ivory if you're reading this!). Eventually, they became our first client, then Vans. Back then, Squarespace, Stripe, and Shopify didn’t exist, so I hired developers off Craigslist to build the e-commerce side. Looking back, the opportunities were endless in building software!

We barely made any profit, but we had our first client and were building something real. At the time, I was more focused on building with a team than understanding customers. I knew little about scaling or growth, but I just needed to start—and learn as I went.

As the team moved on, I sold the business to a small print shop. That experience led me to experiment with new ideas, but my limited technical skills slowed me down. I knew I needed to level up, so I worked at startups, then moved into SAP & Apple—but corporate life wasn’t for me. I learned what I could, then quit.

The YC Journey

Around that time, I started meeting founders from YC through mutual friends and our soccer club in the Mission. I didn't understand what YC was exactly, but I was intrigued.

Some of them lived in a hacker house on Howard & Rausch St. in SoMa, where I remember meeting Justin Kan, Drew Houston, and Brian Chesky for the first time. Twitch didn’t exist yet, Dropbox was still new, and Airbnb was struggling with growth.

Imagine if I invested in just one of these companies. holy cow.

It was a defining era, but at the time, I had no idea just how much these companies would shape the future—honestly, I don’t think anyone did. I was simply inspired by the energy, the community, and the drive to build something great!

That’s when I decided to apply to YC with my third company, RecurPal

I was rejected multiple times..

But I kept pushing.

Then, YC opened up applications to their second program. I applied, interviewed, and got in.

Shoutouts + Gratitude

I’m super grateful for the mentors, friends, and investors who shaped my journey:

Jude Gomila (always believing in me & taking a chance), Anton(wisdom + friendship!), AJ Asver(former co-founder & friendship), Immad Akhund (support + friendship), Roger Dickey (building epic community at Greenwich Castle), David Langer (wisdom + friendship!), Sumon Sadhu, Dilan Dane(my first Burning Man Project), Gustaf Alströmer ( footy teammate + friendship), Keith Rabois, and many more!

Lastly, thanks to Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, and the YC Community.

Excited to see YC continue shaping the future and fueling the next generation of founders!

Karrot_Kream2• 1 year ago

Some of them lived in a hacker house on Howard & Rausch St. in SoMa, where I remember meeting Justin Kan, Drew Houston, and Brian Chesky for the first time. Twitch didn’t exist yet, Dropbox was still new, and Airbnb was struggling with growth.

Wow, small world! We may have overlapped. I was really close to Howard & Rausch around the time and was walking around, one thing led to another, and I briefly talked with Brian. It was a fun time and the paint was still very, very wet.

calrain2• 1 year ago

Please stop using X If the bar lets Nazi's in, it's a Nazi bar.

calrain2• 1 year ago

Don't down vote me, resist...

tjmc• 1 year ago

Congratulations YC! I remember prior to HN, pg used to post his essays to Slashdot under the username Bugbear and all the attendant sniping and lame memes that would come back in response. Hacker News was a breath of fresh air and continues to be my favourite online community.

pbhjpbhj2• 1 year ago

Thankfully, Natalie Portman setup a Beowulf cluster with hot grits to handle my memes!

I quite like(d) that silliness - but your could always choose to downgrade and hide 'funny' posts. I still miss the post/comment visibility functions from Slashdot.

Looks like pg 'joined' 6 Oct 2006; so we've a bit to wait for the HN 20th anniversary.

dailyplanet• 1 year ago

I used to look up to YCombinator, but now I am disappointed in the role YCombinator played in platforming anti-democratic figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, etc. who espouse scientific racism and eugenics with their obsession of race-based IQ levels and their desire for European whites to dominate over others. Big Tech's disruption model is not good for stability and notions of tolerance and decency. Happy 20th Birthday I guess.

liotier• 1 year ago

The brave comment I was looking for... I feel the same: Silicon Valley used to be holy Mecca to this French person; since I started having Internet access in the early 90's, all daily online activity was turned towards it - and some of that remains, as I log on here. To me, the financial success of the companies was a minor side-effect of the technological utopia which was the main point. But those who found financial success turned Silicon Valley into a toxic brand... They managed to make quietly progressive European companies look cool in comparison !

Amaresh• 1 year ago

Eternally grateful to PG and Jessica.

raminf• 1 year ago

HN has been a daily read for last 15 years. Appreciate the information flow.

Incidentally, after years of lurking, applied to the latest YC batch. Didn't make it, but will try again once further along, or with a new idea.

effdatechbros• 1 year ago

Anyone gonna mention Network Cities and the relationship to YC leadership or we just gonna ignore that?

willy158• 1 year ago

Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator

DeathArrow• 1 year ago

I wonder when it's HN birthday.

dang12• 1 year ago

Depends how you track it I suppose:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 (Oct 9, 2006)

https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html (Feb 20, 2007)

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html (Aug 14, 2007)

keepamovin2• 1 year ago

Who else applied to YC 15 times and never got an interview?

rrr_oh_man2• 1 year ago

Just out of curiosity, what did you apply with?

keepamovin2• 1 year ago

With BrowserBox / CloudTabs, which is basically Hyperbeam (YC company) before Hyperbeam. And more to take it further and apply it web scraping, and documents.

sivakon• 1 year ago

From the likes of Silicon Valley, this person defending his friend who tried to blow up a critics car

https://x.com/TrueAnonPod/status/1898155052159701148

tzury• 1 year ago

This is the earliest HN post available online:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2

RGamma3• 1 year ago

And after 20 years of acceleration the wheels are coming off. Anyway, HN at least is mostly cool still, I guess. So good job dang.

dmos62• 1 year ago

I'll use the opportunity to thank everyone for Hacker News: YC, the community, and dang. For me, it's been a special place with a special culture. No other community has provided me intellectual and social stimulation so consistently.

chr1ss_code• 1 year ago

helsinki• 1 year ago

Damn, no shoutout to @sama in that tweet - harsh.

c1one• 1 year ago

Normally I just lurk... but in all sincerity, Congratulations! A truly wonderful place, thank you All!

A_Stefan• 1 year ago

Been visiting this website for some time now and just made the courage to create an account and leave a comment. I'm glad and grateful this place was made.

Another year gone, new one to come. Happy Birthday!

chkhd• 1 year ago

HN is one of very few places where I feel "at home".

Thank you @dang, and everyone else!

wwarner• 1 year ago

Amazing number of household names that began at YC: Stripe, Outschool, Doordash, Reddit, Airbnb ... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/

Vixel• 1 year ago

20 years? BRB, scheduling my ice float.

vlad• 1 year ago

I registered @paulg on Twitter and "vlad" on news.yc in 2007 when this website (news.ycombinator.com) was "Startup News". Besides flying to the US Naval Academy, my first domestic flight was to Y Combinator Startup School in 2007. As you can see in my video, it would be the day before my birthday. Also, I had an app-based business, and Max Levchin and Mark Zuckerberg were speakers.

Vladislav Yazhbin at Startup School with many early YC founders (Stanford, 2007):

https://vimeo.com/3170520

I don't know why I missed the talk by pg (Paul Graham) in 2005 when Y Combinator was founded, but I recorded videos in 2007 because I saw "Pirates of Silicon Valley" in high school about early days of Apple and Microsoft. It was obvious that my videos about Y Combinator could be valuable some day. And, I liked that Paul Graham studied art and programming with many people, while I had made a desktop product with paying customers all over the world. I even joined the companies that Y Combinator accelerated, Justin.tv in 2009 and DoorDash in 2020, to help them succeed.

I visited Boston in 1995 (to get an award in the Governor's Office for winning a poster design contest judged by reporters, politicians, and art critics). I visited Boston again in 2002 after 9/11 (September 11) for my US Citizenship. I applied to the US Naval Academy and was nominated by U.S. Congress, although I was already attending a two-year technical community college. I focused on programming, similar to MrBeast making videos while attending a community college. My college is where George Washington built the first federal armory for United States, but they did not have student email accounts.

In 2002, sitting in my Student President's office, I came up with the idea that I could verify students with the .edu domain name and I could make a website for my college. I was already Student President and already started a printed newspaper. Although each issue was funded with Student Activity fees, Student Activities Office wanted to review each article. However, an employee showed me she used "Black Planet" to share news, and MySpace and Facebook had not been invented yet. Unfortunately, I didn't want Student Activity Fees to be spent to buy server hardware and software because student had free personal @aol.com and @yahoo.com accounts already. I might have mentioned to a friend at Harvard University. Also, I worked as a high school volleyball official, therapeutic recreation aide at a nursing home (entertaining residents who have alzheimer's and dementia), and the campus police department on weekends. I also attended monthly meetings with other Student Presidents of Massachusetts public colleges.

In late 2003, I launched "assfirm" to find and watch items and pay later for merchants on eBay, Yahoo! and Overstock. It was a bootstrapped, paid app for middle-age users who bought physical items on their computers. This allowed me to market and support a product for people older than students but younger than nursing home residents.

In spring 2009, Sequoia was interviewing YC founders in the Mountain View office. I attended this event after arriving from the airport. I stayed in a Hacker House with some YC founders. I met new founders who were excited that I had "assfirm" as a company to buy physical products from merchants. I explained I wanted a name with A in the phonebook. I talked with Max Levchin (founder of PayPal and Slide) in the street in Palo Alto the same week. His next company was named "affirm" years later.

Apple liked the user experience design of my Windows app in 2008. My company "assfirm" was selected by Apple to be the first to make native apps for the App Store in March 2008 before App Store existed. (At Startup School 2008, I don't think anyone else had been selected). I joined UMass Amherst for degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics. I proposed iPhone app designs for a Fortune 100 before I left to the four-year college, and built an app to track my phone's location as calendar events in university. I convinced the enterprise company and university to join Apple's corporate and education programs in 2008.

In summer 2009, I consulted at Justin.tv and co-founded "Hot Or Not Live" with Michael Seibel, Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, and Kyle Vogt. Michael Seibel said he wanted to partner with me for their first API hackathon but said he was CEO and had no other contribution except his idea of rating livestreamers. I had better ideas like live shopping, maybe as a future company. Employees loved the "hot or not" rails demo that I built in hours. It had a video embed and used the REST API to find the next channel. Within hours, Justin.tv founders hosted it as hornotlive.com, and a new hot-pink design and logo, making sure it was on the company's heroku account in case they need to take it down. It was launched very quickly, like investors ask for. This scared Paul Graham and investors when they heard about it via Hacker News, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Also, the HotOrNot company threatened to sue. About two years later, Justin.tv founders launched "SocialCam" for chat and "Twitch" for gamers in 2011.

Before I joined YouTube founders in 2012, I applied to Y Combinator with a mobile app to send messages and photos, and to sell stickers/emojis.

I came up with the idea of a chat app with self-deleting photos, plus the way it would grow quickly. At Startup School, I overheard Evan Spiegel talk about Picaboo. I decided to excitedly share my ideas to a group and walked with him for a bit. When I joined YouTube founders in late 2012, a coworker told me she used Snapchat.

At Startup School one year, Paul Graham smiled at me as I entered the building with a "Mohammed" nametag.

When I was at Startup School to watch Emmett Shear's talk, Justin Kan said "you didn't do anything!" about my three months at Justin.tv, which was completely not true. I noticed that Sam Altman was staring at me with a neutral face. I didn't know what to say. I thought that maybe Sam Altman thought I looked like Elon Musk, which I heard before from YouTube founders (who worked at PayPal with Elon Musk), Instacart founder (who said I looked like half-Elon Musk, half-Jimmy Fallon), co-workers, etc. In 2019-2022, I built a gym at my house in San Francisco and thought I could be a magician, singer, and do impressions as Elon Musk, Jimmy Fallon (I wanted to interview BTS for "Dynamite" while I was in South Korea in summer 2020), Dimash, Keanu Reeves (who filmed Matrix 4 in 2020 in San Francisco but I hadn't seen the movies), etc.

Another YC memory: I started a tech show on YouTube in April 2007 after Startup School. It's possible that I'm the first YouTuber to make videos to ask viewers to do things that help with algorithms (like leaving comments) while having almost no content about the topic. Also, an early usage of "Let's Go...!" Here's the episode about Justin.tv:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210109212744/https://www.youtu...

Happy 20th birthday, Y Combinator

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