_sentient

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.

I could see it going both ways. You're not going to know all YC founders by default, but you will know more founders than if the batches were small.

The individual network is larger, but comprises a smaller % of the total network as the program scales.

Definitely not trying to imply that these people don’t exist elsewhere, but rather than YC does a great job getting a bunch of them in one place.

Definitely could have worded that better, but my point is that I found YC to cultivate a density of smart + ambitious + nice people that I haven't found in quite the same quantities in most other networks I've been a part of.

Tons of incredible non-YC folks out there too.

I wonder how much of this is a function of the W22 batch being remote.

We all know the benefits: The fundraising pop is great, the brand patina helps you hire better talent than you would otherwise, the advice can be useful, especially for first-time founders, you can sell into the YC network, etc. All of this pales, IMO, to the value of the personal connections you make in the program. It sounds like OP, by virtue of being 8,400 miles away, missed out on that.

I went through YC in S14, and I found the in-person experience to be invaluable. There were 80 companies at the time, so we had somewhere around ~200 founders in our batch. Even at that scale, you're not going to get to know everyone, and I found myself gravitating toward a smaller group of people who I connected with personally.

I'm not going to lie, YC was stressful. You're dropped in amongst bunch of smart and accomplished people who are sprinting as fast as possible toward the all-consuming Demo Day. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, but that's not unintentional. Those shared experiences formed the substrate of some amazing, life-long friendships.

I have 15+ close friends who went through S14. We talk every day. We've been in each other's weddings. We've watched each other have kids, shut down companies, start new ones, get acquired for enormous amounts of money, and everything in between. It's been incredible watching their trajectories over the last 9 years. Some are C-level execs at public companies, some are tier 1 VCs, a couple are billionaires, some are homesteaders and amazing parents. All of them are solid, kind, high-quality people, the likes of which you are unlikely to meet in the regular world.

I think you lose much of that in the remote-only format. If I were to go through a remote-only accelerator located in Singapore, I imagine I would make few meaningful personal connections. Like it or not, Zoom is a pretty thin facsimile of real human interaction.

My life's trajectory is meaningfully better for the friendships I made in S14, and I expect that trend to keep compounding over the next 30 years. If you missed that benefit, you missed much of what makes YC special.

It's a fairly time-honored tactic to redesign a brand that has lots of negative associations built up, and I could see Dara driving this as part of the overhaul. Typically that results in a full name change though.

Having read through this, it sounds like the brand team considered more radical changes but ultimately found that the broad name recognition and generally positive associations with the stark black/white aesthetic were too strong to ditch entirely. What remained was the ability to iterate on the original brand, and that's what you got.

I agree with ditching "the bit" icon in favor of a "U" though. That logo made zero sense, and always felt like a creative team stretching to imbue an abstract mark with some sort of meaning.

DM me. Twitter handle is in my profile.

I was at Demo Day, and couldn't disagree more.

If you actually believe that, go ahead and pick the ten companies you think are worth something, and I'll take the "unpromising" part of the batch. We can put a five year bet into longbets that the top ten companies of my group will outperform your ten companies, as scored by either exit value or value of last round raised.

Picking winners is hard, and most great companies today looked dramatically different when they were first getting started.

Depending on what stage of growth you’re at, your Startup School mentor should still be able to be helpful.

Most companies in the program are in the 0-1 phase, but there were a few in my group that were 1-N. The program format is flexible, so it’s fairly easy to tailor content to your audience.

YC core has a similar dynamic, and individual companies in a batch fall along a fairly wide range in terms of stage / progress. They only break out a formal growth track once companies have >50 employees.

YMMV depending on your mentor of course.

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Yes, that's exactly how markets work.

They are about 10x the next best (Techstars) based on valuation of the companies they've funded (~$80B vs ~$8B). Valuation isn't a perfect metric, but it's a reasonable proxy for performance.

I'm guessing this is less about trying to avoid setting too high a bar, and more about taking the term sheet that offered a lower upfront valuation but with much cleaner terms and less overall deal hair.

Either way, this is super impressive from Ryan and the rest of the Flexport team. Kudos.

The answer to this is fairly straightforward: VCs don't actually expect (or need) every investment to be successful, they just need it to have the potential to be huge if everything works out.

Laypeople always seem shocked when a VC-funded company implodes. We should actually be surprised if we didn't see routine flame-outs, as that would mean VCs aren't taking on appropriate quantities of risk for the asset class.

As a final aside: I've lost count of the number of times I've pulled an about-face on businesses I initially thought were stupid -- once I had a chance to talk to the founders and better understand the vision. Many of these seemingly 'dumb' ideas have surprising depth.

Some, granted, are in fact dumber than a box of rocks.

"These new batches have crazy traction compared to earlier cohorts" ... "These new batches are of noticeably lower quality"

"YC isn't taking any risk" ... "Nuclear fusion / quantum computing / _insert_moonshot_here_ is dumb and will never work"

Lol

YC has explicitly stated they won't lead Seed or Series A rounds in order to avoid this conflict.

They are intentionally leaving economics on the table in order to better support their founders. At the stage Continuity invests ($15-$50M rounds), YC's early signal is far less important than the actual fundamentals of the business.

Anu, this is amazingly useful, and probably the best thing I've read all month!

Thanks for writing this.

I'm not really in the furniture rental demo, but I don't think it's exactly fair to compare the price points of high-quality furniture with what you'd pay for some particleboard abomination from IKEA. There is definitely a market for a service like this, but I think it's more a question of whether they can compete against the likes of Cort et al.

I agree that furniture rental is a slightly weird value prop though. People lease cars because most folks don't want to outlay $35-100k for a depreciating asset, or they want to change models so frequently that buying becomes unwieldy. Furniture is not nearly as expensive, however, and the rent-to-buy ratios are far less favorable.

I think you're confusing the Startup School conference with YC's new Startup School MOOC. The MOOC is completely remote with no expectation that companies will move to SV.

While this is certainly a click-worthy title, I'm much more interested in seeing whether the relative number of startup failures is increasing, rather than looking at this in absolute terms.

2015 was a banner year for startup funding, and you would expect many of those war-chests to be running low right around now.

Especially given that those numbers are back-loaded, with somewhere around a third of all YC companies having been funded within the last two years.

I learned that one of the greatest sources of problems in our society arises from people having loads of wrong theories in their heads—often theories that are critical of others—that they won’t test by speaking to the relevant people about them. Instead, they talk behind people’s backs, which leads to pervasive misinformation. I learned to hate this because I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive.

This stood out as particularly relevant to our deep political schism of late. When you have subgroups calcifying around worldviews that haven't been stress tested outside of whatever microcosm they originated in, you end up with with large pockets of people subscribing to massively wrong ideas.

"Art of Living" (Epictetus) is another great introduction to stoicism. Highly recommended.

I don't think the MOOC gets away from this original ambition. YC is still interested in funding the maximum possible number of promising companies.

This is, however, a clear logistical challenge when you have a partner/advice model that doesn't scale all that easily. It may just turn out that an online, infinitely scalable net is precisely the best way to grow the number of great companies you can see and subsequently fund.

I don't think YC intends this to be a purely educational exercise.

I think there are two core drivers that are behind most of the negativity. The first is incompetence, and the second is something close to malice.

For the incompetent commenter:

1) Blind criticism is cheaper than thoughtful feedback. 2) It makes the giver feel superior to the target of their criticism. 3) Cue the dopamine reward. Rinse and repeat.

For the malicious commenter:

1) They have a vested interest in discrediting the target. (Other accelerators -> YC, Other markets -> Silicon Valley, Competitors -> You, etc). 2) Negativity serves these interests. 3) Cue the (perceived) economic reward. Rinse and repeat.

Between all this, you'll find the occasional piece of genuinely thoughtful feedback. It's worth looking for, but you'll need to develop a rather thick skin if you want to wade through the muck and mire to find it.

Most of this stuff is noise, but Startup School is a notable exception. I found the combination of great talks and interesting attendees made it a decent use of time. Oh, and it's free. :)

As for networking, like most of these things your mileage will vary depending on your base networking-quotient * luck (who you happen to talk to).

There are definitely worse ways to invest a Saturday.

This is from July 6th BTW. There has since been a fair amount of back-and-forth on this between Musk and Stephen from Fortune. This episode has also granted us this particularly delightful AMA on reddit, wherein Stephen roundly ignores comments calling out the questionable links between recent Fortune coverage and the Koch's ongoing crusade against renewable energy: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4rqa6q/hey_i_am_steph...

Are you really both asserting that the mere fact someone is willing to litigate acts as evidence to the merit of their claims?

This is California. Frivolous lawsuits make up a meaningful portion of our GDP.

This is exactly the right question. It's clear that Jeremy is not and has never been a formal shareholder in Cruise.

The question is whether having explored (and subsequently abandoned) a potential co-founder relationship constitutes sufficient basis for an equity claim.

This is wrong. Both the original suit and counter-complaint directly reference the fact that Kyle founded the company before meeting/engaging with Jeremy.