localcrisis

bank account. tech startups have huge balances compared to lifetime

I was in YC >5 years ago when batches were in person and in the large-two-digit range. The experience of YC is completely different. The class sizes are in the hundreds and many times I've spoken to founders who didn't know another company in their batch existed.

It's a highly optimized assembly line for getting a company to give a 1 minute pitch. They said they'd never do remote, for good reason, then (understandably) flipped when the pandemic happened. But the downsides of remote didn't disappear when covid appeared...

This doesn't mean that founders don't love YC or that it's not worth it. It doesn't mean that parts of YC haven't gotten better over time. Again, highly optimized. It doesn't mean YC isn't a huge boon to your company's reputation.

But if you're looking for small, focused mentorship then YC is no longer the same place.

You can, but when you're making that much above what a series A or B company pays, it's not a useful number. Having multiple offers that are comparable is what matters. A company can go ±5% but it's not like they offer you $180k and you give them your $800k Facebook total comp then they're like, "oh, I guess we'll give you $800k then."

I also talked to a few fintech companies. I entered the discussions with pre-existing biases that these places are stressfull, not innovative but well paying. The conversations confirmed these biases (except the salaries, which were lower than I expected).

That's interesting. I wonder which companies these are?

I agree. We tried using TripleByte for hiring but what they screen for and what matters are entirely different. A founder we knew got an angry missive from one of the TripleByte founders because they’d rejected candidates during a final culture screen. Apparently the only qualification should be whether the candidate can do contrived coding tests and programming jeopardy, but whether you actually want to work with them is beside the point!

I have had this exact experience with Triplebyte both as an engineer and as a hiring manager.

I simply do not care about things like, “what does malloc return”. I do not care what people know about bloom filters in Postgres. The 99.99% of web developers don’t have to know these things. I do not care if you can implement Tic-Tac-Toe.

It’s poor interviewing, which is the entire product they’ve been offering.

Not to mention the preceding paragraph:

When I started at Stripe, I asked to delay my start date until after a family vacation, but my manager just told me to start sooner and take time off later (Stripe was just shy of 100 employees and moving incredibly quickly). I now had an artificial deadline of one month to ship my first project.

That’s a reasonably sized red flag. Asking someone to miss a family vacation so they can go after some arbitrary deadline?

Yikes.

His reply is after hours upon hours of getting torn apart for doubling, tripling, twenty-times-ing down on his power trip.

And he still believes that some ethical line was crossed.

What IP was stolen? The idea of running code from a web editor? The _button placement_?

There’s nothing here that says he’s stolen code or any IP. The CEO doesn’t even claim that he’s stolen real IP. Everything that’s similar is public knowledge and the burden of proof is to point out what’s been stolen.

Which the CEO could! Because the work was open sourced. So he could reply and say, “hey, you implemented this part in a way that is in code you worked on. It’s also a pretty atypical solution to this problem, so it seems reasonable that you took that from us.”

He doesn’t.

Instead, he gets insecure that a kid implemented a similar product in a couple days and decides to rail on him, then offer a half-apology well after it has blown up.

had the same experience with Aileen.

Many VCs, founders, and DNI leaders have echoed that All Raise is primarily a way for VCs to improve their personal brand around women in tech. They don't make investments, don't run substantial programs, and spend much of their time/money on PR.

If these VCs were serious, they would commit X% of investments or X% of investment dollars to the groups they publicly support in panel after panel after tweet after TechCrunch interview.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280811

All over this thread you are responding about the details not being public.

The existence of the job search itself is the issue. I'm not sure what's not getting through about that.

Opt-In doesn't help them achieve their product goals.

Triplebyte as founded isn't working so they're trying to take a valuable asset they have (engineers looking for jobs) to compete with linkedin

The problem with bootstrapping a linkedin competitor is the same chicken-and-egg problem with networks generally. You need people on it for people to join it.

What Triplebyte wants is your identity public. That's the product goal. The problem is that opt-in won't get them that. What are the incentives for anyone to make theirs public?

How many people who were searching for a job without telling their company are going to opt-in to make that public?

Most certainly not enough to bootstrap a LinkedIn competitor.

So someone had the idea to move fast and break things, either:

a) hoping no one would notice

b) hoping the fallout wouldn't be bad

c) not caring that the fallout would be bad

d) not knowing that there would be fallout

none of the above are particularly inspiring. It does seem hard to miss this coming

I tried "find hot local singles in your area" and the top result was /r/vinyls

actually very impressed

As a VC, marketing is part of the job. Perhaps the most important part of the job.

Getting LPs to invest in your fund encourages strong personal brand building.

Getting startups to want _you_ to invest versus others—and for many "great looking" deals (the ones you want), the company has options—requires strong personal brand building.

In the medium term incentives are less towards being good at helping companies.

You have to do enough good marketing to get founders to sign on the dotted line. After that, if they don't like you or are "bleh" on you, there's nothing they can do about it. What's done is done.

By the time you've fully deployed the capital in your fund (2–3 years, excluding reserves for follow-on), you're raising your next fund. That's _far_ too short of a time span to know what the results will be for Fund I.

What does it take?

Good marketing.

It's not a coincidence, then, that successful funds revolve around good, or at the very least incessant, self-marketers.

Garry has appeared numerous times on @VCBrags (and has, funnily enough, blocked them.)

In that case will you add to your data policy that user data is destroyed in the event of a transfer of ownership?

If your promise is genuine then there is no difference for you in doing so.

would be good to hear what they plan on doing instead.

YC China was a bet at doing something different. With that gone—and idk if it should have stayed or gone.. sometimes experiments fail—what is YCs plan?

Invite 200, 300, 500, 20,000 companies to SF? maybe it is the best option, but also maybe not the best thing to do. YC Seems stuck in an innovator's dilemma. Reminds me of Apple under Tim Cook. Keeping a good thing going, but nothing innovative.

It’s interesting to watch the disconnect between the outwardly liberal/left side of Silicon Valley and its complicity in these things.

Take one example, Garry Tan was an early member of Palantir but went on to be a partner and Twitter thoughtleader.

Some like Thiel have been called out but not entirely shunned for their work. Maybe doing so would go too far or maybe staying in the circles of power is too attractive

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your target customer. Are you only focused on enterprise?

The pricing comes across as something like "forced obsolescence." Forced handicapping? You might not have meant it that way but many of the features in the professional plan are useful for companies of any size. Like Google apps integration is a standard feature. I could see on-prem SSO (I think Oracle does things like this?) but my company deosn't get automatic calendar invites??

In agreement w/ the comment you're replying to, I wouldn't try this because the base features aren't useful enough and the pricing feels very customer-unfriendly.

my dude why're you talking in latin this ain't pompeii

Same experience with the Tic Tac Toe, then again with the rest of the interview.

There were a lot of Googlable boilerplate questions (e.g. "what does malloc return?", "what's a bloom filter?") that, as a product engineer, never come up.

Then there were the classic Big-O notation queries that for most use cases don't come up until much later stage. It felt like the founders were classically trained in CS and over-optimizing for things that aren't practically relevant for the large majority of early/mid-stage startups.

Am I familiar with these concepts—e.g. can I go back and refresh myself when they come up?—absolutely. But often times the skills you'd want in an engineer are:

1. Knowing when to optimize

2. Knowing how to profile and identify bottlenecks

3. Familiarity with the available solutions

4. Ability to dig in and evaluate which is the right tool for the jon

I don't think the comment you're pointing to is saying that she should have done more, but that others in the company should have; that to expect her to have done more is lacking in empathy for the difficulty of the situation she is in.

I think this differs from the election in that we, Silicon Valley, have tacitly assumed that "things are different here", that 2017 San Francisco is different than 2017 Louisiana.

That may be the case, but we still have a long way to go.

If I'd seen this in a horror movie 10 years ago, I'd probably have laughed. There is something about it being real that truly terrifies me.

Great article. Even if startup equity is a gamble, everyone should benefit equally if it pays off.

Who's going to invest the energy to build something world-changing if they can't trust that their ownership means anything?

This sounds similar to dating sites. A happy user is one who doesn't need you anymore!

The thing is, dating sites solve a known problem that a lot of people have, but by no means does it end there. Relationships are hard and take work, where are the apps that help build strong 1-1 connections?

Same thing for you. Increasing workplace diversity is awesome, but hiring is only a tiny part of that. I'm sure that many of your users face similar challenges being a minority in their work environment. How can you bring them together to solve those problems once they have their job?

The numbers here always amaze me. Would they be better off keeping Yahoo going than, say, investing $20bn into the next generation of startups?

Just imagine a $20bn seed fund and the type of companies that could be funded. Startups in more difficult industries that need a larger upfront investment (genetics, pharmaceuticals, aerospace, etc.)

fortunes are built on compound interest

This makes sense to me more on the scale of a single company. Put together a great team and focus them on a long-term problem. Their year-over-year drive and passion will outlast the rollercoaster of starting a company, leading to a much better shot of those huge returns.

Rather than going all in on the flavor-of-the-week, I agree with the focus on radical improvements to existing markets. It's far more likely—which does not mean less impactful—that we can fix known problems than fix as-yet-unknown problems.

I think most of the time people just want to speak with that person. They don't know what they're looking for, just that this person is smart and hope they'll provide direction/insight/promotion.

Forcing someone to ask what they want is great because it forces them to actually think about what they want.

To a small business owner, I'm not sure they know or care about the difference. Zenefits advertises themselves as payroll, benefits, and HR.

Defintely see your point though it seems like a distinction customers won't know