

Y Combinator’s Hacker News Advantage  - mjfern
http://fernstrategy.com/2012/12/24/y-combinators-hacker-news-advantage/

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pg
"why do Paul Graham and YC continue investing their time and resources on this
news site?"

A hacker wouldn't find this such a mystery. Once you build something that has
users, it's hard to shut it down.

(I'm not denying HN has benefits for YC. But if for example there is some sort
of bug that's breaking the site, loss of benefits to YC is pretty far down my
list of motivations for fixing it.)

~~~
mjfern
Paul, Thanks very much for the comment. I wasn't suggesting that these
advantages are the only reason why YC invests in HN. But these benefits are
important enough to justify investment, even if we ignore the significant
social benefits in bringing together hackers and founders.

By the way, I'd be very curious to know if you anticipated any of these
benefits when you first launched HN or if HN was just an experiment (with
using Arc), and these benefits emerged over time through serendipity.

