

Y Combinator’s “No Idea” Round Isn’t a Bad Idea, It’s Awesome - danest
http://viniciusvacanti.com/2012/05/07/y-combinators-no-idea-round-isnt-a-bad-idea-its-awesome/

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wheels
Am I the only one that's tired of the absolutist arguments without any
substantive evidence that seem to plague social news sites?

We have no idea if Y Combinator's "No Idea" thing is good or bad. I suspect YC
doesn't know either and once they do, unless they let us know how it worked
out, we still won't know. No amount of prognostication will answer the
question. It's a real pet peeve of mine when people who don't know what
they're talking about not only answer questions, but go above and beyond that
to answer them definitively.

~~~
gravitronic
The only mistake you've made is submitting this as a comment instead of a blog
post as it is clear that you can play these types of arguments out piece by
piece on blog posts that will make it to the HN front page.

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aespinoza
In my opinion this is just like the way record labels started creating bands
out of thin air without any substance.

They gathered potential talented people, form the band write songs for them,
decide their image, their sound, etc.

This doesn't mean that this model won't work, it just means that they are not
really artists.

The same thing is happening here. How can you be called an entrepreneur if you
can't even come up with an idea?

Entrepreneurship is not for everybody. But if you don't have an idea, then you
really should not be looking to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs undertake
something; "The French infinitive 'entreprendre' translates as 'to undertake'
" (from Wikipedia).

If you have no ideas to undertake, then undertake other people's ideas by
joining an existing company.

~~~
jmathai
Perhaps the best way to look at it is that YC is trying to hire good engineers
to help with ideas they have themself (YC) or to join other YC teams which
they find promising.

~~~
freshhawk
That's an interesting way to look at it, although at that point using the
words "startup" and "entrepreneur" are more marketing than anything else.

I think what people object to about this "no idea" idea is the feeling that
this is just more control being shifted from founders to the same small group
of rich and powerful tech kingmakers.

I don't know how valid that objection is, I guess we'll have to see, but it's
likely a good thing for the community to discuss (although I doubt that
discussion will happen here all that much).

~~~
cube13
My objection to the idea is really contingent on what YC is trying to do:

1\. Get groups without an idea or product to cultivate and implement their own
ideas. I think this is their primary goal, but to be honest, I have absolutely
no clue whether it will work. I would wager, however, that this idea would
work, especially with a good group that can deal with the pressure well.

2\. Match these kickass development groups with another YC pitched idea. This
is less clear how it would work, because it turns YC into a consulting/temp
agency. I'm also not sure what the groups would be working for. Would it be
for pay through YC, or for equity in the new startup? This, I think, is the
worry for a lot of people, because it would result(like freshhawk mentioned)
control being shifted away from the founders.

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georgespencer
A fairly tawdry argument in this article.

Dustin said, simply, that you shouldn't become an entrepreneur just for the
sake of becoming one. You should have an idea that you're energised about and
want to build.

The fact that Zuckerberg had ideas before Facebook doesn't mean that YC's "no
idea" round is a good idea.

Zuckerberg was building things and tinkering before Facebook: that's the exact
opposite of not having any ideas. Literally, that is the opposite. He had
ideas. He worked on them.

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zackzackzack
Oh! I think I get it now! I know why people write about YC when they aren't in
YC, aren't affiliated with YC, and run businesses that are orthogonal to YC.
They want to get to the top of hacker news and maybe get their job advert read
by the selective crowd of hacker news:

"We're currently looking for a lead interaction designer. If you think you're
up for it, email jobs@yipit.com" -sidebar of author's website

~~~
rcavezza
1.) This strategy that has a high likelihood of working.

2.) I don't see anything wrong with it.

Is there an unwritten rule that one must be affiliated with YC to have an
opinion about the program?

~~~
zackzackzack
No! If I was in his position I would do the same thing.

I wasn't writing with a sarcastic intent. It's hard to be genuinely surprised
about realizing something on the internet without coming across that way it
seems. I honestly just figured out _why_ he might have considering writing
about YC at all given his background.

------
remarkable
I don't agree. As a person who has applied in the past, a developer and a sole
founder, why would I submit my idea with no NDA to basically a think tank of
clerical ivy league wunderkind waiting in the wings for a call from PG for a
shovel ready project or a "pivot." All this in exchange for a "thanks but no
thanks dude!"

I was on the fence before about applying to "incubators" (I know YC is
technically not a incubator), but this solved it for me. Ideas are worthless,
execution is only slightly more valuable and YC is an idea execution factory.
To be honest, it's an enviable position. I do appreciate the transparency.

~~~
MrMan
If ideas were worth so little, wouldn't firms tend to become more monolithic?
I feel that ideas are worth more than execution now. It is cheaper and cheaper
to execute, but problem solving and creativity, the things that tend to break
down atomically into groups of 0-3 founders, are holding their value, or
becoming relatively more valuable. I think, personally, that people like to
parrot this "ideas are worthless" line but I think that it is conventional
wisdom at best and flat wrong at worst. I think "no idea" rounds rely on the
fact that investors know that execution risk is getting lower. But finding
idea people as atoms is getting harder. If the opposite were true, individual
or small clusters of founders would not be so highly valued.

~~~
fusiongyro
I actually think the conventional wisdom is that ideas are valuable. After
all, how often have you told someone an idea and had them tell you to patent
it, with the understood implication that you'll somehow be made wealthy just
from the idea.

I don't think any of your points really hold water. Even a world in which
ideas are worth equally as much as execution would make no sense. I can't fly
to work in a picture of a flying car; the execution for new vehicles hasn't
gotten any cheaper or there would be more novelty car companies. I can't
network with my friends using Diaspora. If execution were so easy, there
should be ten decentralized Facebook clones with proper privacy guarantees by
now, and there aren't. Spend four hours walking around, wherever you are, and
you can find a dozen or more people convinced they have brilliant web ideas
they just don't know how to execute. Everyone who can't program is an "idea
man." Separating terrible ideas from the rest isn't hard, but without time
travel it's impossible to distinguish decent ideas from extraordinary ones.

The Valley is becoming more and more insular and self-referencing. From
outside, where I am, it looks to me like a mirror of the setup for the housing
bubble, where the value of everything today is zero and the value of
everything tomorrow is infinite, so nobody is doing anything today except
trading the possibility of doing more and better things tomorrow. An idea or a
founder might be worth a lot in this environment right now, but I don't think
this situation is sustainable.

~~~
MrMan
I can't address sweeping dismissals but I can offer another narrative. A few
years ago Hacker News started to become popular. PG blogged about things and
wrote books and raised his profile and the profile of this site, and the
profile of the companies in which he invested. Around this time it became
clear that it was getting easier to start web companies. Cheaper in raw
dollars to setup, you could hire fewer people who could support more users.
This is true. It was mildly insightful in 2008 to say this, but now people put
their scalability recipes on slideshare and it's clear that a small team can
"execute" their ideas more easily now. And this is just in the world of "tech"
which I think is mis-labelled.

It has nothing to do with geography, despite the efforts of propaganda
emanating from the Valley to convince you otherwise.

By all means don't take my word for it, but by the same token don't fly off
the handle talking about flying cars. Just think quietly about how impossible
many businesses that currently exist would be a decade ago. I never said
anything about the Valley in my previous post. I don't have anything to do
with the Valley, but your remoteness from it doesn't help your post gain any
clarity.

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frankdenbow
Pretty sure @kn0thing got into YC essentially with no idea (PG wasn't into the
food ordering idea but liked them). Hard to argue that was a mistake.

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bksenior
YC views the idea as proof of experimentation and in turn a bias for doing and
not only thinking. It would be like NFL scouts watching tape of prospects
doing home improvements around campus instead of placing football to decide
what they physical school sets were. The idea is a lense in which to judge
talents they consider statistically more likely to produce a successful
entrepreneur.

The other good point already made was that YCs investment best leveraged if
you ready almost right away. No matter how you smart you are, identifying a
problem, creating a solution and assembling a team takes time, valuable time.
In most cases this process would put you a bit further out from some of the
expertise that YC has to offer.

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pedalpete
I think what the 'No Idea' misses is that if there is a team which is
absolutely amazing and can theoretically come into YC and amaze everybody with
their capabilities, don't you think they'd be able to come up with an idea?

PG even gives a list of things he'd like to see built, take one of those if
you don't have your own, but not having anything to me seems like a bit of a
cop-out.

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jbooth
So let's say me and a superstar cast of Iron Man and the Incredible Hulk are
accepted as a "no idea group".

.... What do we do the next day? What do we work on? I can totally get behind
the idea that they're funding the founders and not the idea but there has to
be some idea at some point, right? Why not the day before the application
instead of the day after?

~~~
vacanti
I would tell them to focus on a big problem that they are passionate about and
have some credibility.

