
Y Combinator When No One Cared - tomhoward
http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/y-combinator-when-no-one-cared
======
bmccormack
Back in 2005, Fog Creek produced a documentary called "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks
with Geeks", about their internship program. There are lots of great
interviews in there, including Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from the
early days of Y Combinator (as well as interviews with Aaron Schwartz, Alexis
Ohanian, and Steve Huffman).

[https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946](https://youtu.be/0NRL7YsXjSg?t=2946)

~~~
Alex3917
This is amazing. Even as someone who has been vaguely around for a while (e.g.
attended the first couple Startup School events), it's easy to forget that
this is how it was. It really puts a lot of things in context.

~~~
theparanoid
This was around the nadir of tech in general. The dotcom crash was only a few
years earlier.

------
vonnik
It's useful to think about Jessica's comment under the original message, that
YC is "mass production of startups." What it really means, I think, is that YC
is comfortable with more failure than other investors. They are spreading
their bets wide by making many small investments, and as they have said many
times, only a small percentage of those bets need to be right. That's quite
different from how most VCs invest at any level. Most VCs are trying very hard
to be right while making very few bets that are fairly large relative to their
fund. And as the Kaufman report shows, that doesn't work. Most of those VCs
are failing to show ROI to their LPs. YC's approach -- making many small bets
and tripling down on what works -- is similar to some biological processes.
Consider how mammals manufacture antibodies, for example. When an antigen is
detected, we start to make tons of different types of antibodies, not knowing
which ones will successfully attack the pathogen. Most of those antibodies
turn out to be useless, but a few succeed, and their success is reported so
that the body makes more. That is, massive, parallel failure is the
precondition of success here. YC is like that. But instead of manufacturing
antibodies, they're manufacturing startups. Those startups are attacking lots
of different problems rather than just one. And it's hard to know in advance
which ones will succeed.

~~~
tedsanders
I don't see the subtext that connects mass production and comfort with
failure. In fact, I see mass production as a way to reduce failure rates. The
idea behind mass production is to take a process that's done in a low-volume,
idiosyncratic way and replace it with a process that can be reliably repeated
at scale. With Y Combinator, that means replacing the rocky solo founder
journey with a community full of of advisors and partners who can advise on
topics like incorporation, financial planning, customer testing, investor
relations, hiring, etc. There's no reason for a new founder to re-invent the
wheel when the Y Combinator collective has already manufactured 1,000 wheels
and gotten it down to a science. Founders should focus on their customers and
their product - everything else should be 'mass produced' to the extent
possible.

(An example of this sort of mass production is pg's advice to incorporate as a
Delaware C corp. Advice like this can save your fledgling startup from a week
of legal research. Having 'mass-produced' shortcuts to these sorts of
managerial microdecisions can make or break a startup.)

~~~
abstractbeliefs
I guess mostly because you're spending less on them in overheads.

When you can share the same overhead costs over 10 startups and expect 9 of
them to fail, that's more palatable than spending the overhead 10 times for
each individual company.

And it's not just monetary costs: you can get more done when you have all the
companies demo day together, simply by having to arrange fewer meetings
individually, and less time travelling/setting up etc.

------
edw519
I cared. Still do. Been here over 10 years.

I'd wager for every person helped by YC, another 1000 were helped by HN. There
are lots of us programmers in the diaspora whose closest encounter to Silicon
Valley is virtual, in places just like this.

Yea, yea, I know. There are lots of founders, investors, and celebrities in
SV, but please don't forget about the rest of us, who just keep building and
posting...for years.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Been here for almost 10. I think HN is terribly underutilized. It could be
used in more practical ways to help the community at large. Currently the most
direct way is to do a ASK HN or the monthly Ask Who's Hiring, however I would
love for YC to push the same tools they built for their program (to help
founders and companies) to HN and its userbase.

~~~
Maken
I think being _underfeatured_ is part of the reason why HN works.

~~~
hliyan
Couldn't agree more. It's a good example of finding a simple, elegant and
winning formula and letting it mature rather than constantly messing with it
(i.e. trying to "improve" it)

------
strangeloops85
After lurking for many years, I finally decided to create an account to
comment on this. We were one of the companies in that first group -- alas, for
various reasons, we ended up leaving after a couple of weeks (sigh). But I do
remember the interview process, the first meal or two, and meeting the rest of
the founders. Looking back, it's pretty cool to have (very briefly and
inconsequentially) been part of that formative time in YC's history.

A bit of background: We were a group of Harvard CS-ish undergrads, had been
readers of PG's essays, and also noticed a fellow classmate's startup taking
off (The Facebook!). The Summer Founders Program, as it was called, was
actually pretty well advertised in our community. And, from our vantage point,
it seemed to be both a great opportunity and prestigious (which of course
tickled our over-achieving prestige-seeking 20-year-old selves). In fact, I
turned down an internship after I'd accepted the offer, to do YC (and,
amusingly, after we left YC a couple of weeks in, somehow got the internship
again). I remember PG asking a lot of very good questions, and poking some
pretty big holes in our pitch. I'm guessing they picked us because they
figured we'd pivot into something more reasonable than the idea we started on.
This being the pre-smartphone era, our idea of doing something cell-phone-
specific (and algorithmically focused no less) probably seemed a bit dubious.

While no one (or relatively few) may have cared in the broader investment
world at the time, we -- the young hacker / startup wannabes -- definitely
noticed. PG, Jessica and the rest of the team did a great job attracting our
attention and interest. And that, I'd venture to say, was a key element of
YC's future success that was there from the very beginning.

~~~
santiagobasulto
Did you build your startup after all? These stories are really interesting,
you should write more and share it.

~~~
strangeloops85
Glad to hear it's (at least somewhat) interesting! We did not build that
particular startup for personal/ founder conflict reasons that were related to
why we left the SFP. But I ended up having a great internship experience with
a small Boston-area company that summer, and after graduating the next year,
worked at a big tech co. for a little while. Then, not following what pg's
advice would have been I'm sure, I decided to go get a PhD in physics/
engineering of all things. I now run a small cleantech startup based on that
work, and do look back enviously at how 'simple' a software startup can be (I
know, I know.. we all face The Struggle).

Jessica's article really did take me back to those quieter days in 2005!

------
rexreed
What's also telling is that the program started in Boston and moved to Silicon
Valley pretty quickly. In my own experience, it seems that the Boston startup
scene is dying. Unless you're in life sciences. The ecosystem there seems to
have given up on supporting early stage non-life sciences companies.

~~~
freehunter
>the startup scene

I feel like this is one of those SV bubble things, that a place has to have a
"scene" in order to have startups (and only SV has a "scene"). There are
thousands of successful businesses everywhere, even ones that would be
considered "startups". The only difference between SV and any other city is
people are willing to throw money at ideas with no chance of ever turning a
profit which isn't really a sign of a healthy ecosystem.

I wonder how many people who say "you need to be in Silicon Valley to run a
successful startup" use MailChimp (Atlanta) or RunKeeper (Boston), or Venmo or
Squarespace (NYC) or Duo Security (Ann Arbor, MI) or Dwolla (Des Moines,
Iowa).

Whenever I hear "startup scene", I think of Juicero and wonder if that kind of
company could ever actually ship a product if they were based anywhere but
Silicon Valley. And I wonder how much that actually says about the "startup
scene".

~~~
nickpsecurity
I'd like to see a listing of all the billion dollar IPO's or acquisitions in
past decade with location on it. Both where it started and where it spent most
of its time. That mighy help settle the question.

~~~
freehunter
I think it might suffer from confirmation bias. Say Dropbox started in
Milwaukee, WI, but was convinced they needed to move to San Fransisco to be
successful. Maybe they would have been successful in Milwaukee, too, but now
we'll never know. So now they're contributing to the startup successes that
come from SV, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SF was what made them
successful. Maybe the reason the parent thinks Boston's startup scene is dying
is because people who create startups are leaving to move to SF because they
think they _have_ to.

According to WalletHub, SF rates pretty darn far down the list of best places
to start a business: [https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-
business/22...](https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-to-start-a-
business/2281/)

Maybe the number of success stories coming from SF has more to do with the
sheer number of businesses that are started there? If 100 businesses are
started in SF and only 5 in Tulsa, even if only 10 of the startups survive in
SF while all 5 survive in Tulsa, people would still say "SF has twice the
number of successful startups" even though 100% succeeded in Tulsa vs just 10%
in SF.

~~~
nostrademons
DropBox is an ironic example because it actually started in Boston. Drew had
grown up knowing VCs in the Boston area; some had even told him "If you ever
start a company, we'll fund you." DropBox did the YC Summer Founders program,
which at the time was located in Boston, but all the Boston groups also did a
demo-days out on the west coast because Silicon Valley VCs were better.
Sequoia gave them a term sheet within a week; all those Boston VCs that Drew
had known forever dragged their feet and were like "Is there any money in
sharing files? There are literally dozens of competitors, and none of them are
making serious money", and that is why DropBox is in San Francisco.

I grew up in the Boston area as well, thought I would stay there my whole
life, and a lunch conversation with Drew was actually instrumental in changing
my mind about moving to Silicon Valley. The reason is precisely that: the
Boston business climate is so conservative that you really can't get resources
unless you're working on something that has made money for other people. I
actually don't think I'd _start_ a company in the Bay Area now if I didn't
already live here and have a wife with family here - there's usually a long
period of learning your market before you have anything fundable, and it's
better to spend that in a region where rent won't cost you a fortune. But the
Bay Area remains the best place, bar none, to _scale_ a business, and it's
quite likely that if your nascent business has any serious growth potential,
it'll be fodder for a Silicon Valley competitor with $100M in funding.

~~~
rexreed
This is the most spot-on reply to my comment ever. YES. A thousand times YES.
THIS is the problem with Boston. It's probably a fine place to start
something. But an almost impossible task to get it funded and supported. This
is why I think it's on the downward path. Boston VCs are ridiculous.

------
dmix
Reminds me of that old Dropbox "ShowHN" post.

Looking back at old emails takes some heart, I'm afraid of the idea as I'd
probably cringe too hard.

My Reddit account just had it's "cakeday" which means I'm in the "9th year
club" and the idea I have comments from 9 years ago still publicly available
kind of scares me. Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to
delete anything beyond >1-2yrs back.

Old comments on HN I'm not so scared of as I tend to put more effort to only
post competent/civil comments here. Plus you can't delete them even if you
wanted to.

~~~
shubhamjain
> Too the point where I feel motivated to write a script to delete anything
> beyond >1-2yrs back.

Please don't. I used to write a diary with meaningless essays when I was in
the second grade. When I rediscovered it as an adult, I found them so
embarrassing that I threw it away. It's hard to say how much I wish I hadn't
done that. Those idiotic essays could have been my good memories; little
reminders of how I thought in the past. Same happened with the old
applications I wrote when I was starting out programming.

I still have an embarrassing history intact on various internet forums. I
wanted to obliterated it some time back, but I realised there is nothing to
feel humiliated about your past idiocy, it's in fact a great reminder to keep
of how much you have grown.

~~~
snerbles
As a personal reminder, I agree. No one else cares, until they do.

And when they do, any little thing in your past can and will be used as a
social cudgel against you.

------
jtraffic
"For example, we thought it would be ok to work on your idea each summer and
go back to school in the fall."

I'd love to know more about this. Does anyone have insight into why YC changed
on this point? Maybe it's just the obvious "people lose focus." But I'd like a
confirmation.

~~~
DenisM
[...] Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is
other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're
going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to
grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back
to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on
some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup. You
may as well just translate these to "we're giving up on the startup, but we're
not willing to admit that to ourselves," because that's what it means most of
the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by "but."
[...]

[http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html)

~~~
angersock
_> We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the
startup._

See, it's points like that that irk me. As though somehow leaving SV is
abandoning your business!

Amazing how much people will pay lip-service to remote work and to the
importance of other startup communities and then balk at people pursuing their
ideas in "flyover country".

~~~
trjordan
I think the problem isn't "Minnesota", it's "back to Minnesota". Back to the
place where things were before they started the startup. Where they had other
projects going on. Where they don't focus as singularly on their company.

Moving to Minnesota is fine. By if you moved to SV to start a company, what
changed that made you realize SV wasn't a good idea? The declaration has "but"
in the middle; what are you running away from?

~~~
jpk
> what are you running away from?

Rent maybe? There are lots of good reasons to run a startup in SV, NYC, etc.
Direct access to capital, certain types of talent, and so on. There are also
reasons to _not_ run a startup in places like that. Cost of living as it
relates to runway length being the biggest one. Some startups simply need a
place to sit and a reliable internet connection.

If you've come to the realization that you don't need any of the things big
cities have to offer as it relates to your business, moving back to Minnesota
or wherever is exactly the right call.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"Rent maybe? There are lots of good reasons to run a startup in SV, NYC, etc.
"

Early on, I thought about doing one fairly close to MIT to get talent from
over there. Many businesses come outbof that school. So, I figured a bunch of
other people are doing it already.

------
jondubois
It's still pretty amazing that Y Combinator worked out as well as it did. Like
a lot of very successful companies, it seems like the world just fell into
perfect alignment with the vision.

It's interesting that acqui-hiring (as alluded to in the email) actually
became a trend; even though it was later recognized to be bad idea (E.g.
Yahoo's acqui-hiring tactics have failed miserably).

It seems like there was a false idea that tech talent was extremely precious
and limited. It wasn't, but that didn't matter; acqui-hiring still became a
thing and companies (and some foolish young founders) still profited from it.

~~~
nostrademons
Acqui-hiring was a trend long before YC. Companies have been buying startups
because the founding team has expertise in a new technology that they want to
get into since the MS-DOS days.

I also wouldn't say it's a bad idea, or that tech talent isn't extremely
precious & limited. Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get
acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population
enough that you can get them easily on the open market. Companies will still
pay lots of money for, say, deep learning or drone or self-driving car
experts.

~~~
pilsetnieks
> Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore,
> because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you
> can get them easily on the open market.

And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade
ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized
in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed
at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or
had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set
up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a
shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff,
you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of
the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.

------
staunch
And yet it felt completely obvious to many of us that were around since the
beginning. YC, reddit, HN, and Dropbox are among the companies I definitely
would have invested $1000 into, had the opportunity been available.

I predict the next generation of YC will be a scalable crowdfunding company.
It will look more like a startup-focused Kickstarter than seed-stage Sequoia.

~~~
guiambros
Didn't you just describe FundersClub's [1] business model? Basically a
crowdsourced investment platform for startups.

Yeah, it was limited to "accredited investors" in compliance with SEC and tax
laws in the US, but even that is changing, at least on paper [2].

[1] [https://fundersclub.com](https://fundersclub.com) [2]
[https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-
unaccredit...](https://www.cooleygo.com/can-you-raise-money-from-unaccredited-
investors/)

~~~
staunch
Yeah, there are dozens of startups working on crowdfunding. AngelList should
have been able to make something work by now, but it will probably be someone
else.

------
theprop
"Laboring away in obscurity, as frightening as it feels at the time, is the
way a lot of good things happen. Maybe the way most good things happen."

....so there's hope for me!

------
cyberferret
Nice. But I wonder if the focus is still on "young startups" these days, as it
seemed to be back then.

I don't want to start an ageism war in this thread, but it would be nice if
the vetting process concentrates more on ideas and business viability, and now
includes experience as well as youth and energy.

------
nickpsecurity
Sounds like YC was just another startup in the beginning. Doing a pitch for
something that would change a bit later as often with creating new markets or
segments. Started with small number of customers (founders). After some
experimenting, you seemed to have scaled up.

Not much different than how I see startup process described here. Difference
is yours creates other startups and will likely last a while. I've always
thought of it as a combo of a fraternity style, boot camp, and mass production
ideas all rolled into one thing. Also, you select for founders much like the
fraternities at Yale, Harvard, etc select for and create business or political
elites. Similar methods but opposite effect in innovation.

------
Sohum
Curious question. If YC started today, with the exact same manifesto but in
the current environment as opposed to the one in 2005, could they still have
been as successful?

~~~
zeroer
I'll let you know in 12 years.

------
Nition
Love the page width on that Summer Founders Program[1] link.

I also appreciate the fact that the URL still works! Well done making sure
Cool Urls Don't Change.

[1] [http://old.ycombinator.com/sfp.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/sfp.html)

~~~
elmar
"We know India and China are full of smart people who'd like to come and
contribute to the growth of the US economy, but our government won't let us
bring you here to do it."

------
j_s
OP is now bookmarked next to this one from 2015 under _HN > history_:

"Looking back at 9 years of Hacker News" |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10535210)

------
TenJack
What was the dating site I wonder?

------
santiagobasulto
> I admit that I was never very good at PR.

Quite the opposite. That email is really well written. Analyzing it carefully,
it has pretty much everything important for a pitch email.

------
colmvp
On the topic of small beginnings, does anyone know if PG still reads HN? I
recall when I first joined the site which, wow, was a long time ago, it seemed
like he was a lot more active on it.

~~~
jl
He does not. He stopped at the same time he announced his retirement from YC.
(He'd at this point transitioned the running of HN to dang.)

~~~
sillysaurus3
I miss pg. He was really cool. I understand why he left, I think, but...

I miss your comments too! You should write more. Both essays and comments. I
think it's easy to care too much about image and whether someone might stir up
controversy. But you have genuinely interesting things to say. Even if HN
doesn't feel like the kind of place you can say them, it still does a lot of
good.

I don't know. Sometimes it just feels like you and pg stopped believing in us.
Which I guess is understandable. One year it went from HN feeling like a part
of the community to feeling like we're an adversary. After all, we -- the
internet at large -- are small-minded reactionaries, right? Why bother?

But it's a perception worth changing. The old guard is still here. HN grew up,
so there are more voices now -- there's more to sift through. But the voices
that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here.

Setting all that aside, though: have a nice day! And thanks for everything
you've built.

~~~
ploggingdev
> But the voices that pg once enjoyed talking with are still here.

Just to be clear there are still a lot of incredible people who post to HN,
but from the signs that I see, a fairly large chunk of early HNers who are
well known in hacker circles basically stopped posting. And there are also a
large number of people who are very reluctant to take part in the discussions
here knowing how a vocal subset of HNers react to any post or comment : talk
trash. Examples of the latter : tptacek, dguido and other secuity
professionals. If you read some of the security related threads where tptacek
takes part, you will notice that he is literally talking to a wall, people
refuse to listen to the guy or try to understand the reasoning behind his
comments, though he is respected in the security community and is always right
on security related topics. Especially on security related threads there is
dangerous advice floating around. Eg- use Tor or some stupid suggestion on how
to trick the CBP at the border.

I also noticed the rise of anti-semiticism and just generally hateful comments
when the topics of religion, nationality or Trump are brought up. This issue
is only getting worse and god help the moderators who have to read these
comments on a daily basis.

Though this might be controversial, the general quality of discussion has gone
down over the years. I think this is inevitable : as the community grows,
quality of discussion goes down. HN is doing incredibly well on this count,
the discussions are still the best on any public forum, but IMO the quality is
going down. As the community grows, veterans generally tend to become
inactive.

(Before people point out that my account is only 159 days old, I've been part
of HN for much longer under different handles.)

~~~
metaphorm
I respect tptacek's expertise in his domain. I sometimes argue with him in
other topics, where he is out of depth but assumes that because his a
respected expert in one domain he is also an expert in others when he is
actually not an expert at all.

this applies to all sorts of things, and PG is no exception. PG is an expert
on programming and on founding VC funded companies. he is certainly not an
expert on most other things but would frequently comment on those things as if
he was, and then act very defensive and shocked when he was criticized for
things he was wrong about or tone-deaf about.

really this applies to ANYONE in this community. there is lots of very
intelligent, well-reasoned discussion, but nobody ought to get a pass on
things because of their reputation. we ought not defer to authority. we ought
to discuss the arguments as presented.

~~~
ploggingdev
I never said he should be given a free pass on all topics, I specifically
mention tptacek as an example of an expert in the security industry whose
_security related_ advice, people ignore here on HN.

