

Harjeet Taggar: Start Fund is bad news for bad investors - jedwhite
http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/02/07/y-combinator-partner-harjeet-taggar-startup-fund-is-bad-news-for-bad-investors-interview/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web+All+Stories)

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kul
I was at YC when Milner and Shpilman arrived. It was about 630pm, we'd just
had office hours with PG, and I saw the both of them hanging around discreetly
in the lobby.

About 5-10 mins passed and eventually I felt bad and walked over and asked if
I could help, to which Shpilman replied, in a thick Russian accent, that he
was hear to see Harj. Yuri was keeping himself to himself. I walked over and
told Harj they were a couple of ppl waiting to meet him, then went and sat
with my cofounder at the end of one of the long tables.

I jokingly said to my cofounder that they must be the DST guys, wanting to
invest in YC. I had no idea I was correct, they were very low profile.

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jedwhite
There is a second installment to this interview coming tomorrow on why Harjeet
joined YC. The most interesting part for me was that when Yuri and Ron first
said they wanted to invest in all YC startups, he thought they were joking. pg
wasn't even in the meeting and was doing office hours. That's quite revealing
and says a lot about YC's priorities I thought.

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Datasta
Too bad it's not out today. Got us curious now!

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arrel
I wish Taggar had addressed how this is going to impact the application review
process. It sounds like the YC partners already have their hands full with the
number of applications coming in each round, and I assume those numbers are
shooting through the roof this round. Are all of the partners still going to
read all of the applications, or are they going to need some triage this time
around?

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pg
I doubt anything will change. We've always had to cope with rising application
numbers, and we've constantly been tweaking the system to deal with them.
Between more partners, more alumni, and more software, we'll probably manage
without any externally visible change.

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KevBurnsJr
"[...] money at seed stage has become commoditized."

Investors have always waived around their experience and business connections
as differentiators. It's still going to be in their best interests to
differentiate themselves.

More competition is always going to be bad news for second-rate offerings in
any market.

Does this mean more seed investments on the whole?

