
A Conversation with Sam Altman - sethbannon
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/09/ycombinate/
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jamiesonbecker
There doesn't seem to be much gain in comparing yourself to someone else.
Invent a new way of doing things and focus on being the best at it.

Maybe YC is just doing it 10x or 100x better, and everyone else is doing it
wrong and doesn't know why. This is not really that unusual of a pattern in
other areas.. think about how Google compared to every other search engine
back in the day, or how iPhone compared to every other phone when it was
introduced.

YC seems to focus on things that just make good sense, and keeping it simple:
make things people love, (really) help each other, be determined, keep burn
rate very low, solve one problem at a time, and keep quality high in order to
increase the value of the network. The fact that YC is surprisingly successful
seems to be a natural outcome of basic principles.

It might be even simpler than that. Be excellent to each other. Looking at
their terms on their websites, most accelerators fail at even that.

~~~
s_dev
If Sam and Paul are honest part of the magic of YC is their because they did
the first "successful" accelerator they have a positive feedback loop. Sort of
like how Harvard attracts the best because its the best. The best founders
want the YC brand and so apply. YC gets the best applications compared to
other lower tier accelerators.

They are the incumbent now, others would have to innovate hugely to surpass
YC.

~~~
paulsutter
Are you saying they could just cancel office hours, and all their events, and
just coast from here on out? Cranking out successful companies on inertia
alone?

~~~
ethbro
I don't think he's saying that.

He's just observing that _if_ after the initial successes YC had coasted and
another not-YC accelerator had coasted, YC would still continue to be more
successful as a result of the brand & network effect.

~~~
paulsutter
If he'd actually read the article he'd know that Sam directly admits they have
a positive feedback loop

> A lot of the best entrepreneurs in the world want to join YC.

There's a ton of evidence (for example, many founder testimonials) that YC has
a great deal of authentic value add. So his comment comes across as uninformed
sour grapes to me and I stand by my question.

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nxb
I, personally, would love to hear more about the hundreds of lower tier
accelerators, and insight as to why they're doing so terribly. In many of the
cases I've seen, the people running the accelerators just lay 100% of the
blame on the entrepreneurs.

It's really sad, tens of thousands of founders wasting years of their career
on the low-tier net-value-negative accelerators.

How bad could they be? Far worse than you'd imagine, as I've personally seen.

~~~
richmarr
Perhaps the accelerator model just isn't naturally very valuable to startups,
and YC are just a statistical abberation?

It just seems more likely that one company has made an aberrant success out of
a bad market than almost every other company has fumbled a good market.

I haven't been through an accelerator, happy to be shown where I'm wrong.

~~~
zabramow
You're right that accelerators are bound to fail, you're wrong to call YC an
accelerator. That's what distinguishes YC, it's not an accelerator it's a
company that funds lots of startups at once. Accelerator implies that you're
going to artificially speed up growth, presumably in order to get the company
an outside investment. YC doesn't accelerate growth and Sam in particular
boasts (in a good way) about being a patient investor.

Also, don't underestimate HackerNews. How many other "accelerators" have a
content hub that engages their customer base daily. You can't underestimate
what that does for their brand.

~~~
fivedogit
A YC founder once told me: "YC doesn't _make_ a company and definitely won't
_fix_ a company... they invest in companies that are _already_ working. That's
their secret."

Granted, these companies aren't soaring into the stratosphere yet. "Already
working" can simply mean a few early customers, a functional and polished
prototype, or even just a really good idea and a (very) proven team. The point
is that YC, like any investor, tries to minimize risk as much as possible,
even though they're in the riskiest layer of professional startup investing.

I used to agonize over the fact that I never worked at a big name-brand
company and that I haven't been able to hobnob with apex talent who might co-
found a startup with me as I figured that was the only way to get into YC or
TS. This one bit of advice (i.e. traction is everything) washed away that
anxiety like night and day. The ability to succeed is in the founders' hands,
not YC's magic wand.

Doubly so... because do you really want to take investment (even from YC) in
an idea that _doesn 't_ have traction and _isn 't_ working?

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auggierose
I think they are now so famous among potential founders, that their first-draw
advantage is the main deciding factor. For some accelerator to take over two
things have to happen: a) They start not picking huge potential winners. b)
Somebody else picks up those they failed to recognize as huge potential
winners.

It should really take only 1 (Google-size) instance of this happening to
totally shift momentum to "Somebody".

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jjtheblunt
Do these sorts of articles just scream worshipping false idols, and I say that
as a skeptic of religion who keeps seeing human groups behave in dumb ways
warned against in ancient times? Seriously. Find your own way? Stop
worshipping YC or we all stagnate?

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sparkzilla
I collected many of Sam's interviews here: [http://newslines.org/sam-
altman/](http://newslines.org/sam-altman/)

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vasilipupkin
What's kind of frustrating is lack of data in the VC space. YC is not purely
for profit, from the point of view that at least some of it is actually
designed to genuinely help founders. But, from the point of view of return on
capital, is it actually twice as good as 500 startups or some other seed
funds?

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pcmaffey
Sam says it right in the interview: the YC community is their #1
advantage/value.

It's also the reason Techstars is #2. Brad Feld has done an amazing job of
community building.

Network effects take time.

