
What's produced more value: Y Combinator's investments or Hacker News? - cgcardona
https://github.com/cgcardona/thoughts/blob/master/2013/feb/4_yc_investments_or_hackernews.md
======
DanielBMarkham
One of the other commenters brought up an interesting point: the audience for
HN and the teams YC pick are completely different demographic groups.

I don't think it started out that way; in fact I know it didn't. But over time
we went from "watercooler for hackers" to "stuff that interests hackers" to
"stuff that interests hacker wannabes" to something-else, not sure what to
call it. Maybe "stuff that hacker wannabes like and most techies are
interested in"

That probably sounds overly-critical of HN, and I apologize if I could have
said it better. I just don't think the comparison works the way this author
intended it to.

The key issue here is this: does HN have a progression? Is there some sort of
goal where after consuming it for a while you become a better person or learn
something _useful_ about the world or yourself? (useful enough to offset the
time you spend here) In YC there's a format, a goal, clear steps, and _you're
going somewhere_. HN -- anymore? -- it's a hangout. A place you could spend
all day picking up little shiny things.

I believe it would be very easy to find more value added by HN, here and
there. One guy learns how to program, one guy hooks up with a founder, one guy
learns critical things about startups, and so on. And I think if you added up
all of those cherry-picked cases, you'd probably end up with more value than
YC (for some definition of the word "value"). As an aggregate, however, it's a
no-brainer. YC wins. They teach teams to have a clearly-defined _external_
goal and then teams begin a journey towards reaching that goal.

(Note that you can't do this analysis with numbers. This is an entirely
subjective question along the lines of "Do you like ice cream?" and should be
treated as such)

~~~
Udo
Every time someone tries to assert that HN is by now a low-quality "hacker
wannabe" hangout I can't help but feel offended.

Probably like many of us here, I'm a hacker in the sense that I love writing
code. I like to have stimulating discussions with smart, like-minded people
who offer new perspectives. And while I'm at it, I like startups, too. While I
have no personal connection to YC, I like hearing from their companies first
hand because they are interesting. I think it's great that people doing
startups (YC or not) sometimes post their demo online here on HN. I also love
to hear from hackers who did nifty one-offs on the weekend. And open source
projects. And in-depth discussions about programming. And hacker culture. The
whole thing.

I am also clearly not one of the Old Crew. You have been a fan of the band
since before they became cool and I have not. I get it. But for all that talk
about evaporative cooling, let's not forget that every community _needs_ fresh
blood to survive. More often than not, I feel I'm in the right place here.
Even if that perception turns out to be false, there are countless other new
users who definitely _are_ enriching this community immensely.

Could HN be improved? Absolutely. But every time someone like you suggests
that this is a nearly meaningless and diluted forum where inane wannabes try
to sell stuff to each other, I feel like you're attacking me and, more
importantly, other users who provide exponentially more value than I do.

If you want to "add value" to HN, excellent, please work on doing that. A
first step would likely involve stopping to make it and its users look bad.
What you are doing is simply sabotage from the inside and it's exacerbated by
the fact that you are one of the most influential users around here. By making
it appear desolate, you participate actively in dragging it down. We can agree
on the need for continued improvement without suggesting that everyone but the
Old Crew are idiots.

There is something else in your comment that just rubs me the wrong way. It
reminds me of that time-honored trick where someone first totally demolishes
the worth of a person or company, only to portray themselves as seeing the
hidden "potential" seconds later and then magnanimously suggest how they're
going to rescue said person/company. I apologize if this is unjustified, but
it is the impression I got from your post.

By the way, I believe one of the easiest ways to improve something _right now_
is by committing yourself to vote down snappy low quality one-liner comments
that add nothing to the discussion.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I usually don't reply, but your comment seems heartfelt.

1\. If you want to be offended, be offended. Can't help that. My statement was
full of qualitative generalizations. Nobody meant you in particular, but
you're welcome to feel that way if you like.

2\. I never said HN was useless or should be avoided. In fact, I feel just the
opposite: I like coming here and posting and commenting. Too much, in fact.

3\. Things have good qualities and they have bad qualities. Simply because I
like coming here doesn't make HN good, and simply because it has bad qualities
doesn't make it not worth visiting.

Look, I'm just calling it as I see it. I've spent a lot of time here - some
useful and some wasted. I've thought long and hard about the role of
technology and online communities in my life. These are the conclusions I've
reached.

As I said, this entire question is a value judgment about personal opinion. I
like ice cream but parts of this ice cream suck. You love ice cream and love
everything about this ice cream. It's silly to get emotional about discussions
like this -- they are simply opinion questions.

Thanks for your comment. Sorry if it rubbed you the wrong way. I should have
been more diplomatic, but it's how I feel.

ADD: "nearly meaningless and diluted forum where inane wannabes try to sell
stuff to each other" -- I did not say this, and this is not how I feel. I
simply said that participating in the community, where people find things of
interest and share them can become something you do all of the time _instead
of doing something useful with your life_. HN is not meaningless and does not
exist to sell things to people, although it does look a bit like a platform
for YC PR, which is fine with me.

If you're interested in more of my premise, here you go:
[http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is...](http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology_is_h.php)

~~~
Udo
Thanks for taking the time to reply.

 _> Nobody meant you in particular, but you're welcome to feel that way if you
like._

I _know_ you didn't mean me in particular. I was merely trying to show you
that you're not just attacking a faceless mass of people or some abstract
phenomenon. Whether intentional or not, you are attacking people for
participating in this forum.

 _> You love ice cream and love everything about this ice cream._

This is a gross mischaracterization of my point, and I think you know it.

 _> "nearly meaningless and diluted forum where inane wannabes try to sell
stuff to each other" -- I did not say this, and this is not how I feel._

I must admit you got a bit of flak there as a (perceived) representative of a
larger group. But for what it's worth, I do believe humility is healthy in
discussions. That's probably what rubbed me the wrong way, and it still does
with your answer as well. It's easy to misunderstand tone in written
communications, so please understand that I'm not saying this in an emotional,
vindictive way.

 _> If you're interested in more of my premise [...]_

I think I remember that article, but I'll be reading it again. Thanks!

------
pg
That $45.2m figure was not the average valuation of all cos we've funded, but
the average valuation of companies _with known valuations_ (either by raising
an equity round, being acquired, or dying, in which case the value is 0).

I realize that unless something is changing, the more recent companies that
don't have fixed valuations yet should have the same sort of distribution. But
that quote in Wikipedia still makes me a little uncomfortable, because it's
not strictly correct.

~~~
hollerith
Although what you write is not false, it is little more than a distraction
from the much more important fact that the $45.2m figure comes from Wikipedia,
which in turn got it from a NYT article written in _February of 2006_.

(I am not saying or implying that the distraction was _intentional_ on your
part.)

~~~
pg
It's from a 2012 _Forbes_ article.

~~~
hollerith
My mistake. I will be more careful in the future.

------
gojomo
Hard to calculate, but personally, I would gladly trade all my karma points
for some shares of Dropbox.

------
ashray
I think that more than hacker news, y combinator has funded reddit which has
more far reaching effects and contributions. Also, wasn't HN created for y
combinator people to discuss stuff ? As I see it, HN is an investment by YC
because time was definitely invested in creating the community, this obviously
further complicates the calculation of value considering they aren't
completely independent.

------
benologist
HN is ultimately just a podium for YC companies to market themselves. I don't
think there is much value to it beyond that other than a 'little reddit' kind
of value.

As a tech news aggregator it's just OK, a lot of stuff is mainstream fluff
that digg in its early years used to be full of - you could probably replace
half of HN with <http://web20.originalsignal.com/>.

As a community of intelligent people ... there are some very smart and very
experienced users who create companies that matter or at least matter for a
while, but the average user is just here for average tech news.

~~~
pg
If HN is a merely ok news aggregator that is ultimately just a podium (?) for
YC cos to market themselves, why do you use it so much?

~~~
benologist
For the same reason I used forums, Slashdot, Digg and Reddit before HN - these
sites start off very interesting and addictive and then they gradually appeal
to a wider and wider audience and in doing so become less interesting. Or
maybe it's because I'm growing (or shrinking I guess). Either way one of us is
not keeping pace.

If it wasn't a podium for YC companies we would see very few of them being
mentioned because most of them just aren't that good a match for this
audience, so it's forced.

~~~
robryan
If they aren't a good match for the audience, why are they being upvoted as
much as they are? Not that all YC startups get heaps of attention on here,
some pass by almost unnoticed.

~~~
benologist

      YC founders' userids show up in orange to one another, and
      there is a page where they can see one anothers'
      submissions.
    

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5025168>

~~~
djt
But why are you still an active member then?

------
tzakrajs
This was well intentioned, no doubt. But it feels like you just jerked off pg,
hn and yourself all at the same time.

------
milep
Without pg and Hacker News, I would still be coding Java in "enterprise",
instead of Rails in startup. I would not know about Lisp, Ruby, Clojure and
other cool stuff. And probably would have quit coding altogether in
frustration.

------
DividesByZero
HN comes up in discussion among startup types here in Berlin a lot - it's
definitely having an impact with more reach than individual YC investments,
but what that impact is seems like it would be impossible to quantify.

I know that I became an entrepreneur at least in part because I started
reading HN in 2009.

------
ekianjo
Note: false question which is not really answered in the said post. Too bad, I
was expecting some kind of valuation of HN.

------
marcamillion
I like the premise, but I felt let-down by the conclusion.

Really thought you had some clever proxy to calculate the value of HN.

I do agree that it is hard to quantify it exactly, but feels like you just re-
hashed the Wikipedia article and copped out on the interesting part.

------
cs702
If we include all the second- and third-order effects, the "value produced" by
both goes far beyond the measurable financial results generated by Y
Combinator's investment portfolio and the personal impact Hacker News has had
on its community members.

For example, many other "incubators" around the world have been inspired by,
and are trying to emulate some elements of, Y Combinator's startup program.
Similarly, pg's influential essays -- there's nothing else quite like them on
the Web -- have inspired countless individuals around the world to become
entrepreneurs and/or angel investors.

------
gwern
When measuring Hacker News's value, you want to know its _marginal_ value: how
much it adds compared to the next best alternative, since that's how much
better off you are made if Hacker News exists and how much you will lose if
Hacker News ceases to exist.

Hacker News and Reddit are close substitutes: if Hacker News shut down
tomorrow, everyone could jump on a /r/HN subreddit and not be much worse off.
So its marginal value is far smaller than a quick estimate from traffic or
users would indicate.

------
kriro
Without YC, HN becomes less interesting as well though. I mostly come here to
read "interesting stories from the world of tech entrepreneurship" and because
the filtering for good tech stuff is nice as well because the technology
discussed tends to be relevant for quickly moving/agile type of companies.

I don't really think it makes all that much sense to separate the two.

~~~
andreasklinger
I agree with all of your paragraph but the first and the last sentence.

HN could do very well without the YC bias. (Not saying it necessarily should)

HN has build it's own credibility and community.

------
cgcardona
Author here—I changed the name of the repo that was hosting this .md file in
order to set up a github 'pages' page and it broke the url.

You can find the article here: [http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-
produced-more-v...](http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-produced-
more-value--ycombinators-investments-or-hacker-news/)

------
bjoe_lewis
Well, Just hours back I attended a campus recruitment drive from a core
development company(probably my last chance, in college to get in the
industry) and I failed. I came home depressed of whatabouts of my future, I
opened hacker news and all of a sudden, the world seems a bigger place with
way more space, than it was a few minutes ago!

------
narendranag
I don't think the question makes any sense: Hacker News wouldn't exist without
the eco-system YC's investments have created.

------
Killswitch
Since cgcardona had to change the location of this file, only a day after
submitting it, here's the new location:

[http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-produced-
more-v...](http://cgcardona.github.com/2013/02/07/whats-produced-more-value--
ycombinators-investments-or-hacker-news/)

------
tesmar2
Age 21: Get married. Age 22: Have first kid. Age 25: Have second kid/adopt Age
27: Have third kid/adopt. Age 29: Have fourth if you want. Age 47: Start
business now that kids are out of house and you have experience.

------
vemv
The occasional worthwhile submission justifies reading HN regularly, but I
consider the general signal/noise ratio rather low - some parameters ought to
be tuned.

~~~
intended
The parameters that need to be tuned are the participation types.

I think the strictly technical threads probably have better SNR ratios (number
of useful comments/all comments?), and the value of comments in the more
generic/generalist comments has dropped.

Right now, there is a thread where someone is expounding X, but no one has
come in to offer him a good insightful rebuttal.

I think PG himself said he has noticed a creep of mid-brow dismissals in the
comments. The lack of someone who can provide a high level discussion in the
marginal threads, is something I seem to be feeling more strongly.

(A thread regarding something like Ortiz, or Aaron would usu. have good
representation on the other hand)

------
sbarlster
I don't know about the YC companies but I agree that HN has been a great
inspiration to me also. Got me thinking about companies and that it is
possible!

Thanks HN.

