1. Seems like YC is all aboard the B2B SaaS train. This is funny because early last decade B2B SaaS was known as mostly a lifestyle business category, while investors focused on consumer facing tech and big ticket enterprise products
2. It appears that the big tech employee track and the startup track are one and the same now. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that entrepreneurs and employees are very different from one another.
It's a funding process that appears to somewhat deliberately mimic the process for applying to postsecondary school, so the frequent school connections are unsurprising.
(I didn't meaningfully attend college at all and am in this directory.)
In a recent video chat, YC partners explained how consumer startups are often a "tarpit" (seem attractive - "all my friends think it's a great idea", but super-hard to get uptake, scale and revenue). Whereas there's an endless pool of opportunities to solve business problems that many small-med companies would happily pay (a little bit) for, and it's much quicker to validate (see if other startups will use it) and monetise early (vs both consumer and enterprise).
I remember the Basecamp guys shouting themselves hoarse about these very same values back when "Social, Local & Mobile" were the new hotness. Seems like they were prophets now
I think it's better how it is because it's up to the founders to say it how they want. Certainly Sao Paolo without the tilde is not something to impose on people.
> For prospective founders who are looking for inspiring leaders, here is a way to discover founders who have had experiences that reflect your own and learn more about their founder journey.
I'd guess a directory of 10,000 YC alumni could be awesome, if you're a new YC founder doing B2B sales cold calls.
(YC might connect their current/recent startups to each other. But this could help you put shoe to the pavement, and knock on many more YC alumni doors, where you have the name of a likely well-placed person, and a small "in" with them. Unless that's frowned-upon.)
Working in startups as an employee is a lottery ticket. Is there any heuristics/tips which could help winning this lottery ticket? Like joining previously successful exit cofounder's company? Joining series B ones which are likey to get series C
The best advice I heard for non zero-to-one folks was to watch for Series B rounds where multiple top tier venture firms participated, for example Sequoia + Lightspeed or Benchmark + Accel. This was back around 2012 so the economics could have shifted, less so the firms although there's been some movement. Series B @ $150-$250m valuation seems to be the place where PMF is (usually, not always) de-risked but the company still has room to grow 10-20x (in a good tech market).
To be fair, if you manage to make search slow for a database with ~10,000 entries, you're doing something very strange. Even allowing for egregious post-sizes of 100Kb/entry, that's less than 1 Gb. A raspberry pi could keep the database in RAM with room to spare.
It really isn't. You could have implemented this site using a single MySQL LIKE query and it would have been equally performant. Or even download the full dataset to the client on page load and do the search locally in JavaScript. The problems all arise when you need to scale.
> Or even download the full dataset to the client on page load and do the search locally in JavaScript.
That's exactly what I did for a recent hobby project of mine[0]. In my case, I've a db of 30K entries with gzipped size of ~600kb. This serves well for the few hundred visitors I get every day.
Using like operators isn’t full text search. It won’t find results where the words you typed are switched around for example. It wont even work if you accidentally put double spaces. This could work for a toy project but for any respectable app, using like as the search operator will suck. Not to mention it’s unscalable.
It is quick, but it also looks faster than it is because of the way they're animating the rows as you type. At the end of the day it's still taking the full 300ms or whatever to load the images from S3, and without all the extra jitter it would look kind of janky.
Probably flagged by readers who are tired of this drama (not one of the flaggers, btw). In the thread you were saying something like 'you can't find any reason why your ramen profitable start-up received such a tepid response from YC and you got the advice to come back with a co-founder' [other than the implied systemic misogyny].
Sorry, but that just not an acceptable response to a rejection. Startup accelerators do not exist to empower women founders, make the world a better place or other such grand idea, they exists to make money and you failed to convince one such accelerator that you can make money for them. It's as simple as that. Biases might affect their decision process, but that's a problem for their business, not yours.
Here's my original post, which doesn't mention anything about "empowerment" or "making the world a better place" or "implied systemic misogyny."
>> I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder.
I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank.
The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions.
The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post.
If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile.
Why would you need 6 angel investments, if you're offering angel investing to others? If you get 6 angels and give out 6 angels, you're just diluting your own stake to diversify into others' extremely illiquid companies that you have no control of.
You say you have $2m and $50k expenses. You can self-fund a 4-person team to get to PMF if you want to, without YC's $500k. But based on these 2 signals, you seem risk-averse and not actually willing to go all-in to your company. Personally, I'm a male and didn't get a YC interview for any of my YC applications, but I can't feign sexism over that.
This is a really good question, because it seems counter-intuitive to invest your money in other people if your own business needs funding. Here are a few motivations:
* When an angel invests 30k, I get value beyond the cash amount.
The angels I reach out to are founders with multiple successful exits, board members of other startups, and have 20-30+ years of experience. I get access to a fountain of wisdom and the person is motivated to answer my emails and take my calls when I'm stumped by a challenge.
I'm not good at EVERYTHING (who is), but I am proactive about getting help when I need it.
* A priced seed round sets the value.
Let's say you own 100% of a fine work of art, which you've priced at $10M. There's just one problem - only you value it at 10M, so there's no anchor for the real-world value. To get a return on your investment, you have to find a buyer that agrees with your valuation.
What if instead you owned 25% time-share of a work of art (this is a silly asset class, just using it as an example) that you and 3 other people price at $10. If you want to realize a return, there are now at LEAST 3 other prospective buyers that agree on the market value of your shares.
* There are more people like me out there.
I make angel investments in under-estimated Founders, because they're often overlooked by the pattern-matching lemmings in the institutional investment world. This isn't charity either; since a fund-raising round is similar to an auction, there are fewer investors bidding and betting on these founders. That gives me an edge.
I also tend to invest in "work horse" companies, not necessarily potential unicorns. Institutional investors have to chase unicorns that produce outsize returns, but I can participate in seed rounds that never raise after a seed or Series A.
There's a fund that follows the same thesis (https://tinyseed.com/) but I don't know of many institutional investors who make these kinds of investments.
* The best time to raise money is when you don't need it.
In the example I gave (6 x 30k @ 1% for 180k/3M post-money for a business earning 10-15k MRR), I have options for revenue-based financing and other kinds of debt.
Like I said, a fund-raising round is like an auction. If you have leverage or alternatives, you can command a higher price.
YC's startups get 125k for 7% + an additional 375k SAFE, which gets priced when you raise another round. If you sell another 15-20% on demo day, YC can end up owning roughly 20% of your company for 500k.
So, all I could think of during the tepid interview was "y'all want 20% of this business, but are acting like you're at the dentist." People didn't even introduce themselves (names) or ask mine. I know this wasn't intentional rudeness, it's due to application volume. The factory-farming way YC operates made me realize I could engineer better circumstances for myself and my business via an angel round.
> If you sell another 15-20% on demo day, YC can end up owning roughly 20% of your company for 500k.
How will YC own another 13% if you only sold another 15-20%? That would mean you sold 2-7% for 60k - 200k at a 2.9m valuation, unrealistic. Seed rounds themselves will be 10% - 15%, $2-5m at a $15 - 50m valuation. Most likely they're getting another 1 - 3% for that 375k if you raise a standard seed.
I agree that YC could've got a lot more impersonal with the huge 500+ batch sizes these days. But I still don't agree that the "connections" you're making or making "more people like me" are important when you're spending the money you say you need by raising from your own angels. Raising from your own angels stands as important because you're getting cash for operations and advice, no brainer. I think there's a good reason why founders angel invest after series B+, when they're possibly able to pull liquidity to the tune of several million dollars, making the $50k angel investments trivial. It shouldn't be your focus right now.
If for you "invited to fill a quota" is not [very forcefully] implying systemic misogyny, then you are using the language wrong and will get many more rejections.
If YC is trying to interview a certain number of under-represented founders per batch (quota), then that seems like an earnest attempt to change their demographics.
However, after like 15+ years in the tech world, I've noticed that quota-based targets train people to tune out. I don't think that's misogyny, since it's a pretty natural reaction to check-out if you don't think your input will impact an outcome because there's a mandated quota.
Does that make sense? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but I don't think you're assuming good intent or approaching this discussion with the curiosity I've come to respect on HN.
I think the possibility that YC is discriminating against women is worthy of discussing. If they are, it would be beneficial for both YC and the world at large if they did something to address it. If they are not, it's still interesting and possibly valuable to attempt to figure out why the list looks like it does.
Sure, it's worth discussing. But it's just a bullet point on a very, very long list of arbitrary things accelerators discriminate for. Just look at those faces. Where are the New York mechanic or soccer mom types, or people with visible tattoos? What in God's name have they done with the elderly, tuned them into Soylent green?
You can see from a glance that is NOT a representative sample of the population, and that's based on looks alone. Let's not even mention things like the way you talk and present yourself, educational and employment background. God forbid you are one of those neurodivergent people - Google even has a cute word for those poor undesirables: lacking googliness.
Bottom line, entrepreneurship is just anohter political occupation that relates to power over other people. It cannot function otherwise than as an extension of power relations in society, because those relationships permeate the market and affect the businesses` ability to make money. Startup survivorship is so low and the pool of qualified applicants so inexhaustible, that an accelerator cannot but work to enforce those stereotypes and power structures: why waste capital on a militant atheist founder in a devout society if there is even the slightest chance some parts of the public will boycott their products?
And having a 80% of a full chance on account of gender is in this context a minor problem compared with a 0% chance of anybody that does not talk the talk investors expect for purely cultural reasons.
I've read that co-founders are the norm for YC. It seems to be a rare exception for solo founders to be accepted, you'd probably have to prove you're the next Google for that. But then even Google had co-founders.
I'd say don't take it too personally. If you search the YC companies directory it would not be easy to find a solo founder company. The lack of interest you saw could have been that they had already decided that you needed a co-founder early in the process.
It's actually quite good to have made it to the interview stage.
That's a little scary. Any way to opt out of being included in that? I'm probably not the target market for YC, but if I were, this would run me off. I don't want to be known, I just want people to enjoy the stuff I make and for that enjoyment to be quantified in USD.
I think there probably is. It might even be opt-in. How do you get people to opt in? Have them check their information is correct and remind them to until it's launched.
> We’re also enabling any YC company to opt into having their YC application video, written application answers, and Demo Day video public on the YC Startup Directory
It's almost certainly opt-out for founders, I would be very surprised if they individually went back and got permission from every founder for the past decade before creating this.
I see someone I know would have said no if asked, for example, as their time at YC was pretty awful and resulted in what they consider to be shameful failure.
Maybe it’s a lack of imagination, but I can’t think of why any kind of YC experience should be shameful, provided lessons were learned and no one ended up in jail.
He had to drop out due to still-unresolved mental health issues, and the source of his shame is mostly that he didn't deal with those issues earlier, and still isn't dealing with them now.
Hmm, I see. Can relate too. I still see that as no reason for shame, even though from within that situation it can feel shameful. The journey to getting better can be a long and challenging one that’s hard to make sense of from the outside.
Yeah, that sounds right, and I don't agree with making it opt-out. I think it should be opt-in and like you am now almost completely certain that it isn't.
But if you chose to incorporate and run a company in the US as YC requires, and participate in their program, you'd be "public" regardless, in various forms.
Not necessarily. With young startups, the only available position for a role is often "Founder". A developer could simply want to work on a project and see where it goes, and the only way would be to become a founder.
Why is it scary? There is an option to opt out, but marketing and networking are two of the main reasons people join YC in the first place. No founder is saying no to this.
>Why is it scary? There is an option to opt out, but marketing and networking are two of the main reasons people join YC in the first place. No founder is saying no to this.
Probably because in an age of targeting phish paired with browsers that strain to run whatever JavaScript or whatever you hurl at them, the founders are rightfully concerned someone who’d be stopped by the secretary can slam their inbox because they misticked some box.
(But what do I know? I’m a venture socialist slamming lattès in the museum when everyone else is at work.)
They emailed months ago asking if people wanted to opt out; it was a concern but I suspect the vast majority of people both want to be in it AND are already trivially googleable as being in YC.
UX is strange. I searched for a founder friend and he has multiple companies listed but clicking on his image or anywhere in the result row just opens the page for an old company.
I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder.
I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank.
The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions.
The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post.
If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile).
I'm going to bounce this back and ask what you'd do in my shoes.
Your net worth is around 2M, you burn around 50k/year to eat, sleep, and be merry. You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle.
Let's say (hypothetically) you worked somewhere that just announced they're laying off 10% of their workforce.
You want to make an offer to 2-3 product + infra engineers who were laid off. You know they do excellent work, and they're a god damn joy to be around.
However, you need at least 6 months of payroll, health insurance premiums, and incidentals fully liquid to extend those offers. Ideally you'd have 8-12 months banked - because you care.
Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years!
> You could retire tomorrow, but you weren't put on this Earth to just be idle.
nice
> Your startup is "Ramen profitable" - that means you're making around 7k/month revenue to cover 2-5k expenses. If you start saving 100% of profits NOW you can afford 1 of those engineers in (checks notes) just under 8 years!
What's your next move?
Offer the engineers meaningful equity rather than the one or two points they might ordinarily expect.
I know this is your baby and building it all out on a raspberry pi is pretty cool, but I feel like that could be a bottleneck long-term.
First of all customers will need a physical device so you have to figure out shipping. Second, the RPi puts a limit on your computation. If you ever want a bigger and better model, you’re out of luck.
Why not just make it into an iPhone/Android app? Either do the processing locally or use the app as a thin client for a SaaS ($$$). Hell, people are running stable diffusion on an iPhone these days.
If it’s an app, people can easily try it out, and if it works for them you have a new customer overnight. Plus you don’t have to deal with pain in the ass RPi supply chain issues. Maybe it already exists as an app in which case ignore everything I said.
So personally what I would do is spend $10k porting to a mobile ecosystem and go back to YC saying you need cash for a couple mobile devs and maybe a temporary designer. If you’re comfortable doing the ML yourself you can save on that too.
I would not, but I know some people who would consider a deal like that. At $12k/yr and your stage you’re basically hiring a cofounder, so four points is… not a lot. You sound like you probably still have most of the equity left, so I’d expect more.
And a cliff? Nobody does cliffs these days after big tech axed them.
I wouldn't bother with an accelerator largely because I know I wouldn't find a social fit, and the informal connections are so much of the value prop. If YC had 25% women, they'd get to 40% pretty quickly. But so long as they're <5%, it's going to asymptotically approach 0%.
Also I'm confident that biases would factor into not only YC selection, but also (and more importantly) the investors who traditionally work with YC companies, since they just don't see women outside of "fem-tech" and fashion, in part because that's how YC selects.
My perspective may be as much a product of my pattern recognition of consistently having to deal with sexism as it is the valley being sexist, but either way I'm just done with it.
There's a full generation of talented women software engineers who do not have computer science degrees.
I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?
Here's a podcast that does a great job of explaining how PC advertising in the 80s/90s and onwards resulted in the current abysmal number of women CS graduates (in the US / English-speaking countries especially).
"There's a full generation of talented women software engineers who do not have computer science degrees."
Yes?
"I just happen to be one of them, and I worked my way into the top 1% of software engineers (by salary) in Silicon Valley. I've spent a lot of time wondering: how did this happen? How many more people out there just like me, and how do I invest in them NOW?"
My wife is an IT consultant (frontend), the most recent customer actively asked for women developers so both of the women in the company got the job directly without any interviews (they had other gigs at the time).
The IT consultant company is making bank, she is not (happened to me too so I switched industry).
So maybe start an IT consultant company? Seems to be quite the market for it.
Hey, I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful - but a service business doesn't produce the return on time investment I want. It's kind of like recommending I buy franchises near an airport. i.e. super time intensive, but can be very rewarding in the right conditions!
I used to run a WordPress services business before SquareSpace/Wix commoditized the space.
If your wife decides to start an IT consulting company, tell her to shoot me an email.
In a year or two, I'll probably be able to build a production micro-service by dictating to an LLM. That'll be the execution tool of choice for a Founder doesn't have much coding exp, but has 10-15+ years of line of business experience.
I say all this as someone who thought they'd be a CTO and has depended on software to put food on the table for 15 years.
I wouldn't call it rolling the dice though. Starting a business
is a calculated way to continue compounding my wealth all while doing something that I love and that I believe will be important in my lifetime.
I'm curious though about the business plan going forward though (after the beta). My assumption would be that PrintNanny is currently targeting hobbyists and smaller 3d printing services.
I say smaller, because I assume that companies like Shapeways either already have something similar or would build their own if you tried to charge enough. (E.g., for $XM/yr they could hire multiple engineers to work on it full time).
Is the angle to expand laterally into more manual monitoring opportunities? (ShopNanny?) Go deeper? Is this market bigger than people think?
My target market is SMB manufacturers in the US and Germany. My ideal SaaS customer has 10-15 employees and 5M in annual revenue, around 50% coming from a mix of services and government contracts.
The United States is ramping up domestic manufacturing, since the pandemic revealed weakness in "just in time" supply chains.
Automation/AI-assisted production is the only way to make the unit economics work though. Picture Zapier, but laser-focused on automating service/production tasks.
The second line of business I want to add in 2023 is a white-labeled PrintNanny appliance, with a SaaS sub. A few 3D printer manufacturers have reached out to me and are interested in white-labeling PrintNanny for their large format printers, which retail for 5-10k/unit. This will give me access to trusted/mature distribution networks while I'm building the business's credibility.
I've talked to 3D printer manufacturers who've tried to build their own stuff in house, since the margins of software (90%+) are VERY attractive to a hardware biz with margins around 30%. The tl;dr is:
1) 3D printer manufacturers are only willing to invest in in-house software for their hardware, but most manufacturing shops use like 10-20 different pieces of hardware from 5+ vendors. No one wants to spend money supporting their competitor's hardware.
2) Shapeways (consumer and pro-sumer on-demand printing) is not where the money is.
Compare to 2D printing: the overhead of print-on-demand t-shirts is not an attractive investment. Shapeways is the Rush Order Tees Dot Com of 3D printing.
The REAL money in 3D printing comes from companies who are manufacturing drone parts for the US gov, misc plastics for OEM and after-market automotive industry, satellites, commercial plumbing, Ag Tech. Ask someone who works at John Deere their ballpark budget for domestic manufactured parts.
The next 10 years of plastics and metal additive manufacturing on US soil are going to be important, and the stuff sci fi nerds like me used to dream electric dreams about
Good to know! The diversity on the shop floor is an excellent point.
I'm curious if you perceive white-labeling as a stepping stone or a reasonable destination. That is, it seems like you'd prefer for customers to buy directly from you, once you're ready for it. Precisely because of the diversity of vendors problem: you don't want them to think of the PrintNanny appliance/service as being from FormLabs or Inkbit or anybody else, you want them to know "We have our printers and then we have our PrintNanny". Right?
YC is NOT representative of CS, or most faang employees even. It’s extremely stressful, high stakes and high risk. I wouldn’t do it, and most people I know in tech wouldn’t either.
Out of extremely high stakes games, my understanding is this has always been male dominated. So you’d have to first take the prerequisite ratio (for instance if CS degree, it’d be ~19% women, in the US) and then multiply by some risk taking factor, perhaps by comparing to other ventures in domains with 50-50 to get some form of baseline.
I mean hell, we don’t even know the ratio of applicants.
Given that YC companies in general have a tech (as in software/computing technology) focus, and given the large number of technical founders, it is not unreasonable to assume that there will be a correlation with CS graduates.
I wonder to what extent that is due to women being discriminated against after they apply, or women being less likely to apply. If there is a significant difference in the acceptance rate, they should consider concealing characteristics like gender as much as possible in the process and maybe inviting people with more diverse perspectives to assess candidates. If there is no significant difference, they should consider advertising YC places where they may reach a different audience and publish statistics that reassure applicants that they will be treated equally.
I agree, both male privilege and female privilege are real and very serious problems. The existence of one doesn't negate the other. They are often interlinked, such as the male privilege of not getting lower pay and fewer career opportunities just because you have a child and the female privilege of being allowed to take more time away from work to raise that child and not being treated as a secondary parent. You can't solve one without solving the other.
The things you mention are not necessarily in that category, but seem to be because people are taught not to care about men as much. The flip-side could be our society's infantilization of women, but the harms of that are more subtle than the result of our society's indifference towards men, such as men receiving higher sentences for the same crimes and being refused help in situations where help is offered to women. Perhaps having fewer people encouraging women to take risks and fewer people being willing to invest in women is one of those harms.
I think the point is less about whether each type of privilege is real, but that this logic is incredible shaky. (i.e. deciding there is a bias against a group solely based on representation in outcomes)
Put another way (and I think the OP tried) if we look at prison sentences by gender and apply the same logic, then we have a huge bias against men in the justice system, yet no one seems to be making that case nor would it gain popularity.
Of course there is a huge bias against men in the justice system. That should be obvious to anyone, and is also confirmed by many studies. For example, from the US federal system:
> It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.
> We find significantly harsher sentences imposed on male offenders even after controlling for most case characteristics, including mitigating factors such as ‘caring responsibilities’. Specifically, the odds ratios of receiving a custodial sentence for offences of assault, burglary and drugs committed by a man as opposed to a woman are 2.84, 1.89 and 2.72
Strange, I don't find anything you have listed in your profile for either https://www.ycdb.co/batch/w09 (AirBnb batch) or https://www.ycdb.co/batch/s09 (Stripe) but maybe you don't have everything you were involved in listed on your profile?
I still have not been able to get to the bottom of it. My ex stole a bunch of money from me, lied like crazy and ran off with our two daughters (this part is heart breaking and kills me every day). We are in a bitter legal battle (an ironic thing is I am ordered to pay her legal bills), and she has sadly perjured herself multiple times. She somehow got YC involved, and was able to steal $50,000 from my business Mercury account. I couldn't believe it, and still haven't gotten an explanation or apology from Mercury. I raised bloody hell on the forums when that happened, and so I'm guessing the ban was related to that. I think it might be a cover your ass thing, as they really fucked up that one and are probably worried I'll sue (which I may, as I have great cause and people have been encouraging me to, but I'd rather focus on more positive things in life).
They've done their best to censor me, but luckily there are mostly honest people there and many stick up for me. I'll keep fighting for the truth.
I'm saying this because I would want someone to tell me this if I was going through what you're going through.
Forget YC, the $50k, and your startup right now. It seems like you're experiencing mental illness which is distorting your ability to see things accurately. 12 weeks ago you stated: "Our team is going to radically accelerate the cures for cancer in 12 weeks."[0], but there is no team and you haven't done that. It seems like delusions of grandeur from psychosis, maybe related to pandemic isolation. It's apparent to anyone seeing your HN submissions and twitter. It's why people from YC are "ghosting" you. You need to immediately see a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, and get to the bottom of this. Do it for your family. Your startup and change-the-world ambitions can wait one year.
I just wanted to reassure you that even if your comment has no effect, it's not "your fault" -- it turns out that there's ~nothing anyone can do, short of dragging them to the hospital.
Once our family member was hospitalized and started taking medication (they initially refused), he snapped out of it very quickly. Less than a week, I think. But it was very difficult to get them into the hospital in the first place. In my friend's case, he believed that everyone in his apartment was going to attack him; in my family member's case, they thought that black cars were full of agents trying to get them; and it appears that in OP's case, he feels that YC's out to get him, when it's anything but.
It's often just one of those sad situations where we can't do anything but be kind and empathetic.
I didn't feel very kind, but thank you. I've lost count of how many people I've seen on HN teeter on homelessness because of obvious mental health issues, sometimes causing past felonies. I'm at a loss why it seems so much more prevalent these days, but it's heartbreaking and concerning that it's possible for any of us to eventually mentally break.
I sensed you might not, so I wanted to thank you for the attempt. You have a good heart, and your comment really shows it.
For what it’s worth, HN has a long history of this kind of thing. It’s probably more frequent now because HN has grown several orders of magnitude in a relatively short time. (You can get a feel for this by graphing item IDs vs time. I haven’t done it, but I bet it’s a steep J curve.)
Totally agreed about how surprising it is that anyone can break. The other aspect is, they’re not broken — there’s a chance they’ll take your advice and turn their life around. It’s a terrible illness that people can recover from. Like you, I hope he does, especially for his family’s sake.
> My 3 most important papers—that will go down as turning points in the history of computer science—have a combined 0 citations, and 2 of them not only were not in a journal, but they were even flagged and removed from arxiv
Not immediately apparent, but as I said, going through their HN submissions and Twitter, it is apparent. Many upvotes and other replies to their comments in the past few months agree.
I applaud you for stating your theory out loud in public: that I'm "experiencing mental illness".
I offer an alternative theory: that I'm saner than almost anyone and a talented and tenacious builder and will indeed lead the project that reduces cancer deaths by 50% by 2027.
Let's look at the evidence and the credibility of the sources behind the 2 positions.
> there is no team
Anyone with a web browser can determine this is false. You could have said "small team". It's true, I thought we'd be on our way to 100 by now, and instead are still in the low double digits, but saying "no team" is a lie, and big strike against your credibility. Some recent quotes: "the best experience of my life", "It is really great working with you and the team."
That being said, I feel bad about the job I've done at leading the team. I have been under constant attack for months, and that has been a distraction and hard on the team.
> 12 weeks ago you stated: "Our team is going to radically accelerate the cures for cancer in 12 weeks."...you haven't done that
You left out a huge part of that quote: "I just need people to #LetMeCode. And unfreeze my bank accounts." This hasn't happened. Instead it's been the opposite. I've been harassed to this day—personally and people on my team, have had even more money stolen/frozen, and been banned and censored from many forums that I helped build. I've also had my children kidnapped, and haven't seen them since September. Anyone who knows me knows my daughters are my top priority in life, and that has not been easy. Had people simply remained neutral, we would be further along with CancerDB.
What I learned was that: there are really bad people in this world AND there are people who are total cowards and do really bad things out of fear.
I've had to adapt our strategy appropriately and shore up our flank defenses while going on the attack against this kind of cowardly behavior.
> related to pandemic isolation
Lol. I am a 1% social person. People think because I post a lot online I must be on the computer all the time. I don't own a phone. When I'm AFK, I'm in the real world, and have lots of friends, and no one who spends time with me would call me isolated. Your data again, is very wrong.
> It seems like delusions of grandeur from psychosis
It's not a delusion of grandeur. I am grand. Look at my 3 long bets. Very contrarian. Very grand. Either I'm experiencing a 20 year "psychosis", or like I said, I'm smarter and saner than most anyone.
I think it's the latter. Let's look at COVID. I called COVID right from the very first datadump, on February 18th, 2020 (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1228117546974371840). I then went on to build the Covid Data Explorer for Oxford's Our World in Data that has been used by over 100M people, including I think every president of every country. In winter 2020, when the vaccines came out and then the FDA cancelled the control groups, I called bullshit, despite extreme pressure from everyone I knew, and now have been vindicated.
And yes, on the matter at hand, I got into YCombinator. Twice. The first time I spent a lot of time helping my batchmate AirBedAndBreakfast.com. The second time PG wanted me so bad he went from 7% to 3%! (Smart move, as that class became their 2nd most valuable of all time, spawning a startup called Stripe, again that I was involved in helping in the early days).
> It's apparent to anyone seeing your HN submissions and twitter.
Plenty of smart people are on our team and our side. The sheep call me mentally ill, the honest ones call me a man of honor.
> You need to immediately see a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, and get to the bottom of this.
Lol. I did! One said "he doesn't need to see a therapist they need a divorce lawyer". And the other—who I saw at the insistence of my wife—knew an order of magnitude less about the medication he wanted me to take than I did! She wasn't happen with that meeting, and I later found out in court her and that phony went to court in Hawai'i and tried to get me involuntarily committed (the court told them rightly to screw off).
Here's the bottom of it: I am an honest, sane person in a world full of cowards and liars. We have now 2 statements and 2 theories. The "I'm crazy" argument supported by lies, and my statement, backed by evidence. My daily peaceful existence and the continued growth of our products and new friendships is pure evidence that I am fine.
> Your startup and change-the-world ambitions can wait one year.
See I have people coming to me begging me to help save their loved ones. They don't have a year. I've already shed many tears and been to many funerals. This is real. This is war.
I will not slow down. Not so cowardly sheep can feel better about themselves. (Not speaking of you there, but specifically the people I know personally who have told me to "slow down").
I applaud you for stating your theory out loud in public, and opening yourself to criticism. My harsh words are not so much directed at you as they are the argument, which has been disproven over and over now, that I am crazy.
"Mania is like an invisible drug. I had been off it for years. I had been vigilant. But after a long stable period, I had forgotten and now my guard was down. I didn’t recognize it as it was happening.
Looking back, this was probably the time to catch it. To go see my therapist. To get back on meds. To reveal my condition to some more people and ask for help."
Sound familiar?
"My behavior became textbook manic. My ideas and claims became more and more ambitious — topics that had seemed complex to me before suddenly seemed simple, I could learn anything, solve any problem, change industries.
With my software project I started to feel the paranoid need to move fast"
You need to walk into the closest psychiatry office and tell them you have Bipolar and are in a manic episode that is distressing your family. You can stabilize and get your situation back to normal. I promise you the cancer startup can wait a few months until you do that and get things under control.
My words from the link you cited: "Bipolar disorder is not a thing."
I wrote in silico models of the brain. Couldn't figure it out. Turns out it's a lie. System people do not like people who excel and so created a fake condition and labelled them crazy and that they need to be medicated and hospitalized. That's my position. And it's a very strong one.
You will not be able to prove that it is real, because the data is not there. Bipolar disorder is as real as the Covid vaccines are effective. Covid lockdowns/mandates/vaccines btw is my proof that society can easily fall for mass delusions. Tom Cruise was right about psychiatry being largely a mass delusion.
You can look me up on Google Scholar and Github. I know what I'm talking about. Do you?
You only said "Bipolar disorder is not a thing." during your mania the past 3 months. You need to trust the person you are in: https://medium.com/@bipolarguy321/going-manic-with-a-fitbit-...
That is when you actually made your contributions on Google Scholar. Your GitHub contributions are almost entirely before September when it seems like you started mania.
What you have been doing recently isn't working, objectively. You're living on your own right now and financial numbers are only going down. These are objectively worse. You've accomplished a lot before this and still can, but you need to see the psychiatrist first and trust your past self. I promise you this is how you get to see your daughters.
> What you have been doing recently isn't working, objectively
?? Have you seen our traffic numbers? We had a minor dip during the Xmas break, but now back to record numbers.
> You're living on your own right now
I'm rarely sleeping on my own ;)
> and financial numbers are only going down.
?? Which financial numbers? This will be a record month for us.
Talking to you is like talking to an NPC. You make a statement, I provide data that it is false, you don't take that new evidence into account to adjust your reality calculations (https://www.rootclaim.com/).
Can you please send me a link to your story? I started looking through your comment history and the first thing I noticed was this comment doesn't show up (probably because it's a descendant of a flagged comment), and rather than go looking for something that may have already been hidden on HN I figured I'd just ask.
> this comment doesn't show up (probably because it's a descendant of a flagged comment)
Correct - this how HN's software works these days. We didn't do anything specific to the thread; it's just that users flagged the root comment.
Btw I wasn't part of any internal YC discussions about banning anybody but I know and like breck from our time in W09 together, I have a lot of experience with this on the HN side, and you're unlikely to be able to extract the real story from material on the internet.
Speaking generally, there's an asymmetry with stories like this: one side can take to the open internet and say anything, while the other side can't or won't—and sometimes one of the reasons, ironically, is to protect that very person.
Irrespective of how many sides there are to the original story, why is the parent comment flagged? He did YC, but he's not in the directory - those two statements are true, no?
(Admins flag too; it’s their duty. We wouldn’t want to be here if users were the only ones doing the flagging, for a bunch of reasons. Suffice to say, the HN team does a fantastic job.)
I can't tell you why users flagged it, and we don't often unflag things that users have flagged. But if you want a reason: the comment wasn't just saying a couple of true things neutrally; it was baiting a drama that has already played out repetitively quite a few times, and is not possible to discuss publicly.
That’s interesting. I suspect it’s special cased for admin accounts specifically.
The reason might be that users often pick fights with mods. Dan’s comment page might be overwhelmed by such threads if left unchecked. pg once noted that pg’s own account was highly watched relative to other accounts, so maybe users were following Dan around and adding fuel to the very fires he was trying to put out.
The reason I say that is because I can’t find any examples of this phenomenon except his account. Do you know of any? E.g. this thread does show up on the flagged user’s profile page, contrary to what others were saying. It’s right below this one for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=breck&next=34266186#...
It also seems to show up on everyone else’s page: mine, tptacek’s, etc.
Cheers for pointing that out. Stuff like this is fascinating, and we rarely get the chance to nerd out about it.
There are no exceptions (...at least, none that I'm currently aware of). Dang's "missing comment" actually is on his page, just not where I was looking.
The comment was new, but it was a descendant of one of dang's older comments, so it appears further back in his profile than where I looked.
It’s a surprisingly easy mistake to make. I thought it might be that, so I triple checked, and still missed it. So you’re not alone.
One time many years ago, I almost emailed a bug report claiming the very same thing. Luckily I noticed right beforehand.
It speaks to Dan’s dedication that he did so much for the site in a single day that both of us missed his comment buried in the avalanche. :)
In fairness, the discussion was a little confusing, since it was combining a few different topics (showdead, OPs thread, flagging, and admin’ing) so a mixup probably isn’t too surprising.
HN is completely fascinating, and I appreciated the analytical eye you were bringing to it. If you keep doing that, you’ll notice a ton of surprising little details over time. Minimaxir tried to document them in “undocumented features of hacker news” and the list is still far from complete. Plus it’s cool that the site is ever-evolving.
One of my favorite new features is that if you go to an old submission, e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 (or thereabouts), all the users’ names will show up in green if they were a new account at the time. I.e. it preserves the historical fact of someone being a new user in a given comment thread.
It’s such a small detail, yet there are quite literally thousands of such small details that all add up to something wonderful.
Regardless, have a good weekend, and cheers for the chat.
1. Seems like YC is all aboard the B2B SaaS train. This is funny because early last decade B2B SaaS was known as mostly a lifestyle business category, while investors focused on consumer facing tech and big ticket enterprise products
2. It appears that the big tech employee track and the startup track are one and the same now. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that entrepreneurs and employees are very different from one another.