I would love to believe what pg is saying. However there are strong counter points to his arguments.

Uber and Travis Kalanick don't seem to be failing. They may have some negative publicity, but their growth is strong. Uber is probably worth more than any single yc company including Airbnb.

There's also a tendency for people to think they're good people and not realize how they're being mean. Criminals are good at this.

I think displacing the resident population of SF is pretty mean, as is creating a monoculture there.

Apathy matters.

>There's also a tendency for people to think they're good people and not realize how they're being mean. Criminals are good at this.

"Criminals" are also good at being mistaken as mean people when they are really good.

I don't disagree with this. Organized crime actually serves a legitimate community function in its early stages usually. They always get their hands dirty.

Is that really someone that you'd want to emulate though?

You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy because he never had to use violence, but he still sold crack to people.

>You could make the case that Freeway Rick Ross is a really nice guy

Good point. Is he "mean" or not? More curiously, is he "successful" or not?

Uber:

(1) Legal.

Nevada just outlawed Uber. More generally, Uber stands to encounter a lot of legal push-back.

(2) Competition.

In e-mail of Sat 11/22/2014 12:20 PM, CBinsights reported that Uber has "27 alternatives".

(3) Localism.

Yes, maybe in each city, something like Uber, if successful, could have a network effect that would let it have a barrier to entry: That is, since all the drivers use Uber, all the riders do; and since all the riders do, all the drivers do.

But, the taxi business is geographically local so that success by, say, Uber in Boston does next to nothing to help Uber compete in NYC, Atlanta, Chicago, SF, LA, etc. So, in each city, Uber can be attacked by local competitors.

I think that to run something like Uber you have to be Travis. There is a lot of money in destroying the taxa monopoly so that would override the cost of being mean.

The taxi monopoly is really more of a government monopoly than a business one. This is especially true in NYC. Sure, big companies own groups of medallions and single owners hadn't been able to get one (until this year) for 20+ years, but medallions are very illiquid assets. The resale value on them is much less than what the city gets for new ones issued at auction.

There's tons of state-controlled monopolies out there if you look hard enough.

Why does it need to be replaced? '12 mini would still be going strong.

On that note, why does YC let so many MBA founders in?

YC lets them in because the people making that decision believe said founders have some (unspecificied, but non-trivially non-zero) chance at building a company they can sell (to other investors or "the public" in an IPO) for far more than they invest in it.

It seems people are making a category error with respect to YC. YC's purpose is not to foster a cradle of technical innovation with an engineer focus; it's to maximize returns on high-risk investments in what happen to be technology companies. Engineers in the startup world are like engineers everywhere else in technology work: second-class workers who exist to expend their life in the form of labor for (relatively) token compensation in return, with lots of ego stroking to help deflect attention from that.

> Engineers in the startup world are like engineers everywhere else in technology work: second-class workers who exist to expend their life in the form of labor for (relatively) token compensation in return

Be careful, that breaks the marketing veil too much ;-)

The problem is that to attract and keep engineers busy and happy it is important to tell them stories about changing the world, "breakthrough technologies", paradigm shifts. Also it is important to explain inability of many engineers to discern how equity gets allocated, how options and stock work and so on. "oh look you get 10000 shares!" type tricks.

Now, granted, those are not mutually exclusive, some do work on breakthrough technologies.

I haven't seen any stats to say that it's lopsided or not, but i'd wager because education alone doesn't define an individual or the company?

Because people who matter still see an elite MBA as a useful imprimatur.

Thanks for writing this Ankit. This will help tons of people.

"Don’t let funding take your eye off the goal: making something people want. Everything else, including going through Y Combinator, is there to support that goal but is not the goal itself." Exactly...

This is particularly challenging, since, given the amount of effort it takes to make an application, if you apply to multiple accelerators during "application season" it's easy for it to be a full time job.

It's very easy to believe "if only we just got in... we'd have the money to do X".

agree 100%. Getting into YC is a bad bar for success.

YC will miss out on allot of companies. It not humanly possible for them to be that good.

I rather have a business that has that type of growth than get into YC.

I think the mindset to have here is that YC is so popular and the number of YC partners are so small, that you have a very small chance to get in the first place.

I wouldn't burn too many candles hoping to get in or trying to figure out a reason why you did not. There is a benefit to applying in that it makes your commitment to your startup even stronger.

Focus on what is important and that is your business. I truly believe building something sustainable is better for YOU, than trying to make the next Dropbox, Facebook etc. But if you already gaining Facebook like traction I am sure YC will already have heard of you.

Worry about your startup and just focus on making it sustainable. Becoming popular with customers and maintaining that relationship. has more benefits for more people than getting into YC. Focus on what is important.

This is an interesting point on the timeline for YC in that their apps increased 40%!

PG says they now have 3 silos, like 3 mini YC's reviewing. But if you have 1400 alums reviewing apps, by definition you are going to have scoring that is biased against finding black swans, regardless of how many silos you create.

As you say, the problem is too many apps and not enough time for a smaller amount of alums to review the apps.

One answer might be going to a rolling application process to avoid the washout that happens with a wave 40% bigger than you anticipated. And/or opening other offices, which is most likely in the works.

"PG says they now have 3 silos, like 3 mini YC's reviewing."

Can you point me to where PG said this?

"But if you have 1400 alums reviewing apps, by definition you are going to have scoring that is biased against finding black swans, regardless of how many silos you create."

Why do you think the scoring is biased against black swans?

I think it was in this video with Jcal http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMqgiXLjvRs . Not sure at what point in the video, but PG definitely gives up lots of great success tips, so worth watching it all.

As far as the black swans, I could be wrong on this, but my understanding is that YC has maybe 10 partners all giving a grade on the apps coming in (apparently started this after they missed SendGrid). Im not sure if the 1400 alums initially flag or what, but even with the 10 partners grading, their odds of finding black swans get worse because black swans don't look like winners to most people - they are essentially counter intuitive, crazy ideas that don't appeal to the majority in the beginning (or maybe the founders are not Stanford drop outs or ex Googlers, which further sways the majority to give higher grade to what is more obvious. Thus pushing down more potential black swans below the interview cut off line.

So the more partners you have grading a particular startup, the more partners you have trying to cover their asses and not fuck up. So the safer choices will get more interviews - and safe choices don't usually result in black swans.

Not sure if I'm making sense here, but maybe the proof is in the pudding in that some of their biggest wins are Dropbox, Reddit, and Airbnb...all relatively early in YC batches when there were fewer partners making choices.

Why do you think opening other offices is likely in the works? This is a genuine question. Sorry if it's obvious (I don't follow YC too closely), but what would you think has changed since their choice to stop doing YC batches in Cambridge? Just the sheer growth in size?

Yea, I think just sheer growth. PG mentions growth and Sam taking over at about minute 3 or 4 in the video above. So who knows.

That is allot of money to leave behind. However, if you can be happier doing something else for less money than go for it.

Agreed with edw519.

How come no one asks where do old chefs go to? What about old artists? What about old musicians? What about old plumbers? What about old construction people?