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Comment by stonethrowaway

1 year ago

You’ll have to expand on this for us plebs. To whom is it a net negative signal?

To anyone with eyes? Job seekers looking for startups to join, investors looking for places to put money, etc.

I'm sorry if your company got accepted into YC, better luck next time. At least you can hang out with the founders of... 100 AI-assisted Code Editors, 'The first Travel Credit Card for Gen Z', 'Starbucks memberships for restaurants', 'a video first food delivery app, tiktok meets doordash', and 'the operating system for vacation rentals'. Truly a staggering group of talent.

Those are all real companies in W24 btw...

A) Security is always an afterthought at YC companies - I know from firsthand experience.

B) YC companies are risky to use, obviously we meme about people using IBM for "saftey", but there is an opposite side of that which is going with a seed stage company - it's very risky.

C) Even if you are a happy customer, if you are too niche they will typically abandon you. I've been on the decision making side for this, sometimes your early customers don't fit your new market, so you have to let them down slowly.

  • I'm bearish on the giant YC classes but (C) is an entirely necessary evil at any successful startup anywhere.

I mean I can't speak for that commenter, but I hold any VC backed startup in suspicion for a good amount of time because if they can't reach the size demanded by their investors, which runs the gamut from ambitious-but-achievable all the way to not-in-my-or-your-lifetime, a perfectly profitable modestly sized business is almost bound to be shut down and it's services terminated with little drama, leaving behind potentially useless products, or yet another fucking ZIP file to add to the pile of the things I have yet to open up and sort into other mediums.