Comment by noobermin
1 year ago
I think something people might be missing is the context around this post, which is that the founders are being dragged on twitter, essentially.
Since a lot of you hate the site, I'll summarise briefly: one of the founders did a thread starting with the following post:
"
I just quit my 270 000$ job at Coinbase to join the first YCombinator fall batch with my cofounder @not_nang
We're building PearAI, an open source AI code editor. Think a better Copilot, or open source Cursor. But you've heard this spiel already...
"
One thing not conveyed here is the first line is in unicode bold and the end is littered with emoji spam. Essentially, the post ticked a few rage inducing boxes for a certain kind of tech twitter user. It was rather cringe, reading like a thread from get-rich-quick influencer types while also likely imbueing some readers and quote tweets with a little jealousy they wouldn't openly admit. This was probably the impetus that pushed one or two angry people to poke around their product and find out about the open source code cloning and the fact the founders were overselling (which founder doesn't, I guess...) which lead to a rout of publicly mocking them and YC in general, resulting in blog posts like the OP, I guess.
I personally don't really think one company amongst the whole batch is enough to judge the start of a trend for YC "trading prestige for growth" or whatever. I think the discussion of prestige is in general is an interesting one, I just don't think PearAI is indicative of it more than they themselves just being hucksters which happens in tech in general.
The founders showed hustle, as every founder must. nothing wrong with that in my book.
But they need adult-guidance on communication. You dont go around twitter boasting about your 270K job etc. They need to show grown up hustle (grit, perseverence, etc). Not high-school (mine is bigger than yours) hustle.
I feel like that "270K job" comment was some sort of cultural signal to Zoomer devs on the FAANG leetcode job grind. I'm in my 40s so it just seems both tacky and unimpressive but maybe for folks half my age it's a meaningful signal towards competency?
270k is on the low end and would indicate incompetency if anything if you're older than mid-20s, esp since it's not like he's taking a pay cut to work in a cool or interesting field (coinbase lmao)
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The simpler break-down here is that they are crappy con artists and need to be be better at con-artisting. Which is fine, but please let's not pretend it's very different.
This is an indictment of Twitter tbh. Not YC. A lot (most?) YC founders aren't even on Twitter.
the founders were status-signaling on twitter.
it is clear they are in it for the "status" of being YC. and they dont care a whit about solving anybody's problem.
they do this for a while, get it on the resume and go back to their 270K jobs after a few months.
this in and of itself is a hustle, lol. they hustled YC.
Honestly, I hate X/Twitter specifically for this - the click/rage bait cesspool that it has become in the past year after content engagement became monetized.
Every other day, or at least every week, there is a new topic that everyone piles-on rage and hate to - even accounts that have nothing to do with the topic. This is because eyeballs make users money from X - so getting any audience possible, and getting them inflamed enough to engage is the point.
Even worse, the algorithm is gamed such that the latest rage is pushed to every other users eyeballs, resulting in a constant stream of hate in your feed.