Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
1 year ago
> … yield a big company …
I assume that this sort of says it all.
Everyone wants “big.”
The article talks about brand curation, really.
That seems to be a lost art, these days. I worked for a corporation that had one of the most powerful brands in the world (but has taken some real hits). I watched them dilute that brand, and make lots of money, but really get clobbered. They are now regrouping, and, I hope, re-establishing their original luster.
They were able to take a fairly small corporation, and compete with mega companies, on the strength of their brand. When they grew rather explosively, in the 1990s, they sowed the seeds of their own demise, in the mid-2010s.
Strong brand value seems like insurance.
You don't think about it when you don't need it, but it bails your ass out of otherwise-impossible situations when you do need it.
Everything's fine for uninsured property... until it's not.
I would say you could trade hard-earned goodwill and respect for a number of different things, maybe because it is such an unquantifiable asset.
I think earned leadership can be legitimately exploited where everybody wins up to a point, and if you put your mind to it you can engineer an operation to approach that point more successfully than those who do not.
You could be monetizing your "prestige", at a maximum sustainable level, without drawing down the asset.
OTOH it would be possible to go overboard on the march to maximum monetization, and arrive where the asset begins to dwindle. It may not be such a clear picture since it's so unquantifiable, and dwindling returns as a consequence can be some of the most easily misattributed.
That doesn’t provide any information since an incubator like YC is hoping for Stripe/Reddit successes. That’s not changed.
But I know W20 guys who pivoted inside YC three times, and eventually raised money. Their company didn’t exist when they applied. So what OP (of Etherpad IIRC fame) posted about the rejection comes as a surprise to me.
the whole mythology is nobody knows what will be a big company in general.
The known big company spaces are heavily oversubscribed so nothing can be predicted.
The unknown big company spaces are unknown by definition.
> That seems to be a lost art, these days. [...] I watched them dilute that brand, and make lots of money, but really get clobbered.
Maybe this is the normal lifecycle of a successful organization, unless one decides to grow more slowly? Infinite growth is what ruins most things. Scaling is hard.
YC seemed to attract genuine founders, back when starting something up was not so trendy. As it became fashionable, and YC began to be seen as the Harvard of startups, it has still attracted some great founders but also some less genuine ones. All successful organizations experience this issue.
A key element here is that neither PG nor Jessica Livingston seem to be actively filtering out people. I doubt anyone from batches curated by them would have posted on Twitter bragging about quitting a $270k job to work on a re-licensed fork.
It was sad to read about this whole affair and, frankly, I think discussion on HN has become less interesting, reflecting a similar trend. Front pages were full of technical discussion back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Content of that kind is less frequent these days.
> Front pages were full of technical discussion back in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Content of that kind is less frequent these days.
Yeah, noticed the same trend. Reflective of the overall, as you said.