Comment by notyourwork

6 days ago

Which really makes me sad that no one from YCombinator is speaking up. It’s all about money.

Y combinator has funded a significant portion of the most harmful tech companies of this century. They're profoundly amoral, just like you'd expect from a profitable venture capital firm.

On the bright side, they also hire dang, so that's one against 100 million.

  • And the few that have gone public have done awful

    https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

    • Most of the bad ones IPOd in 2021, when there was a huge overvaluation of speculative tech companies... Marking performance since IPO is also a bit weird since it's kind of arbitrary date in the firm's history.

      1 reply →

    • It's surprising to me that investors have been so wrong about combinator IPOs. I wonder if this has been driven my retail, or by the expectation of a small probability of enormous success.

      1 reply →

  • To be honest, I have personally funded almost all of the most harmful companies that are around today, too.

    But that's because I funded pretty much all the companies via my investment in an index fund.

    YC pretty much takes something like an index fund approach to startups: they finance a lot of them. So naturally they would also have a significant portion of what you deem to be harmful ones.

    • What part of buying index funds of public shares in a company (aside from direct investment, IPO or private placement which are not hallmarks of index funds) funds the company?

      2 replies →

Given YC's leadership over the past decade or so, I don't think they have anything they'd want to speak up about. This is probably all fine with them.

I used to hold YC in very high regard, but these days I don't think they're materially different from any other investing shop when it comes to values.