Comment by amazingamazing
4 hours ago
How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired? What about acquihires? Cant stop that - employees have their own agency.
4 hours ago
How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired? What about acquihires? Cant stop that - employees have their own agency.
> How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired?
For the record: national economic policy shouldn't revolve around Y Combinator classes and similar startups.
I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups. I'm not saying one will, but I'm saying that's a cost I'm willing to pay.
YC startups could just become mature businesses. Nothing wrong with providing a good service, earning a good profit, and employees maturing into stable careers.
> I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups.
And it should also prevent the acquihire.
I think the really important question is HOW this will happen. If you mean for the state to buy them at fair market value, nobody will object to that, not even if it closes the door to private equity.
But that's not what you're talking about, is it?
How about doing what America used to do? Provide seed funding for a new fire truck company in trade for condictions. Can we agree to do that? Fund 3 companies to make fire trucks, fast-track whatever certification and approvals they need. Create the companies we need, risking (and in fact expecting to lose) a bunch of the capital used for this.
YComb was just an example, though. Should companies be able to be bought and sold at all? My opinion is yes. Agree or disagree?
The OP explicitly answers this: go back to pre-80s antitrust policy. Companies can be bought and sold but not if it creates concentrations of economic power that allow them to dictate prices to vendors or customers.
22 replies →
But "corporations are people" and those types of markets have closed since 1865 in the united states.
Why do you present this as a binary to agree/disagree with?
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If the acquirer has too big or dominant position already in the specific sector no. They should not be able to sweep the board of all companies doing single thing.
If the acquirer attempts to acquire a startup (regardless of investor) for anti trust reasons, or there are anti trust concerns, the M&A activity is disallowed by regulators. A recent example is Figma and Adobe.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Seems vague. What is an anti trust reason? Figma and Adobe id a great example. Both are doing very poorly.
What definition of success are we using that having over $7 billion in net income after expenses in 2025, and nearly $2 billion so far this year, is "doing very poorly"?
2025 numbers: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/796343/0000796343250...
2026 Q1 numbers: https://mlq.ai/stocks/ADBE/q1-2026-earnings/
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It's not vague. You can go look it up.
Everything is vague to you. All you're doing is concern trolling for monopolists
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I am not an anti trust enforcer or scholar, so I'm going to defer to experts in the field: Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, etc. That is the point of experts in a domain.
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I think 5-15 person employee businesses do not concern trust busters.
Whats the connection between the number of employees and anti trust? Also, there are plenty of YC companies with far more than 15 employees.
Generally you don't hold a market dominant position in any sector that anti-trust regulators care about at 15 employees?
Frankly this stuff is impossible to talk about in the abstract. The details of every individual case matters. If you're actually curious (instead of just playing a shell game), you can go look up the types of analysis that FTC does to evaluate market dominance and whether a given transaction will excessively consolidate a market.