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Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students (ycombinator.com)
219 points by snowmaker 33 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 268 comments
We announced something today at YC called Early Decision, specifically for students. It's a relatively small change, but we thought people might be interested to hear the thinking behind it, even if you don't happen to be a student graduating this year.

A year ago, YC went from running 2 batches / year to 4 batches / year. We did this because we wanted to give founders more flexibility to do YC at the right time for them. It seems to have worked - a lot of founders have told us that they were only able to do YC because the new schedule fit their timeline.

Early Decision was driven by the same motivation. We talked to a lot of college students, and we learned that most graduating seniors interview for their after-graduation job in the fall of their senior year. For the ones who are interested in doing their own startup, this creates a bit of a dilemma. If they don't interview for jobs in the fall in order to apply to YC later, they're risking that they might be left without any options.

We created Early Decision so that they can apply to YC at the same time they're doing recruiting for regular jobs, the fall of their senior year. If they get into YC, they can confidently turn down their other job offers without worrying they'll be left without anything.

Note: this isn't really a new idea. We've quietly done this from time to time since 2018, but we didn't create a dedicated flow in the application software for it, so most people didn't realize it was an option. Hopefully by productizing and popularizing it, we'll make it easier for college seniors to start companies.



I think everyone criticizing this is comparing it to the wrong thing. Many ambitious students:

-graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates.

-join other people's startups where they work crazy hours

-work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school

Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation.

It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.


Yes, this is an excellent point.


No it isn't. I, and many I know, would never trade away 100+ hours at a namebrand investment bank/PE firm/consulting firm to work 100+ hours at a startup. It's not what I would recommend nor is it what many people I know would recommend, some of whom are billionaires. The constant advice is to always work at the best possible opportunity the first few years of your career, then step into entrepreneurship. You'll then have an idea of things actually work in the world. And I say this as someone who went the other way around (startup first before working in corporate).


I'm sorry but only at my most very dedicated periods of work did I work 100 hour weeks, and that was like 3 or 4 weeks tops. I highly doubt that anyone sustains a 100 hour work week for much longer. Eighty hour work weeks? Sure, that is doable, but sleeping at the job site because you are pulling a 100 hour work week is just not sustainable.


Rules changed in 2003, but until then medical residency programs routinely had doctors working 100+ hours a week or longer. In 2003 a cap of 80 hours a week was instituted along with a maximum of 24 hours in any given period, but programs found various loopholes around that cap which still had doctors working close to 100 hours a week. So further restrictions were placed so that over any 4 week period there's a hard cap of 320 hours, no exceptions.

At any rate, for most of the HN crowd who work a fairly routine IT or an office job, 80+ hours sustained for months and months might seem impossible, but join the military, work on a ship, work on a farm, work the oil fields, work in investment banking, work in a film crew which threatened to go on strike in 2021 for having 98 hour work weeks for months on end... and you find that while it's not common, it certainly happens in various fields.


Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week? It's the cognitive load that I find difficult to believe about these numbers, not the

At one point I was also working crazy hours at a fast food shop. But that was only possible because I could "zone out" and just pour the customer's coffee and make sandwiches. Writing code for that long would have been impossible.


Obviously not every moment of every hour in a residents day is deep clinical thinking with high cognitive load, but we’re definitely not “zoning out” when making medical decisions. Patient statuses change very quickly and very often in the hospital, and every problem should be re-evaluated like it is a fresh concern. Decisions can be made quicker with more experience but you’re expected to be “on” all the time. Plus, lots of things contribute to cognitive load outside sheer medical decisions - social work, dispo issues, patient preferences, etc. Luckily my residency is closer to 60-70 hours a week but 100 is still common.

Remember - the 80 hour a week limit is not a max limit. It is the max hours per week AVERAGED OVER 4 weeks. You can easily work 100 hours this week if you do 60 the next.


> Are residents and people working on ships actually making decisions for 100 hours a week?

Residencies? Yeah. The guy who came up with the US' system for medical residency was high on cocaine pretty much constantly and expected everyone to perform at his level.

https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/expert-insights/a-day-in-th...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stewart_Halsted


>. In 2003 a cap of 80 hours a week was instituted

Oh you sweet summer child, was instituted on paper

Here's how it actually works. "Mark down the hours you worked this week. Oh. And if it's over 80 of course we'll run into big problems for violating this rule and your residency will lose credentials which is bad for you.. also we'll know it was you"

People who work 90, 100, 110, 120 hours (gets hard north of 130), guess how many hours they put? 80 if they're feeling nice, 81 if they want to make a point. Even today.


I'm sure prisoners in labour camps work more than that. And the death toll for patients cured by overworked doctors is not insignificant.


6 days / 16 hours or 7 days / 14 hours still leaves time for a normal sleep schedule.

Many of the people in our YC batch were doing this for the duration of the batch. My cofounder and I both have families and managed to make a similar schedule work (with more peaks and valleys).

The last few weeks have been a crunch where I’ve been getting a lot closer to a true 140ish. That is unsustainable and I’ve had to go into it knowing that the price is future productivity.

But as a student with no commitments, 100hrs a week feels like the norm in YC startups right now.


This is performance - the human brain doesn’t work like this.


I've frequently had points in my career where this is just life. It comes down to planning when you do which tasks. I'm absolutely not at peak decision making capacity, but sometimes you aren't making decisions, just executing on work that takes time.


You may have a family but how much time are you spending with them.

You know yourself but I think it's extremely unhealthy advice to give to people and usually hides a lot of inefficiency and misused hours.

Constraints breed creativity and efficiency. Do more with less and all that.

Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

Again, what you're doing might work for you but I'm trying to offer a slightly more nuanced take than what I consider it to be the "constant crunch" mode.

Busy doesn't mean value.


> Have you done the exercise of "how can I produce the same value output in 80% of the time". The exact percentage doesn't matter, just doing the exercise to improve efficiency and have a more balanced approach. That also gives you space for actual crunch time whereas you seem to work in a perpetual state of crunch.

My cofounder and I do this usually about twice a month where we sit down and purposefully think about this at a macro and micro level.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

It's real! My health is not being taken care of, but that is the "pick 3" axis that I'm compromising on in the short term.

> Is it real or is it performative? Are you taking care of health? Do you realize work is not everything to life and that you CAN have your cake and eat it too if you slightly balance it out.

I think this is not the right way to think about it. People have different preferences. The difference between having 4m in the bank and 8m in the bank at the end of my career is very marginal to me. I would much rather put myself in the position to work towards a tail event.


Meh. I just don't believe that it is not performative and about "the hour metric" when on second read, I read the phrase about the really unsustainable thint being when you reached the "140 hours". In the last few WEEKS, plural.

4 hours sleep. Every day. And working non stop.

You can pretend all you want but for all that is holy stop giving this bullshit snake oil advice.

You don't have a life and neglect your family. They better enjoy those extra millions and buy themselves a father and a husband.


And somehow you seem to be defending it. Even though there is statistically a better return just working in a bank as a Java dev in a second tier city.


This is absolutely untrue. We pay ourselves and all of our employees competitive salaries.


See you paying them at least $335K in cash seeing that an average enterprise dev can make $140K working 40 hours a week and you want them to work 2.4x as many hours?


speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.

The thing is those kids still have massive cognitive gifts - I’m not going to use a loaded word like talented or whatever - and have worked very hard in the past. It’s just that the journey to the thing they want to do no longer rewards hours.

Paul Graham is like the Mr. Beast of seed investing. He wants to make the best SEED STAGE INVESTMENTS in the world, to mock a Mr. Beast PowerPoint. He doesn’t want to get the kids with the highest potential, or the kids who work the hardest. They are very sincere and supportive - I mean, who the hell in your life is willing to risk $525,000 on an idea with no traction?? - but they are not out to anoint a category of kids as the “ambitious” ones versus the unambitious ones. You can be ambitious about being a writer and find success and wind up writing very little!


> speaking only for recent graduates I know personally well: ambitious students also want to be writers, for example. If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer! So if you have to sit around and get life experiences that are interesting to write about (a good way to be a good writer), do you want to do that while working for Stripe, drinking kombucha and getting free lunches and being able to live in New York? Yes. You don’t want to do that while being an investment banker or a doctor or a YC founder.

But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path.

There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true.

But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.


> If only it were so easy as writing more makes you a better writer!

One commonly repeated piece of advice that almost all successful authors state is to write a lot, a lot, a lot. Like just practice writing, it doesn't have to be good.

I hear this often said about many other creative endeavors as well, including painting, cooking, game development/design, etc... It often seems like really good artisans just pull greatness out of thin air, but that's because we often only see the successes, not the failures, but I am reminded that even the best writers, poets, and artists in general spend a great amount of time just creating content that no one will ever see.


If the funding is available immediately (not just an immediate commitment for funding once they start a batch), would it address the following problem I've run into a few times?

In the last year alone, I've had to bow out of co-founding two promising startups with good biz co-founders, because first-year MBA students wanted to finish their degree before they sought funding.

Two ways funding could help:

1. I couldn't afford to work over a year as a technical cofounder, executing in full-time startup mode like usually needs to be done, with no income. While they were part-time, and getting an MBA and networking out of it during this period. Even ramen lifestyle funding would've made this closer to an equitable balance of contribution and risk among the cofounders.

2. There's also the concern that MBA programs seem to push students to have a hypothetical startup, so there's always a chance that the MBA student won't be fully committed to actually do the startup once they graduate. Maybe accepted funding could make this a firmer commitment. (Even if there's no contractual obligation to pursue the startup, I'd guess that new MBA graduates don't want to burn bridges in the small world of investors, so would take the commitment fairly seriously.)


Yes, I think it would.


Being able to burn away at a startup while you are studying would be great. Uni was the most productive time in my whole life due to all the free time.


if one of the founders is an MBA graduate, your chance of success just drop 50%.


If your cofounder isn’t full time, that’s not your cofounder. That’s a part time contractor who owns 50% of your company.


Mostly I agree. But I also think that someone who is very good, and in a very good MBA program, can do their share of contributions, iff they're committed fully to the startup upon graduation.

But if the follow-through doesn't happen, then the whole thing was probably a huge waste for non-MBA-student co-founders. (Unless those co-founders weren't really committed themselves.)


Maybe a 18-24 months cliff would solve it?


you need a way to cause the termination for this to help. IME most things linger in zombie mode forever, they don't explode early.


Full-time cofounder(s) should have the right to fire other cofounders, at least until a formal board of directors is established

The problems start when you fire someone with equity closer to the cliff

Anyway, I don't get the original post, IMO an MBA is not the kind of degree that is worthy of delaying founding a startup


> Full-time cofounder(s) should have the right to fire other cofounders,

I'd guess there's usually no point in a technical co-founder "firing" their capable business co-founder; it just ends the company.

While the technical person is spending most of their time on technical bits (no matter how much customer-facing product management time you have), etc., the business person is spending most of their time on relationships (investors, partners, customers, etc.). To a large extent, they take those relationships and reputation with them wherever they go next.

Unless the technical cofounder has some very rare and marketable technical expertise that the business people recognize (e.g., some recent big AI invention, or a fancy title at a FAANG), the technical cofounder will probably be considered an ordinary commodity by most.

> IMO an MBA is not the kind of degree that is worthy of delaying founding a startup

My guess is that an MBA from one of the most prestigious programs is usually worth delaying founding a startup. The MBA student can lay some of the groundwork while in the program, get mentoring and connections, and then out-execute many competitors once the student graduates.

The kinds of startups a lot of us have been thinking of are essentially the last 20 years of mostly ZIRP investment scams, but that can't go on forever (current dotcom-bubble-like "AI" hype wave low barriers to acquihire exit notwithstanding). I'd guess more people will have to do viable businesses than our field has in a long time.


I've interviewed at a few YC companies, and the issue with really young companies is that they don't know anything about running a company. Experienced people don't want to work for a 27 year old, and so it's a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing, making promises out of ignorance and not delivering.

I'm tempted to think that YC knows better than I do here, but my experience suggests this is a bad idea. The worst managers I've had were inexperienced, and someone who's 22 won't know when they need someone experienced, or how to talk to customers. Many of them may be too nervous to act, and since they can apply under the safety of also applying for jobs they may not be as motivated. I suspect this is just a ploy to get more Stanford grads to apply but I'm not sure it's the best way to go about it.


I don't know why there's so much negativity. I see this as a big win for students interested in it.

1. it's a short commitment - only 3 months. more time-bound opportunities should be available to kids coming out of school. too many people go straight to big finance/law/tech/etc and get stuck because they don't want to give up the salary or safety.

2. get access to a network that is very difficult to get access to otherwis

3. better status boost than most other things you could be doing. There are likely better status signals about someone's abilities/intellect than YC, but i'm guessing they are few for people in the valley.

4. Get to work on something you are interested in

5. learn a lot very quickly.

6. gives you a lot of optionality

yes, YC is trying to make money but they do seem intent on developing talent and this is a good avenue for that.


This is a good way of thinking about it!


Seems like a good thing for founders, doesn't force them to quit school to start a funded startup. Especially for under-privileged youths who might not be able to miss a high paying job opportunity or have no income for months.

Seems like a bad signal for YC though - if you aren't committed enough to quit school or at the very least reject job offers and do your startup anyway - feels like you might not be committed enough to do what it takes?

But if anyone does, YC knows how to pick founders with the right mindset.


I think there is some risk of that. But commitment isn't static. A lot of incredible companies started with founders who were just toying with an idea and weren't committed at all, then they became more committed over time as things started to work.


You should consider placing them into a 1 or 2 year “on the job training” program at another YC company before sticking them in a batch.

Maybe you could offer that as a “waitlist” option.


YC has done that over the years and I believe is planning another such program. Not every prospective founder wants to do that, though, so there's a need for both options.


I like that suggestion. Work experience at a startup is eye opening.


It does make me uneasy that founding companies is becoming another tracked thing that people feel they can apply high-IQ pattern-matching to. Especially when startups are where first-principles thinking is the most valuable.

That being said, I can see this being useful to a lot of kids. Certainly beats going to grad school for someone who wants to start a company. Keep in mind that a 500K SAFE doesn't force a founder to go big or zero-out.


Gotta catch em while they're young, naive, and malleable.


Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again?

There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:

- new parents

- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled

The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?


We might, and I'm sure you're right that there are many great founders not applying to do YC because they don't want to move here.

But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.


There are plenty of remote schools, always have been, they’re just lower quality and solve a different problem than traditional in person university


I agree, to add on - I think places like Open University are absolutely fantastic for folks who want to learn but have other "real world" responsibilities. The last time I heard a out OU was when a new parent was happy having being able to get a degree from there (while I think studying at night).


In Canada a lot of well-known schools are shifting much of their delivery to online. They're limited by the government how much they can charge/increase while international student visas have been cut dramatically. It's an existentially moment for international-focused schools, but even the best traditional universities are hurting.


The bigger problem for Canadian universities is that they have never had their funding restored to pre-austerity levels by the various levels of government.


“By the early 1990s, combined federal, provincial, and local spending had peaked at more than 50% of GDP.”

You mean those spending levels?


>> But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.

This is not true. I know several people at different institutions - decent schools - that have most or (in one case) all of their courses (at Queens) via remote delivery.


Because a university's ability to charge the prices they do depends on people being on location. Nobody is going to pay 50k or 100k for an online course.

Plus if rich fucks can't buy a building to put their name on that kids will walk through they won't donate money.

You make it sound like it's a decision based on school administrators putting learning first.


So much emotion! I graduated from a fairly shitty (and getting worse) state school and I started my own company. Which failed!

Then I started another. Horrible failure! Then another. And another!

And now I own a successful company built off all my previous learnings and failures. The “rich fucks” work for me now!


I like how other than being triggered by the word rich fucks your reply has nothing to do with universities being remote or in person, just you bragging about personal accomplishments? I mean congratulations, but universities are still going to charge more by requiring you to go on location.


I was triggered because people rationalize why they fail because of “other people”. But the reason you fail has nothing to do with universities


Universities are still a scam though, that was the point of the original comment


Because San Francisco is a truly singular place that drastically increases your odds of success in starting a venture-backed company by simply existing there (even temporarily).


There's also people who are driven, don't have a real-world situation that pins them to their location, but don't believe that they need to move to SF to do a startup, because they shouldn't have to..


To be fair, it is a 3mo batch. The better analogy would be a long business trip or on site project, not a remote vs. in office job.

Moreover, for better or worse, the all day every day work culture typical of venture-backed startups isn't really compatible with being a new parent etc. anyway.


People in those situations can and should start companies without an accelerator (or at least without this one). The joke around the SF scene is that even a founder with a boy/girlfriend is a sign of a startup doomed to fail, and YC doesn't seem particularly invested in changing that culture.


I don’t usually wear my ring day to day because it’s poorly fitting, but I wear it to meetings with private equity because I want to filter out anyone with that mentality.


This doesn't resemble anything I've ever heard at YC in the many years I've been here. People don't think or talk that way at all...they're far more normal and decent than that.


Unless your girlfriend is your laptop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmFoNXkQTt8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkZ8MAk2oH4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z-_py5WgOM


It’s a form of self selection. YC (and silicon valley at large) isn't interested in founders with pesky things like real life responsibilities or anything else that will prevent them from focusing on their startup 24x7.


This is too flippant.

YC is so early on some of these deals that the primary gauge is team - which means personality of founders. Very hard to measure remotely.

I'm in a group, not as big or famous, that does early checks. We're 95% remote. IME, it's so hard to make those judgement calls through web-cam.

Agreed that founder focus is a big factor and that life gets in the way (of deals). However, if you don't like YC conditions there are 100s of other places to (attempt a) raise.


Except that all acceptance via YC is actually done remotely. They don't meet you in person until after they have already wired the money.


I think you are talking about phase-1 and I was talking about a phase-2 of the process (of N phases).

We're just addressing different steps.


Phase-2 being what? demo day?


A lot of other places are just YC-lite/-wannabes and have either niche focuses (this is good) and/or not enough innovation-seekers (this is bad).


Would you invest in Australia?


Check out https://tinyseed.com/


Doesn't TinySeed require some measure of traction already?


From "Ask HN: How to Price a Product" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41180492#41220971 :

> Asset Value = Equities + Liabilities

> /? startupschool pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=startupschool+pricing

/? site:startupschool.org pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:startupschool.org+prici...

> Startup School > Curriculum > Ctrl-F pricing: https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum

YC Library: https://www.ycombinator.com/library

/? YC Library : pricing: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/search?query=Pricing


There is so much online to help jumpstart a young entrepreneur- they can have some small sense of what they are in for. As far as start a company vs get a job, just being told that is an option can be super empowering. I agree that burning up a few years in a failed company as a young entrepreneur does not have a good monetary outcome, but it does help them gain a ton of real world experience that can serve them well their whole life.


This is great in principle. A word of advice:

Life is short. Play long term games with long term people. While a batch bakes in a season, a cap table rests like a boulder in a hillside. If you’re smart there are better ways to find a lever with which to move the world.

Consider incentives. Don’t accept a hammer when you need a bulldozer. Don’t ask which paths exist: find where you want to be, ask what needs to be done. Do it.


This is a bit riddly. Have a concrete example?


Less riddly: Don't take money if you don't need it. if you have to, take it from people who have values/incentives (with life and business both) aligned with you.


I like this, thank you.


I bought into the idea of startups after college. And did It despite having an offer from a good large Corp.

I regret that decision.

Truth is that it is incredibly difficult to build startup without any good industry knowledge.


Fun fact, not every startup needs funding. Seems like post paul doesn't really talk about this anymore.


YC gives founders a lot more than funding.


AP (After Paul) is much more concerned with traditional VC exits; YC is just another firm now, but because they invented the space get to trade on their name a while longer.


This pattern of extending the peripheral aspects of elite undergrad into high school and after actual undergrad seems…wrong. I disliked the Google cultural tendency of trying to mirror grad school but this seems worse.


My advice to 20 year olds, don't go to startups, go to big tech while it still pays good salary, build up your wealth, network and how things work at such corporations.

Then at mid 30s get hired as Dir/VP of engineering in smaller Series A startup.

You will have higher chance to retire early and/or afford yourself to work on things you like later on.


Relevant blog post: https://www.gayle.com/blog/2011/10/29/why-coders-shouldnt-jo...

Something ironic I found when I was on my last job search (and applying to some YC startups) was that, despite startups often being critical of big tech, when describing their past experience, the founders (and their teams) never failed to ‘name drop’ the brand-name companies they’ve worked for.

Additionally, I think the reason a lot of founders threw my resume in the trash was because they couldn’t recognize the no-name startups I’ve worked at… Luckily I’m at a household name company now and even non-tech people recognize the company I work at.


Doesn't part of your soul die when you start working for big tech? All that youthful energy and hope to push a potentially meaningless product. Such a sad thing to watch potential and idealism get crushed.

I understand its provocative statement - your play is the risk free life route - perfect for many many people but not everyone. Certainly not people who want to build things that go into the wild.


Doesn't part of your soul die when you start working for big tech?

I learned more at Microsoft than any of the startups I worked at. I shipped product to more users than at any startup I worked at.

I understand its provocative statement…

Meh, more of an example of “begging the question” than anything else.


Don't forget why YC wants more young people to work for startups, they benefit from couple of successes and their metric is to increase number of companies they want to invest, which requires more number of cheap engineers/interns giving their life.

Your chances of success is lower than YC's chances of success because they invest to many companies in parallel, but you can only work for 1 company


Understanding people and companies incentives doesn't mean that it is inherently bad as you are implying. YC is also investing in a bunch of people and putting money towards new ideas. Lets not forget that innovation is difficult and fraught with failure.

People who want to go that route and feel strongly about it should give it a shot with their eyes open.


To what extent is YC's current strategy a form of "cookie-licking"? I.e. capture a small fraction of every plausible startup created by the next generation of students?


100% at this point. The industry's leading AI for start-up ideas has run out of AI for _____ suggestions. It was pretty obvious they were scraping the bottom of the barrel a month ago when I made this list from their current batch:

Acrely — AI for HVAC administration

Aden — AI for ERP operations

AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation

Agentin AI — AI for enterprise agents

AgentMail — AI for agent email infrastructure

AlphaWatch AI — AI for financial search

Alter — AI for secure agent workflow access control

Altur — AI for debt collection voice agents

Ambral — AI for account management

Anytrace — AI for support engineering

April — AI for voice executive assistants

AutoComputer — AI for robotic desktop automation

Autosana — AI for mobile QA

Autotab — AI for knowledge work

Avent — AI for industrial commerce

b-12 — AI for chemical intelligence

Bluebirds — AI for outbound targeting

burnt — AI for food supply chain operations

Cactus — AI for smartphone model deployment

Candytrail — AI for sales funnel automation

CareSwift — AI for ambulance operations

Certus AI — AI for restaurant phone lines

Clarm — AI for search and agent building

Clodo — AI for real estate CRMs

Closera — AI for commercial real estate employees

Clueso — AI for instructional content generation

cocreate — AI for video editing

Comena — AI for order automation in distribution

ContextFort — AI for construction drawing reviews

Convexia — AI for pharma drug discovery

Credal.ai — AI for enterprise workflow assistants

CTGT — AI for preventing hallucinations

Cyberdesk — AI for legacy desktop automation

datafruit — AI for DevOps engineering

Daymi — AI for personal clones

DeepAware AI — AI for data center efficiency

Defog.ai — AI for natural-language data queries

Design Arena — AI for design benchmarks

Doe — AI for autonomous private equity workforce

Double – Coding Copilot — AI for coding assistance

EffiGov — AI for local government call centers

Eloquent AI — AI for complex financial workflows

F4 — AI for compliance in engineering drawings

Finto — AI for enterprise accounting

Flai — AI for dealership customer acquisition

Floot — AI for app building

Fluidize — AI for scientific experiments

Flywheel AI — AI for excavator autonomy

Freya — AI for financial services voice agents

Frizzle — AI for teacher grading

Galini — AI guardrails as a service

Gaus — AI for retail investors

Ghostship — AI for UX bug detection

Golpo — AI for video generation from documents

Halluminate — AI for training computer use

HealthKey — AI for clinical trial matching

Hera — AI for motion design

Humoniq — AI for BPO in travel and transport

Hyprnote — AI for enterprise notetaking

Imprezia — AI for ad networks

Induction Labs — AI for computer use automation

iollo — AI for multimodal biological data

Iron Grid — AI for hardware insurance

IronLedger.ai — AI for property accounting

Janet AI — AI for project management (AI-native Jira)

Kernel — AI for web agent browsing infrastructure

Kestroll — AI for media asset management

Keystone — AI for software engineering

Knowlify — AI for explainer video creation

Kyber — AI for regulatory notice drafting

Lanesurf — AI for freight booking voice automation

Lantern — AI for Postgres application development

Lark — AI for billing operations

Latent — AI for medical language models

Lemma — AI for consumer brand insights

Linkana — AI for supplier onboarding reviews

Liva AI — AI for video and voice data labeling

Locata — AI for healthcare referral management

Lopus AI — AI for deal intelligence

Lotas — AI for data science IDEs

Louiza Labs — AI for synthetic biology data

Luminai — AI for business process automation

Magnetic — AI for tax preparation

MangoDesk — AI for evaluation data

Maven Bio — AI for BioPharma insights

Meteor — AI for web browsing (AI-native browser)

Mimos — AI for regulated firm visibility in search

Minimal AI — AI for e-commerce customer support

Mobile Operator — AI for mobile QA

Mohi — AI for workflow clarity

Monarcha — AI for GIS platforms

moonrepo — AI for developer workflow tooling

Motives — AI for consumer research

Nautilus — AI for car wash optimization

NOSO LABS — AI for field technician support

Nottelabs — AI for enterprise web agents

Novaflow — AI for biology lab analytics

Nozomio — AI for contextual coding agents

Oki — AI for company intelligence

Okibi — AI for agent building

Omnara — AI for agent command centers

OnDeck AI — AI for video analysis

Onyx — AI for generative platform development

Opennote — AI for note-based tutoring

Opslane — AI for ETL data pipelines

Orange Slice — AI for sales lead generation

Outlit — AI for quoting and proposals

Outrove — AI for Salesforce

Pally — AI for relationship management

Paloma — AI for billing CRMs

Parachute — AI for clinical evaluation and deployment

PARES AI — AI for commercial real estate brokers

People.ai — AI for enterprise growth insights

Perspectives Health — AI for clinic EMRs

Pharmie AI — AI for pharmacy technicians

Phases — AI for clinical trial automation

Pingo AI — AI for language learning companions

Pleom — AI for conversational interaction

Qualify.bot — AI for commercial lending phone agents

Reacher — AI for creator collaboration marketing

Ridecell — AI for fleet operations

Risely AI — AI for campus administration

Risotto — AI for IT helpdesk automation

Riverbank Security — AI for offensive security

Saphira AI — AI for certification automation

Sendbird — AI for omnichannel agents

Sentinel — AI for on-call engineering

Serafis — AI for institutional investor knowledge graphs

Sigmantic AI — AI for HDL design

Sira — AI for HR management of hourly teams

Socratix AI — AI for fraud and risk teams

Solva — AI for insurance

Spotlight Realty — AI for real estate brokerage

StackAI — AI for low-code agent platforms

stagewise — AI for frontend coding agents

Stellon Labs — AI for edge device models

Stockline — AI for food wholesaler ERP

Stormy AI — AI for influencer marketing

Synthetic Society — AI for simulating real users

SynthioLabs — AI for medical expertise in pharma

Tailor — AI for retail ERP automation

Tecto AI — AI for governance of AI employees

Tesora — AI for procurement analysis

Trace — AI for workflow automation

TraceRoot.AI — AI for automated bug fixing

truthsystems — AI for regulated governance layers

Uplift AI — AI for underserved voice languages

Veles — AI for dynamic sales pricing

Veritus Agent — AI for loan servicing and collections

Verne Robotics — AI for robotic arms

VoiceOS — AI for voice interviews

VoxOps AI — AI for regulated industry calls

Vulcan Technologies — AI for regulatory drafting

Waydev — AI for engineering leadership insights

Wayline — AI for property management voice automation

Wedge — AI for healthcare trust layers

Workflow86 — AI for workflow automation

ZeroEval — AI for agent evaluation and optimization


Please don't spam the threads with massive lists. It's enough to link to the information.

I'm not sure what this is supposed to show, other than that YC funds a lot of startups and a lot of them are working in AI, which is what you'd expect during any major tech wave.

In fact, YC funds so many startups that your list is actually misleadingly short, unless you meant to argue that AI startups are a low percentage.


You should create a startup based around an AI for collapsing lists if clicking [-] is too difficult and they are so annoying.

110 of those were from their summer 2025 batch of 170, so your statement is actually misleading unless you meant to argue that 65% is a low percentage.


Tecto AI is my favourite, as it forms the "AI for AI" ouroboros. Outrove also sounds confusing, because doesn't Salesforce already purport to have their own native AI features? And when I look them up, it seems they're just AI for recruiting, which is also what VoiceOS purports to do.

Looking up the founders is fascinating too. So many of them seem to have graduated and immediately started trailing what appear to be a string of back-to-back failed businesses, rarely with more than a year of staying power per attempt. It's hard to tell if that's "failing quickly" (desirable) or "frantically trying to get-rich-quick" (undesirable and what I run into in Melbourne most often).


This makes me want to reach for a tool that definitely has no AI whatsoever involved.

Specifically, the one described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287474.


Incredible list. Thanks for sharing.


>Verne Robotics — AI for robotic arms

Kiko the Monkey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KaWPYOLuT8


This is art.


Please tell me your AI tool did that for you and you didn't do it manually


I'm actually the CEO of a startup that created the very first AI for AI for _____ list generation service. Already in our 347,985th round of funding, currently valued at $382,457,203.


Yo this is nuts lol!


I think this is oddly predatory, and sends the wrong idea to graduating students who have not even entered the real world.

There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.


These kids are (typically) in some of the best colleges in the world and in incredibly high demand. They have lots of options and enormous amounts of agency.

Hard to buy that "here's another option" is predatory.


Not just predatory, but irresponsible.

The idea that someone fresh out of college should start and run a business is deeply concerning. These are kids who have just (hopefully) learned about ethics and what it takes to run a business, yet you expect them to be responsible stewards of their users' data, to comply with laws and regulations, while you throw $500,000 at them, give them minimal guidance, sell them fantasies about infinite riches, and skim whatever you can from the top.

Yes, I'm aware that Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and others, started their businesses before even finishing college. But a) these are outliers, and b) when someone refers to users of their products as "dumb fucks", do we really want to put them in charge of running a company?


Bill Gates was already from a rich family and got some nice early contracts due to his family connections.


Putting inexperienced kids with good credentials who are amenable to listening to a board in charge of these things is part of the yc business model.


YC is looking for people who have high agency and can back their own judgement. All the most successful founders fit this profile.


In fairness young people can have high agency, back their own judgements, and have grit, perseverance, et al. and still lack experience and be more easily influenced by perceived mentors than they might be a decade later in their career paths.

With no disrespect to YC, of course.


Sure but the founders who will generate the greatest returns for investors are the ones who won’t be pushed around by boards. Facebook’s board advised Mark Zuckerberg to take Yahoo’s $1B offer in 2006 [1]. He was 22 years old. He refused, and Meta is now valued at nearly $2T. That’s the kind of founder that the most ambitious startup investors are looking for.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/an-ugly-truth-mark-zuckerber...


Sure but one example is a point in the cloud of all responses, granted the cloud tips toward a particular part of a large multi variate space.

Unless ... your point is that all YC founders are homogeneous interchangeable cyborgs? ( surely not ).


We’re discussing the cynical assertion that YC is looking for founders who will be compliant and subservient to boards. I’m just pointing out that if there is any defining quality in the kinds of founders that an investor like YC is looking for, it’s that they are not compliant and subservient to anyone, including or especially boards :)

When pg and others talk about the qualities they look for in founders, they use terms like “formidable” and “force of nature”.


As someone who has worked with many boards and execs, I cannot tell how wrong this way of looking at the world is.

Execs universally love working with people who maximize proactivity and strong opinions. The opposite of what you think.


> Execs universally love working with people who maximize proactivity and strong opinions.

Only if they share the same strong opinions.


I hear, "You're the expert, we're paying you a lot, tell us what to do" often!


But what if what to do isn't what they want to do…


Yes we know execs are going to drink as much kool-aid as they need to to join this group of people and they'll probably love the process, especially when they're getting sweetheart liquidity deals earlier than everyone else at these firms.

I'm not really concerned with that. I'm more interested in the aggregate effect of putting a significant amount of the industry in the hands of a few ignorant twenty somethings and the small group of wealthy people from the bay area who are on all these boards. That is a frightening level of power concentrated in the hands of a small and anti-democratic structure.


YC doesn't take board seats.

edit: removed snarky attack


Just 7% ownership while being one of the most important pipelines for early investment opportunities in the valley, which has extensive relationships with the people who will be on the boards. Additionally, YC might not take board seats, but its ceo certainly does.


a "board" presumably like a "medical school acceptance board" and not a corpo board


> You don't know what you're talking about.

Please don’t comment like this on HN. Your point would carry more weight without the snarky personal attack.


Noted.


Many thanks!


I loved YC and can't recommend it enough. But if you're going to start a company, please consider working at another company first, even if briefly. (And make it a company you respect and want to emulate.)

The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.


> if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works.

You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.


> You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.

having worked at a few dysfunctional companies, there's value in it. you learn to spot red flag decisions and the kinds of people that tend to cause organizations to explode from within. a Lot of the success at my current company can be attributed to decisions I've made that came from experience at failed startups where we did the opposite.


Exactly! being able to recognize the wrong thing is just as valuable as recognizing the right thing


Great, then at least you can see what you don't like! (But really, I intentionally said a company you want to emulate, because I do agree – no point in taking this advice if you go to a bad company)


also helpful to see a dysfunctional company (or four) to cover your bases on shitty management practices


Learning what NOT to do is almost as valuable as knowing what to do.


This is partially why the average age of a successful founder is late 30s to early 40s at the time of founding.

There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.

Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.

But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.

And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.


So it's not too late !

Still, I think you need to be well connected, or already profitable for VC fundraising.

Otherwise your just another programmer with hacked together prototype.


Better than just another Idea Guy with an MBA.


There are two types of idea guys, Idea Guys who actually can get funding.

And those who can't.

I've already wasted too much time creating small prototypes and then cold calling/emailing VCs/YC.

It's a big club and I'm not in it, at this point I'd rather just make weird games with my friends and open source them versus trying to chase a dime.


I made this mistake. I love where I've wound up, but I would have gotten there much more quickly and with a lot less heartache if I'd worked as part of an existing company before starting my own.


I learned a lot working for other people but I’ve learned the most running my own thing.

I do think many college grads generally don’t understand how business works though because they just haven’t experienced it yet. School is a totally different beast.


Cannot +1 this enough! Joining a team you respect and seeing how they operate gives you a really good baseline to work off of and take what you like and modify what you disagreed with.

You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself


> And make it a company you respect and want to emulate

Personally I would caveat that they be a small company. Large companies are a very different beast. What it takes to get ahead and succeed at there is often very different from a startup, in ways that don’t become obvious until you’ve worked at a startup.

Rather than learning which wheels not to re-invent, you have one data point and reflexes that you’d need to deprogram.

Working at the company I most highly respect and would want to emulate (Stripe), I don’t think the skills would have been at all the right ones. (Admittedly I was in a highly toxic and political org.)


If this is what tips the scales for someone in deciding between being a founder and taking a 9-5 job, they don’t have the level of commitment needed to be a successful founder.


bad, ideologically-motivated idea when thiel did it, and bad, ideologically-motivated idea now


"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Jared's description about why YC is doing this now seems clear. If you know more or better, you're welcome to make a substantive argument. But please don't use this site for shallow putdowns—it's not what it's for.


[deleted]


Young, fool and hungry. The best VC material.


Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once.

Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!


I'm having a hard time understanding the 'gotcha' quality of this comment and this subthread. There's no inconsistency; PG has always said that people should finish college before starting a startup—I heard him say this over 15 years ago, and he went on about it at length at his most recent YC talk.

Edit: I think I understand the problem now. PG's actual advice has always been "finish college before starting a startup". Somehow somewhere that got distorted into "don't start a company in your 20s", which is certainly not what PG has been saying (the average graduation age is somewhere around 23). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372572 quotes a representative passage, and if you read that essay you'll see that he's mostly saying "don't start a startup at 20".

(Edit: I deleted my last sentence which was irritable.)


I don't have a strong personal opinion on this, but the PG essay mentioned in the comment you link to advises people not to start a startup while in college and to do other things in their "early 20s", while Early Decision is targeted specifically at people who are currently college students and (mostly) in their early 20s. I don't think there's a 'gotcha' there, but there is at least a tension, no?

While you're correct that the comment you're responding to is a bit sloppy in summarizing what PG said ("20s" instead of "early 20s"), its basic point still makes sense.

YC is not the Church of Paul Graham, so I don't see any need to dive into Pauline exegesis and attempt to reconcile YC's current admissions process with everything PG has ever said. YC can do what it likes, and people can note what may or may not have changed since PG was in charge of it.


The early decision is for people who want to start a startup once they finish college. I don't see a tension between that and advising people to finish college.

The difference between "20s" and "early 20s" is huge; it's the difference between Google and not-Google (btw, that pg essay includes this information). Since not-not-funding-Google is, to a first approximation, the entire startup investment business, conflating the two is more than a bit sloppy, and the GP comment (imputing an inconsistency to PG that doesn't exist, with cynical implications), makes no sense once one adjusts for what pg really said. He's been consistent about this for many years! I'm being irritable again now though. but not with you!

You made me laugh with the Pauline bit!


As startup valuations have gone up quickly and the YC offer largely remains the same, YC has naturally moved downmarket. They have gone from being an exclusive, premium product aimed at people who have a serious chance of building a unicorn to a finishing school for venture-backed entrepreneurs. In my opinion, this is a great thing for YC because it's a more natural fit for their main value proposition, but it also means that the best time to do modern YC is essentially straight out of school.


I don't think this is a valuations vs. stagnant offer scenario. I think it has more to do with YC scaling up from dozens to hundreds and thousands of investments in a very competitive landscape. From a few early successes when no one was doing what they did, to having way more money to invest than there are good ideas and now it's spray & pray; trade on the YC name and with some luck hope there's a pay-off. If we start with the apocryphal "VCs look for 1 in 10 home runs", well the earliest YC classes only had like ten in a batch, so they had the time, energy and NEED to have a success. YC added a lot of partners who had a successful exit - or didn't - and surprise, they look like every other VC partner in the industry, at least minus the identical headshots in navy blue suits.


This was absolutely Paul's strategy -- read his essay reflecting on returns from their early portfolio (AirBnB and Dropbox). His take -- "we should have done another 1000 investments to get a third hit" (coinbase, it turns out. And he was correct).

The math for YC's seed stage returns is overall inexorably towards more checks being written - the checks are incredibly cheap. YC's IRR is currently roughly 176%, yielding an 81,000x return since 2005 -- another way to say it: a single $25k investment from 2005 could be deployed into 81,000 $25k investments in 2026. Or another way to say it, for every check they wrote, they're able to write another check off that investment every 8 months, compounding all the way back.

YC's main problem is that there aren't 81,000 even slightly viable startups in the world. It's true they've lost their "exclusive" vibe, but to be honest, when they started it was more "small and quirky" which briefly became "gold standard exclusive." It was never their original brand, and I don't think it was ever really part of the strategy.


For whoever wants to re-read one of the articles that mentions the idea, there you go: https://paulgraham.com/before.html#f7n:~:text=You%20can%20do...


What that article says is "don't start a startup in college". That is what pg has always said, and is not at all what the GP comment imputes to him.

More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45375715.


> Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once.

I've been lurking on HN since 2008 and can't remember a time where i got the vibe from pg to be like "live your life" instead of "start a company now and apply". Can you point to some specific essay you had in mind?


https://paulgraham.com/before.html

"Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.

You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people, this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration. If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it. [7]"


Totally disagree with Paul here. If you are growing up rich, you can take your time with no deadlines.

If you grew up with responsibilities, you cant ignore the ticking clock. You have to start working on a career path asap.


If there is a single advice i would give the young folks here: Don't listen to VC's. Live your life. Startup founder is more comparable to an olympic athlete in terms of what you have to give up to get there - by definition 99% of people who try no matter how brilliant won't walk this path successfully - but both will lose many things on this way without being much happier than before. This is also where most of this community is being very dishonest be it co-founder search or success stories: Only a very small percentage of people is mentally suited (e.g. extreme resilience) to go on with this gamble yet we encourage everyone to try it out here.


This. I'd also add that, in general, you don't need a large sum of money in the early stages, as long as your basic needs are covered. For instance, living with your parents for a while can be a smart move. More importantly, use time wisely: with discipline you can do or validate a lot over several quarters. By contrast, if you take the VC route, the metronome ticks much faster, often in a way that can be counterproductive for your startup. As unintuitive as it sounds.


>extreme resilience

You misspelled narcissistic psychopath.

The Best of Gavin Belson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30WTWkFe910

The Best of Russ Hanneman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI


Doesn't PG actually argue for startups as the "surest" route to million dollar "success"?


Honestly I think there are two different audiences. The type of person that is open to traveling, exploring jobs, etc. in their twenties is different from the “institutional pipeline” track of good high school > good college > good job.

This early decision thing is functionally going to move a few pipeline kids from the corporate world to the startup world, which probably isn’t a terrible outcome. But it also reflects how YC has become a marker of institutional pipeline success for a lot of people.


it's unclear to me which track you think YC runs on - stuffy corporate or hip & edgy explorer?


I wouldn't use either of those labels, more like...it is becoming / is already tied into the institutional definition of success. 15 years ago, it was still kind of unorthodox to turn down a BigTech job and start a company instead. Nowadays it's starting to feel like another credential or routine path that smart tech-adjacent people take.

IMO if you're trying to decide between a well-paid job and starting a company...you probably aren't cut out to start a company. But...the infrastructure for choosing the latter option is becoming developed and safe enough that realistically speaking, it may actually be the optimal non-entrepreneurial career choice.


Whatever statement is more relatable at the time hence better for their business.


Gives me weirdo Thiel vibes who pays (or used to pay) kids to drop out of college and start a company for him.


It seems kind of the opposite to me. YC is allowing you to finish school. You don't need to drop out.


another POV is two people who are willing to risk a lot of money on pre-seed stage companies - no traction, only people and an idea - have arrived at a lot of the same mechanics for such investing

the better question is: how do these two investors differentiate themselves?


In fairness, while I’m sure it didn’t work out for all of them, one of these students became one of the youngest self made billionaires in history


He did it to the smartest kid in our CS class. I feel bad now because I feel like he deserves a degree.


A classmate of mine dropped out to do this. Failed, and ended up picking up later to finish the last two years of college. It really didn’t seem to have slowed them down, and finishing college a few years later (with some startup founders experience) seems to have been overall good. Unfortunately did end up going to Boston Consulting Group from on-campus recruiting, so not a great end to the story, but historically that’s a high-ish paying and hard to get job.


I get the feeling only very affluent and well-supported people follow this path, and they probably don't need THiel's money to do it. The vast majority don't have a few years at this stage of their life to play the lottery.


Yeah, I hung out with one of the early batches of these people (my former supervisor was involved) and would agree that they tended to be from better off families. How much of that was the Ivy league selection bias vs anything else I dunno though.


He'll receive plenty of opportunities regardless of degree so I don't see why you feel sorry for him.


He would have made a fantastic professor in my opinion. But I think also, certain opportunities just require a degree on a policy level.


Doesn't mean that this was a good thing for them. For example, many kid actors who become rich and famous are not happy.


I mean... is it self-made if a billionaire helped you?


Or weirdo Russ Hanneman vibes who bought a company called The Lady so he could use his phone as a parental remote control to raise his kid with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI&t=217s

A company I'm funding, we call it The Lady.

I press the button, and The Lady tells Aspen when it's time for bed, time to take a bath, when his fucking mother's here to pick him up.

I get to be his friend, and she's the bad guy.

I've disrupted fatherhood!


First time he gave that advise it was not directly affecting his company profit chances. Second time though is different.

--

Another good example of expressing and exersiging values, how easy to construct appealing narrative regardless of underlying subject and something else what I can't pinpoint at this stage...


PG never gave that advice (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45375715), and has been completely consistent about the advice he has given.

Not that everyone should always be consistent, but you guys could not have picked a worse example to seize on.


I've had to explain this to several people: YC goals are not our goals. For YC, it would be great for lots of people to burn down their lives for even the slimmest chance at success.


Venture capital would love it if everyone worked overtime with no weekends to build “the next big thing.”

Your hobbies and interests should actually just be work and producing profit. Don’t spend the weekend taking a hike with your friends, you gotta get building.

The people doing that work are a probabilistic financial instrument to the VC system. The founders who fall for this trap instead of living a balanced life are just lowering the cost basis for the VC investors by giving away free labor.

In reality, you can build a startup while maintaining a work-life balance, but if everyone did that then VC firms would have to delay the purchase of their owners’ fifth yacht by a couple of months.

The only people who have the time and energy for the toxic startup founder lifestyle of thing are students and young people who haven’t yet established families and their optimism and interest is being exploited.


[flagged]


They can make it just like tennis!


2031: Pregnant mothers are encouraged to signup their child before they're even born. No pressure.

2032: Sperm scan available for teenage boys for future child's YC eligibility.


What do you mean "turn out their other job offers"?


Whoops - I had a typo! Thank you; fixed.


I can't quite put my finger on it, but this announcement gives me bad vibes.


I think a few things:

Wanting to finish school is a negative signal. Also

> Also we know that many students spend a lot of time in Fall or during their final year applying for jobs or internships. Early Decision gives students another option: apply to YC and bet on yourself.

So now YC is an alternative to searching and apply for jobs? I think if you're marginal on trying to find a corporate job or starting something, then you should prob find a corp job. Objectively starting a startup is worse, you work harder, lower odds of success, more stress, less money, etc. You have to be a little crazy and hardheaded to make it work

Finally everything that YC does to increase it's applicant pool so they still maintain exclusivity. If you have 2% acceptance rate, why are you trying to maximize the top of the funnel? You should discourage people to apply.


> Wanting to finish school is a negative signal

No. This sounds like VC trash advice and very bad career advice.

Startup chances of success are <5%, and many of the factors are beyond your control. A degree is still relevant in being able to easily get interviews and secure jobs, in the >95% case that you do not succeed on the first try.

I'd only recommend dropping out if you see mad traction and revenue and you are on a trajectory to be famous enough that people won't care if you don't have a degree. If you're still a "nobody", it's a really, really bad idea.


honest question: do you think that in a job market where it seems to be ridiculously hard to land that junior corporate job maybe starting your own thing is a increasingly valid alternative? I'm not sure this is aligned with the properties that YC is necessarily shopping for (they seem to compete with companies eager to hire the same people) but maybe if you're a newish grad from a lesser-known school? My sample size of one includes someone who did that in the 90's and built a $B+ valued company.


VC investment has rebounded but it's also been extremely concentrated in AI in the last couple of years.

"Starting your own thing" in a vc-backed way (need a big exit, or bust) as a fresh college grad who now has to come up with a thing and sell it to a lot of customers within a couple of years sounds incredibly hard.

Especially when framed as "you won't have to look for a job" - not having the hustle skills to be at the top of the pack in the job-hunt vs your classmates doesn't really give a good signal for your hustle-and-build-and-sell-a-VC-startup alternative.


I have been thoroughly enjoying re-watching HBO's Silicon Valley, appreciating all the little details and sub-plots I missed during my first watching long ago. It's aged so well.

It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.


I love the show and rewatch it often, but if you lived in that world during the show's timeframe you can see it's changed draamtically. It still holds up as the "vision" of what we thought a SW startup looks like, but the reality is these scrappy little altruistic startups are not lead by hands-on tech founders, they're all taking the money today - often from PE - and are already the people from the show we laughed at. Show a member of a YC25 class SV today and they'll think Gavin Belson is a "how-to" tutorial.


I agree, it's gotten much much worse, especially with all the MAGA/Trump/Musk/Thiel boot licking.

It's prime time for Silicon Valley: AI Bubble. Instead of hiring the original actors or artists or writers, it could be ironically AI animated in the style of South Park, with a storyline about infringing on copyright and intellectual property, and putting actors and artists and programmers out of work.

I wonder what kind of company names would Erlich Bachman come up with on ketamine instead of shrooms?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXqkkpnZDgU


I suspect Erlich might have died of an opium overdose at this point.


Exactly the same feeling here, it's such a strange thing to promise a kid they are accepted into a program, but it starts in like 4 years.

As if all of your education (and probably side-projects, life decisions) is meant to lead to YC.


> Also, if you're not in your final year, you can still apply for Early Decision. You'll be able to finish the school year you're currently in,

It's a one-year early decision, like pretty much every other early decision program.


For awhile now I’ve felt like YC has turned into another badge for the type people who are obsessed with prestige. It’s all about checking a box and not about the substance of what they want to do.

This is evident in how disappointed certain people are when they’re rejected from YC. Their startup is merely a vehicle to get into the club.


Better to start our own club then.

All things have a life cycle. Despite what yc wants you to believe, it will come and go. Perhaps it’s becoming a prestige institution in the hopes to increase its longevity.

That being said, belonging to a group is a central component of being a human as we are highly social animals. So it’s not wrong to want to belong to a group and then being sad when you are rejected. It requires a lot of maturity and stoicism to cut your own path. This is somewhat ironic since traditionally founding your own company is considered cutting your own path but I think yc and others have made it much less so. There is a formula now to follow which is why there is now an in group and an out group. Cutting your own path by definition does not include a set formula.


The number of people we are talking about as a percentage of CS like graduates is tiny. They aren’t kids either. It seems like a low risk experiment on both sides.


Asking people without experience, skills and maturity to know what they want in their life to commit to YC way before graduating comes off as simply too much.


Interestingly, this mirrors the kind of thing that has been happening in finance, especially in private equity. Normally, you start out at an investment bank, do two years as an analyst there, learn the basics, then make a choice whether you want to stay in IB or move to PE (or somewhere else).

Eventually, PE started recruiting earlier and earlier to the point where they were hiring college graduates for two years in the future who hadn't even started their IB role. Obviously, these people don't even know what they like doing, and you have no idea if they are any good at their job.

The end result was Jamie Dimon of JPM slamming his fist on the table to knock it off. This has led other banks to follow suit and major PE firms to commit to stop recruiting this early. At least for now.

But it seems that something similar is now happening on the VC side.


It's all about riding that idiotic AI bubble until the huge burst


They just want warm bodies. Why else would they focus on people that don’t have experience?


Neither experience nor hard skills, let alone soft ones.


Something tells me the business is became the product.


This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society

If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.


I feel like being "the best and brightest" is quite orthogonal to having what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

I also feel like highly intelligent people might quite reasonably decide for themselves that they shouldn't have to take on that kind of risk to get what they want out of life.


This really is not true, basically every engineering job in the Bay Area will set you up with enough money to live extremely well.

YC startups are a bit above average, but still most startups fail.

If you care about building wealth, taking a stable engineering position straight out of college and working hard is a great path


This. There is a huge opportunity cost, even more so for the “best and brightest” (by whatever definition). The odds of striking it rich are really not in your favor. You may be better off working at big tech for a few years, save up, let the money work for you while you explore your entrepreneurial urge. You have a cushion and maybe that will let you take on bigger and bolder bets than what you could when you come out of college, and you maybe forced to take a “relatively safer” bet because you also have to make money soonish


No you want to take these bets when you are young, its the opposite, you go into stable careers when your appetite for risk and working around the clock has waned


There's an entire generation of FAANG millionaires that just spent a decade out of school working at one of those places and got fabulously wealthy off of it. In fact, it's probably the most likely career to get you rich instead of betting your time on startup equity that might be worth something in 6-10 years.


Yeah great they got into the fastest growing companies of all time at the perfect time


It’s not just the companies are growing. If you get an offer from BigTech with cash + RSUs and the stock stays stagnant, you will still be better off statistically than spending 5-7 years of your life at a startup.


YC is not really advocating you to become a worker at a startup. They want you to become a founder. As a founder you don't need to be a huge success for you to be well off. I'm one of 3 founders currently in a bootstrapped company that has done okay. We are approaching end of year 5. This year we will make 700k revenue, 240k profit and 50% yearly growth. Typically this kind of business is not something a VC would consider investing in, but it can still be profitable for the founders.

I'm not very liquid at the moment. My salary is a measly 60k a year. Most of 80k that is my share of the profit will stay in the company instead of go into my pocket, but the 33% ownership in the company is valuable. Very typical valuations for companies in general is 10x profit, which would mean my share of the company is worth 800k. Companies getting strategically acquired can be 20x revenue, which makes my share of the company worth 4.7million.

At FAANG I would have likely made a liquid 300k * 5 = 1.5million, which would allow me to spend more money and enjoy life right now. However, the next 5 years with my company will likely be a lot more valuable. If we manage to grow 30% a year then after 5 years profit will be 900k. That means 300k a year profit share, 3m valuation at 10x profit and 17m valuation at 20x revenue.


You realize that you’re kind of making my point? Even with your rosy projections, you’re still going to be making much less than a few returning interns I know made in their first three years working at BigTech.

Heck you’re making less than a run of the mill enterprise dev is making in a second tier major city in Atlanta

And as a founder, you still need to do well to do better off than a BigTech employee and statistically you won’t come near.

And on top of that, you’re sounding like every startup that doesn’t realize that they can’t linearly project growth based on past performance. The first cohorts are almost always easier than later cohorts unless it is a platform with network effects.


Don't forget the actual rate of return vs time spent working too. As a founder you're probably working at least 50% more time than the average faang dev, plus the added stress of being in a high impact, high consequence role.


Thought experiment: What group do you think will have the higher median total earnings over 10 years - the group that worked at BigTech or the group that worked at a YC startup?

You make your money first, let it make money for you and then do a startup.


Having done this, and acknowledging the fuzzy definition of "rich" etc - going through YC after graduating is a great career move. You have to do everything yourself so you learn a lot. About business, about a specific industry, about programming, whatever. You make connections. But unless you walk an absolute golden path (hey it happens), > 90% chance you don't get rich. > 99.9% chance you won't get rich by 30.


Not denying you can fail, but one year spent on YC and failing puts you in a position to start another business


How many YC founders end up rich before 30? Or even at all? I think it’s likely a highly valuable experience running a business experiment someone else will fund (not to mention connections you wouldn’t otherwise make), but the odds of actual, liquid wealth from the experience and time spent are very low.


Alot of them do, not only that, they build skills that help them start their next company. Many of which are bootstrapped and profitable. This whole idea that startups are a complete lottery ticket is not only false, its increasingly less false, more money is being made now in startups than ever


Based on public exit and liquidity event information, startups still remain a lottery ticket for most. 90% of startups fail entirely, for example (CB Insights). YC startups have more longevity, and more get to a Series A then non YC startups, but the best batches based on performance have been between 2009 and 2013. 10% achieve an exit, 4.5% became unicorns. Only 17 companies backed by YC (out of almost 5k) have gone public, and all except Airbnb, Instacart, and Reddit have underperformed post IPO.

Have fun, learn, develop and grow your skills and network, take the investment, but it’s important to be honest with one’s self about odds of success and outcome. If you win, respect and appreciate the lottery ticket for what it was. Hard work and years of grinding is table stakes, but you can still fail (and most do).

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pulling-back-the-curtain-...

https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report


> More than 50% of companies are still alive after 10 years

I’d rather have a 50% chance at my own startup being alive after 10 years than go work some big corp job.


To each their own. If you must do a startup, do so. My comments should be treated as informing prior to an informed decision.


If you work for 10 years in big tech and save your money, you’d have enough for a lifetime of chasing startup ideas.


This is the part I think young people don't understand. My husband and I worked around 16 years combined in tech. We started pretty late, since we both have PhDs, and we're not engineers so we aren't making top of the market. We still had enough money after that time to buy a house, have 2 kids and go on a multi-year sabbatical. And most of this working period was not at FAANGs.

If you're young, talented, single and bringing home $200k a year including RSUs, you are on track to basically do whatever you want in a decade. Make it to senior manager / Staff level and you should be clearing $400k a year at least. And if you do it smartly you're working 9-5, not some 996 bullshit. That's a ridiculous amount of money.

It's not as sexy as building a startup. But at least for me the ROI has been incredible. And I'm not super smart- my whole college career I looked down at people who spent their lives in front of a computer. I completely missed the trend of tech and Silicon Valley, and I definitely don't work any harder than the next guy. But if you do good work I've found that it tends to pay off.


People really underestimate how much FAANG pays, all things considered.

If you spent the last 10-15 years as an engineer/manager in FAANG (and these past 5-10 years have been very far from what’s called the “golden age”), and were financially responsible, you’re a multi millionaire, most likely still in your 30s.

If you’re a couple that worked there, well damn you’re not just rich you are wealthy.

I can’t think of a better starting point for founding a startup. Or retiring.

Sacrificing 10 years seems a lot when you’re fresh out of college. But 1. it’s not really a sacrifice since your life is much more comfy than most 2. in the grand scheme of things 10 years is not a lot. You will most likely spend way more time on a failed startup while having the worst time.


I have a problem with the analogy “lottery ticket”. I think analogies are helpful as long as we are talking perhaps a singe order of magnitude difference between the two things.

The chance of winning most popular US lotteries is approximately 1 in 300,000,000. In comparison, the chance of IPO-ing a YC company is approximately 1 in 300. You can count how many orders of magnitude of difference that is.


I buy a lottery ticket for $1, in a moment, with no further effort. A YC startup founder grinds for years, if not a decade, to reach IPO with unknown opportunity costs. They are not the same. How many lottery tickets over how many lottery draws to equalize the odds is a fun thought experiment to quantify a dollar value for the option premium.

17 YC IPOs over how many total YC founder years (Lifetime YC companies * # of founders * years YC company active, roughly)?

(I’ve put a lot of thought into being a founder, from an aggressively data driven perspective about how to spend time, which is non renewable)


It's all about the opportunity cost. There are always assumptions that need to be made, but it will be hard to argue that lottery tickets are better than startups. I don't think they are.

A more useful comparison would be a serious statistical analysis between startups and other occupations.


I am not spending years of my life trading money for lottery tickets, startups are worse than lottery tickets


I said "serious".


Thought experiment: who do you think would be better off as a group? 10 college grads working at any of the FAANG+ companies or the same 10 being YC founders?


10% chance at millions fresh out school sounds great!


If you think "exit" automatically means millions, you've probably never seen an exit before. Of those that exit, the majority of startups get almost $0 for the common shareholders. I continue to believe that a lot of YC's alpha comes from the fact that they are very good at angling people toward small exits where they basically make no money but YC recovers their investment.


10% of 0.01% of people is probably closer. 0.01% is probably way to high even.


Let me make this simple for you: you will not get rich by 30.

I know, I know...there are examples! And yes, there are, but statistically, they won't be you. You're playing the lottery, only it's a lottery that steals your youth and gives you psychological problems.

If your only goal is to get rich, then don't do a startup. You have to have some more fundamental reason, or the agony will beat you.


I live in NYC, I have met alot of very rich startup founders. But not only that, lots of people making 50k a month from a startup they built post YC, raised no VC, and have no boss.

Its an outdated take to think people arent doing this


Sure. Google "selection bias". You aren't meeting the 10,000 who failed.

I also live in NYC. I lived in SF, during possibly the all-time greatest period of wealth creation in the last 50 years. I knew billionaires when they couldn't afford bar tabs. I ate leftover boxes of Obama-Os (again, Google it) that nobody wanted.

I'm still telling you the truth. Every one of those people who succeeded went through hell and back, and even then there was no guarantee that there was a reward at the end of the hell. Doing a startup is like getting punched in the face repeatedly for many, many years, with only your faith -- in something -- to carry you forward. You have to have more than just a desire to be rich.


Wait, are you saying the Obama O’s story - that the 500 boxes sold out, saving AirBnb - is not totally true?


Well, they definitely had a lot of Cap’n McCains left over, and we also had more than a few boxes of Obama O’s inside JTV. We would eat them as office snacks.

I was told that we were given them, but maybe they were surplus? Either way, real boxes.


You dont have to create a billion dollar company. Especially after raising VC and failing, its much clearer how to build a business. Very reasonable to think a smart hard working person can build a company making 1M a year. Life owning a company that makes even a moderate amount is 1000x better than a career. I think your analysis is outdated


If it's 1000x better than a career and you believe it's achievable, why haven't you done it yet?


why do you think i havent


It seems like you would've mentioned your own success rather than those around you when talking about how feasible it is. It's a lot easier to say something is achievable when you've done it yourself.

And again, I think you would've simply responded "I have" rather than ask me what I think. Obviously I could be wrong.


You live in NYC.... there are a lot of "startup founders" who already come from generational family wealth


Are you trying to tell me those who take the most risk already have a safety net?!


> If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

I am 30, I am rich by most measures of wealth and probably in the minds of most college grads. I worked in various big tech companies (incl stints in FAANG) after graduating with my BS in CS. A lot of my peers did do startups, and they had varying degrees of success. But almost everyone who went to big tech has set up their next generation for success at this point


By rich I mean like 25 million +, not 3 million


Goalpost shift. $3M net worth individual is rich by every measure in the USA


Why is everyone equating "best and brightest" with "rich by 30"? Were Kernighan and Ritchie rich by 30?


> If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.

Many will enter, few will win lmao


or you buy bitcoin


Entrepreneurship isn’t getting showered with millions for doing nothing other than being accepted as a part of the blessed elite and access to an infinite spigot of free money when all other sources have been dammed off and diverted to the ever shrinking minority of ever increasing ultra-wealth.


This would be a better comment if it asserted what the poster believed entrepreneurship IS rather than what it is not.

FWIW, to me entrepreneurship is an amazing path, but starting a company right out of college?? There’s a LOT of skills to develop. Have someone to copy. Make sure you draw enough salary. Keep an identity outside of your company (networking!) so you can pick yourself up if (when) it crashes.


For people who took a second to get this (like me), @fijiaarone means it is.

And I concur - in this AI hypecycle more than ever it seems to be about how can peacock the best. Its neck and neck with the crypto hypecycle a few years ago for the incidence rate of vaporware and snake oil. Sure there are some legit founders building meaningful product but they seem to be a small minority.


dude we just invented computers you can talk to


yeah and its amazing, that doesnt mean you dont have charlatans, hucksters, hustlers, opportunists etc. come for the gold rush. In fact, you should expect them to


Whose "we"?

there are open weight models which are SOTA.

not sure how you plan to monetize it.

Tell me how you can make a profit or if you even have a plan to make a profit..

or your plan is to sell it to a higher fool who believes that they can sell it to an even higher fool....

Oh. Sounds similar?


its still better than these people fighting over promotions in finance


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Senior year of college, aren’t we talking 21/22 year olds?


There's plenty of 65+ people who are still best described as toddlers.


Having had friends that went to a technical high school I have a feeling that there's a subtle suggestion that, "graduates" might refer to talented kids coming out of high school. At any rate suggesting to a young person that they should essentially ruin their life to chase a pipe dream is unethical especially when you benefit financially from making these suggestions.


That’s clearly not the suggestion of the post. It only mentions college students. There is no child abuse.


In what way is this "ruining your life"? If things don't go as planned, I imagine the person would be in a good position to pivot to higher education/a different job/starting something new. I think this idea that ruining one's life == not following the exact k-12 -> college -> big corporation route is short sighted.


Do a risk based calculation of compensation and learning.

Your will see that you are putting you self at risk - especially if you had the opportunity to work at an renowned business.

Eg. Having 2 no name defunct businesses on your resume you claim as startups over 3 years will likely not benefit you so much.


All depends on the person, their goals, their expectations, the experiences they want to have.

Agree we should not deceive anybody that doing this would make them rich or have a successful business. Most startups fail, startups by new college grads who never had a job might fail even more than normal startups. But if an adult wants to burn a few years of their 20s this way, fine. Maximizing earning efficiency of earnings in your 20s might not be optimal either. Maybe you hit a local maximum and would have much higher earnings later after discovering something by following your nose for a few years.


Your 20s is a great time to be a founder. You have fewer responsibilities so can get by with less income and more easily up sticks to somewhere else. Your opportunity cost as a junior is low. It's a bad time to get a job as a junior too, so this is a good way to get job experience if nobody will hire you. You probably won't succeed (because most startups fail) but you'll learn a lot and probably have a lot of fun.


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uhhh, it's their website. they can promote as much as they want


lol come on guys let kids live a little


Yeah so all our talent can line the pockets of SV.


Eternal September for the startup world.




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