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A comment on Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth. Parent comment

Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by jhanschoo on Monday September 30, 2024 @12:18PM (#41698905)
> It's just hard to convey the sense from the early days of YC that they really didn't care about the return, or the progress so far, or VCs, or fads, or anything. That said, I really was at the right place at the right time and got very lucky.

It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did. Web apps and mobile fundamentally transformed everyday life and communication in very visible ways and there seemed to be a lot of low hanging fruit. I observe, similar to your 2), that YC seemed to have a bias toward products for tech people by tech people, and that wasn't a bad strategy, because there was still a lot of plumbing to do; there still is, but I feel that there are established solutions for the mass market to a degree that there wasn't.

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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by cherryteastain on Monday September 30, 2024 @01:40PM (#41699873)
> It seems to me that there was an early '10s milieu that enabled YC to behave like it did.

Definitely, it's called ZIRP and QE.

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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by stackskipton on Monday September 30, 2024 @05:22PM (#41702283)
I think so many questions about “Why did business X operate like this in 10s?” Is answered with that statement.

So much was funded on economic smack high. A few sobered up and a ton bottomed out bad.

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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by raydev on Monday September 30, 2024 @07:25PM (#41703171)
It didn't hurt that there was also a burgeoning new computing platform that everyone and their grandma was buying into for the first time.
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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by wyclif on Thursday October 10, 2024 @11:50PM (#41805903)
Yes, because ZIRP and QE are deflationary policies: they reduce the amount of interest paid by the government.
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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by skeeter2020 on Monday September 30, 2024 @02:57PM (#41700675)
There were a lot of preferable options for connected, generally non-technical people after the dot-com implosion, for the first ~15 years of the 2000's. I joined a comp sci grad and his engineer brother in a software startup because we couldn't get jobs with an established company, big corp, investment bank or other much more likley "sure thing". The equation has completely changed, and the startup landscape with it.
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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by jorvi on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @02:48AM (#41705298)
Startups went from “let’s become the next Google” to “let’s get acquired by Google”. FAANG+ have become way too big and have effectively become a multi-opoly (oxymoron and a half) that has ossified the entire market.
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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by AbstractH24 on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @07:36AM (#41707063)
But two decades earlier couldn’t you say the same thing about Microsoft?

It’s part of the cycle.

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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by bulletsvshumans on Friday October 04, 2024 @06:43PM (#41746190)
Oligopoly is a close word.
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Re:Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth by Sammi on Tuesday October 01, 2024 @03:44AM (#41705685)
10-20 years ago the internet was still an unpopulated continent that everyone was rushing to settle. It just isn't the same wide open green pastures it used to be. This is my guess of what is the largest reason for the declining success of YC companies.
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