I worked with pg in a three-person startup in a basement in Harvard square just before he started YC. I was an undergrad at MIT and met him after arguing with rtm (who was a TA for my class) about TCP backoff. It was called Aspra and we were trying to build an app development platform for mobile phones. The idea was that you could build an application that could "render" to either an IVR system, for dumb phones, or the kind of web page that a Motorola "smartphone" of the day could view. Ahead of its time, like Paul. It didn't go far, and not long after he started YC. Good thing he did, for the industry and many of the folks here! Anyway, the "20 years" got my attention because I didn't feel that old, and thought someone might like the little story.
So myself and 3 others worked for Intuit and we traveled, from Mountain View CA, to your tiny office near Harvard to look at acquiring the company. I believe Intuit made a lowball offer and eventually you sold yourselves to Yahoo for twice the price. At Intuit we did not offer you guys money for the product, it really was not that special at all, but for the people—I thought only 3 folks at the time? I don’t think we actually talked to Paul that day but I remember Trever well and the tiny ‘server’ room.
It possible we may have met you too. It was a long time ago.
nah its true, this is one of the few places left on the web thats friendly and thoughtful (most of the time at least). That is directly related to your work keeping things civil. thank you
Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007).
Such an inspiring book - I still have it by my desk :) I bought it because they covered Joel's FogBugz and 37Signal's Basecamp (I was building a competitor product back then).
I remember the initial PG announcement about the founder's summer program and wanting desperately to be a part of it. I wasn't at a place in my life where I ever could join YC but the tribe that's been built by everyone involved has added tremendous value to my life. I'll always be incredibly grateful that this place and YC exists.
Congratulations YC! I remember prior to HN, pg used to post his essays to Slashdot under the username Bugbear and all the attendant sniping and lame memes that would come back in response. Hacker News was a breath of fresh air and continues to be my favourite online community.
Happy birthday YC! YC has created a ton of value, and I can say is responsible for the major inflection point in my career. I'm forever grateful to Paul, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor for seeing the value in the reddit team before anyone else did.
Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )
[I guess the tweet refers to YC the incubator, not the web site of news, but I want to focus on the latter]: I registered on HN a few days after it was created. The HN community was incredibly instrumental to my career, my ability to keep up with the development community, with like-minded people, and to have a voice, the times my posts and projects reached this home page. Thank you, for for all of that. Now, I see that, inevitably, as this place becomes bigger and bigger, there is no longer that strange, odd and wonderful "90s News Groups" alike quality. Despite the decline, I still find quite some value visiting this place every day.
Agreed. HN was how I learned about tech growing up in poverty (back when I used to think Googlers all wore lab coats!) and gave me the inspiration to both study CS and pursue the career I was lucky enough to end up in. The bigger HN gets the more it has qualities I don't really like, but it's also the last text platform I consume without curation on my part. (I know dang and the mod team do a heroic job, but I do very little curation of my own here, unlike Bluesky, X, or Discord where I do a lot of things to keep my feeds/channels useful to me.)
I agree. For me though it was only when slashdot started to shrink that I heard about HN, so I was a bit late to the party. To be fair, I still check slashdot almost daily!
There's going to be a lot of "the big successes already happened" type comments about YC but I think they're wrong.
Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship & web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe, or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important ways, but huge successes will surely happen.
Doesn’t YC still predominantly fund young men who aren’t at all industry experts in some mature field? It appears like the majority of startups I see are “AI for X” type applications.
I think this is more a reflection of the applicant pool. It's easier to put together a team when folks are early in their careers - also if you've been in industry for some time you might know VCs and are already an 'insider' to that industry
The business is built on the fact that young founders have an extra 10-15 years to learn everything compared to older ones. I think this will soon change when older people start rejuvenating and extending their lives. Also, it's just a trend like TikTok and startups founded by 25-year-olds sell better. Given the startup maturation cycle of 7-10 years, the founder will be 32-35 yo and they'll need another 10 years to present a success story for the system to work
HN is the only internet community I’ve found to be largely good. Thank you to everyone for all your kind posts and comments, and intellectual discussion. Love to you all.
It’s the only place where you can causally talk to multi millionaire startup founders and CS legends.
It’s also amazingly inclusive. There was a poster here who complained that they were effectively homeless and upset their Pixel phone would no longer hold a charge. Someone offered to send them a used laptop.
I think we thoughtfully discuss issues related to tech, even though we don’t always agree.
For me, it's the politics. There's a certain kind of user that keeps pushing them here, to people who don't care about them, and which are barely related to technology if even. If you point it out, they will say "everything is political"...
I feel like this is kind of pedantic - if your definition of the word "political" renders their point moot, then clearly they must be using a different definition.
But I understand what you mean. The problem is that 99% of online discussions about politics are not about how it relates to anything else. They are usually the same 5 conversations rehashed over and over again. And for some reason, they are aggressively derailed in that direction.
I like it enough to keep coming back, but lobste.rs is slightly preferable in my experience; more goodwill/less pedantry, and less Trumpelon apologism.
(If you are gearing up to reply to the last three words of the previous paragraph, I can promise you I'm not interested in hearing it. You have your preferences and priorities, and I have mine)
I found that lobste.rs had a much narrower range of views on every topic. And the intolerance of other views is presented far less eloquently than here. People just get hard downvoted or banned. Not just the obvious political ones but technical views too: dynamic typing is rubbish, cryptocurrency is rubbish, etc
Started reading HN nine years ago, when I screwed up my third startup the year before, was devastated, and needed some inspiration. And among the shared news were stories that inspired me again, that made me come back to this site every single day ever since. I like the cultivated discussions, like the things I learn about, and I feel like I never miss any tech trend. Excellent community. Love it.
Thank you PG, thank you Dang! Thank you to all the contributors for the high quality content.
Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search engine.
The idea here, AFAICT, is that the right intention matters even if the implementation is lacking and imperfect. If the intention is there, the implementation will improve.
The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.
HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.
I love the near-non-BS nature of it. And even though the techland changes, HN itself has had very little change, so it acts somewhat safe stable ground/forum/club for observing the ever changing techland. Although I recognize there is somewhat minimal degration in comment quality (less professional pragmatic comments over the years, at least so I feel), it still trumps every other alternative there is.
So, thank you PG/HN, and of course the HN community that makes most of it.
PS. I have been read-only mode for the past ~15y (and there was nothing valuable for me to comment on anything), but now I created account and this is my first comment :)
> HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.
I bet a lot of people here would say the same thing about Slashdot ten to fifteen years ago.
@HN: Thanks and please don't change.
HN has outlasted Slashdot by a wide margin at this point.
IIRC, Slashdot stopped being great around the same time as the decline of the Digg era. It started to sink in quality around 2007, which gave it ten years at most of being a central part of the online tech community (1997 - 2007).
I started reading HN in 2008. It's lasted nearly twenty years as an incredible community.
I'm at ~19 years - HN as daily home page since inception :)
Before HN, I used to hang out on Joel on Software and Eric's Business of Software forums; I occasionally used to post there and here but lost old accounts. If you have friends who have friends who has HN archeology skills and access, maybe I can recover my old account :)
We can try to dig up your old account if you want! You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, or if you want to "do it live", post here and we can ask for the community's help if needed.
Alas we didn't make it work. I was all ready to gloat over recovering your old account for you—probably got too confident about it. Hopefully some other information will resurface and we'll get it done another day.
Thank you for all your efforts and immediate attention, sorry that I couldn't make your job easier. What mattered the most was that I got a chance to have a brief chat with the actual human being behind the legendary HN username that makes everything run smoothly. Cheers, Daniel!
I have plenty of semi-technical friends that do this. Some of them only look at the links (e.g. via social media bots), and aren't even aware that HN has comments.
They're the kind of people who consider themselves "tech enthusiasts", they can install a nifty tool via pip if the instructions are clear enough, maybe even figure out what's wrong if there's an error, but they're definitely not programmers by any means.
Quite a few of them speak "tech English"; they can figure out a settings window or a signup form, they know enough tech vocabulary and basic grammar to mostly understand manuals, maybe with some help here or there, and can barely string an English sentence together. Ask them to define "lettuce" or "salmon" and they're lost.
Everyone is an expert in their own activity. If they have something insightful to say (or to ask) one trick is to write the comment in their native language and use autotranslation (double check technical words, because sometimes autotranslation picks the wrong synonym) (also check the output, because if the original has a one letter typo, sometimes it's translated to a very different word).
Another possibility is to write the comment in English inside gmail, and let suggestion gmail fix all the errors.
Probably. I created my account almost 13 years ago, but I read for years before creating it. I didn't create a reddit account until 2014, or a twitter account until 2015. I was reading Slashdot in the 90's though, to give you a sense of my age and how long I've been following stuff. I'm just a very late adopter...
Absolutely. Some of us see (or at least I see) the level of discussion and feel it would be hard for me to say something worthwhile that sounds kinda smart. So I mostly lurk while being grateful for those who do write incredibly insightful comments.
Happy Birthday, YC! I've been a regular participant in the HN community since 2012. All these years HN has inspired me and during this time I've learned a lot. I started back in the days of building FIDO, when the first point networks appeared. Of course, I’d love to see more communities and fewer bots, but progress is unstoppable. I wish the HN community to thrive and remain strong for many years to come.
I'm creating a mobile reader (iOS app) specifically for HN and if you want to join to speed up the process, you're Welcome!
PS: I fear that I’ll never get into YC and in the future there will be no more startups, only an AI, and I’ll have to work as a battery cell in the Matrix.
Hacker News is just 19 years old? I remember my professor at university mentioning it when I told him I am using .net for my project. According to him I should use OS language like Java and recommended me to HN. I thought it is much older. Time flies.
Y Combinator is 19 years old. Hacker News was launched in February 2007, so it just turned 18.
For the longest time I thought Hacker News must have been some proof of concept for Reddit and must pre-date it, which is not true. Reddit was launched in June 2005, shortly after Y Combinator.
As I remember it HN was initially a “response” to Reddit written in Arc, as by that point Reddit had already become focused on politics and some other more general stuff and had left its programming focus behind. HN was meant to fill that gap, with the important addition of the “entrepreneurial” / start-up business mambo-jambo behind which I could never get, but there were a lot more people that did get it seriously back then and which now have a lot more assets than people like me (didn’t care about start-ups, we were in here only for the programming stuff) now happen to posses. Lesson learned, I guess.
While I've never worked with YC directly (though have lots of friends who have been involved with YC in one way or another), I found HN during the pandemic and it has been my favorite place on the internet ever since. I have learned so much from this community, across so many different disciplines. I truly cherish the community we have here and I thank Dang, PG and others for maintaining this gem in a hidden corner of the internet. And while I agree there have been some changes even in the time I've been a part of the site, it's still the best online group of people I've ever come across. Thank you also to all of you who make this such a great, informative, inclusive community.
My HN account is 18 years old. Still no successful businesses to speak of after a few attempts. Have started an NGO instead to promote better urban planning and design.
HN has been an outstanding corner of the Internet, seemingly invulnerable to all the trash that has consumed the rest. I'd love to know how HN has avoided the bots and the spam, while retaining a simple and elegant login process.
Dan's moderation practices are viewable via his comment history*. They align well with my preferences, but, with a little imagination, I can see how some people wouldn't like them. One person's idea of good moderation is another person's terrible moderation.
You're not seeing everything he does. For example, he removes capabilities from people's accounts and he can't remember why he did it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42917749
He says he likes things to be "informal" by which he really means "opaque".
HN is a very particular public digital garden and @dang is a gardener doing his gardening stuff, just wondering what is your purpose here if you don't mind sharing?
No, that's formal. Formal systems that purport to answer all questions in advance are a bureaucratic bane, and as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there. I'm confident that the community feels the same way as well.
If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.
I don't think it's a good idea to complain publicly about the moderation regime here. To me it seems dang and whoever else has thought things through and made reasonable decisions based on, among other considerations, the amount of labour they have at their disposal. Changing that would likely require a very strong incentive, and chatter does not amount to one.
Looks like he's just talking about how users that start flame wars around the contentious topic of the day will forget about it soon and move on to the next topic. Even if you disagree with him in regards to the topic that was posted on, I don't see how anyone can honestly misinterpret that badly enough to think he's describing HN as a whole.
Thanks for existing, HN! And thanks to everyone that makes it awesome. My no. 1 stop on the interwebz for going on 10 years now. Please keep being the only not-s** online community left standing.
I’d suggest more specialization to reflect that some domains have materially different execution models, evolutionary timelines, and product playbooks when done optimally. There is some of this but it feels like there is often a tacit default model that every startup is social media, simple SaaS business, or similar and is biased toward what works in those domains. There are VCs that specialize in less conventional startup domains but the accelerators that teach people how to quickly and effectively execute some of these domains are limited when generic startup advice no longer applies.
If you are doing hardcore data infrastructure software, some kinds of defense tech, et al the startup building process is sufficiently different that first-time founders would benefit immensely from accelerators that really understand from direct experience what those startups need to do to be successful.
I'd say the only real reasons any founder needs "accelerator"/any kind of VC firm is lack of money and/or domain-specific professional help/mentoring when encountering a problem that seems to be too hard to overcome by yourself.
So, ideal accelerator/VC would be one that would want to fund your (ad)venture without taking too much motivation off by having large ownership/control, and have connections/pool of domain-specific professional expertise. And wants to believe in you.
Also thankful for demonstrating that investors are just lucky humans and there is no secret sauce to all of this. 20 years of YC, nearly the same time frame as the low interest rate policy (started at 2008). The rising tide lifted all boats and thanks to social media we can also see the magic go away in real time.
Happy Birthday! I'm happy to be a part of this community - it's the only real place nowadays on the Internet outside some financial forums where you can really chat with founders, startups, and see the converge of business and tech!
It seems the first few batches of YC were VERY successful. But, the number of successful YC companies I can think of from the last 10 years of batches is very minimal despite them investing in thousands of companies.
Makes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype wise).
Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
I'm always surprised people just seem to discount timing.
The mid/late 00s came with the rise of "Web 2.0" and mobile that was a gigantic technological shakeup, and YC was definitely in "the right place at the right time", and their Web 1.0 pedigree and expertise transitioned perfectly to these new technologies. Importantly, these technologies required relatively little capital for new startups because all the infrastructure in terms on the Internet, GPS, mobile, etc. had already been built.
I'd just argue that in the past 10 years there simply hasn't been nearly the "greenfield" tech landscape that existed in the mid 00s. AI obviously has been a tech sea change, but so far the contours of that change just look much harder to monetize. The frontier models are becoming more and more commoditized, and everyone else is just trying to figure out how not to get shoehorned as "just an OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper". Looks like there may be some winners that are really putting all pieces together in an attractive package (Cursor and Glean come to mind), and it's fair to wonder why YC doesn't have one of these "AI app winners" (and maybe they do, or will, I don't know), but in general, I think there is just nothing like the opportunity there was in the late 00s/early 10s to gobble up a big part of the new tech landscape.
Or that most of the largest opportunities have been filled and newer companies are aiming at much smaller niches, or to be alternatives to well-established competitors.
Also, in 2005 there wasn't that much of an acquisition ecosystem. I feel like fewer founders back then actually thought about getting acquired and instead shot for building big companies.
You had to go big or your thing would fail, whereas nowadays you can fill a tiny niche and get rich by being acquired by the incumbent you're a complement to.
The era of "any promising startup gets swallowed by big tech" seems over with antitrust, but M&A is still happening.
Companies take time to become successful, so the verdict is still out on most of the companies that started in the last 10 years. Time will tell.
Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top companies")
I believe median time to unicorn status is now about 7 years, so this is not as uncertain as you think. In other words, 50% of YC's 7-year old unicorns have already showed up. The number is higher for older companies.
Yes, but average time to unicorn status has been increasing since the time of Dropbox and Airbnb. I assume you can draw more inferences from companies that are earlier-stage, too.
Just looking at how most have done since going public , most VC backed companies including YC are just exiting and finding the “bigger fool”. YC has done phenomenal for itself. For the public that bought at IPO - not so much.
If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of the S&P500!
14 of the 17 companies lost money for the investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO value.
Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500 benchmark
Of course? On average, companies that are still standing after ~15 to 20 years are going to be a lot larger than the companies who started more recently.
> Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
Most of their recent communication is going all in on AI. Saying stuff like this batch prefers hiring devs that use AI, and 95% of their codebases are all AI generated.
It's because every market inefficiency eventually disappears as entrepreneurs capitalize on it. It's like there's an optimal architecture for the economy at a given technology level, and the job of the entrepreneur is to find that architecture and refactor the economy, piece by piece. And if they're successful, they get to take everything of value in the old, obsolete parts of the economy that get destroyed.
When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for disruption.
Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and less successful. The big successes already happened. I could see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999 entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3 technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he was totally on point.)
Wow, there's so few solo founders, and so few non-US companies. I bet nowadays, there's very few non-AI companies. So if you aren't a US-based AI-startup with multiple founders, perhaps ycombinator is not for you.
YC has a known bias towards multiple founders. They accept solo founders, but solos have to stand out more or maybe already started their business. YC even provides a co-founder matching system (of unknown efficacy).
PG said "Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be."
These are two well-known biases of YC. I believe the reasons are the following:
* YC founders are usually very young, and young people can be capricious. They don't want a solo founder just deciding to do something without a second founder having some leverage to protect YC.
* YC is in the US and has a very pro-US perspective, so they invest in what they know and like.
If you have a cofounder it forces you to get in the habit of delegating really early on. Prolific solo founders like pieter levels just do everything themselves, which is great for their ego but not enough to build a venture scale business.
They have a disproven ability to find people and rally them around a common cause though. Whether it's due to their personality or the idea or some other thing like timing, the inability to find a co-founder could be considered signal, for some.
Ya that is my fear. Just like the whole crypto dominated batches. My fear is Garry Tan is leading YC and he falls for every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing.
> he falls for every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing
Isn't this what an early-stage VC firm is supposed to be doing? Lots of investments in companies working in whatever the hot new tech may be. Most companies lose, some break even, one wins so big you forget about the rest.
High risk, high reward, high volume is always how I thought of a firm like YC. And one expects a lot of investments to evaporate to nothing for such an industry.
C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place."
EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely massive wins that they have yet to (and shouldn't expect to!) replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.
Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it actually due to YC selecting so well.
Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article and a few social media posts.
But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for a few people.
=
Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity infrastructure company.
That’s… fair, I guess. Both are majority controlled by MANGA, but they are indeed new companies. That’s kinda illuminating: it takes the breakthrough of the century to establish a new name these days, and even then you’ll probably end up selling slices of yourself to the giants.
I do think YC has become chasers of the latest trend rather than creating the trend. That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.
Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing.
Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care.
I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a passion.
I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that YC has not had a success for a very long time.
It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen to the tech industry.
Well it’s a function of those that apply and are accepted, and pitches are going to reflect the current hype. YC occasionally puts out a call for applications in areas they think are interesting but perhaps they haven’t seen many compelling pitches for. Have they recently put out a call for specific areas of interest?
Except now their call for startups are focusing on tech solutions (use LLMS to do x), instead of focusing on problems that need solving. They're now doing exactly what they've railed against, solutions in search of problems
> That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.
Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums.
All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky, made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same way on AOL 15 years before.
Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an existing idea or resell polished turds as new.
and before that, there were literal community message boards. corkboard at the grocery store. people gossiped before there was Facebook. the only real innovation was going from verbal communication to the written word, but now with TikTok, we're back at verbal communication, just with a lot of extra steps. there's no other innovation that's happened in the world since writing, isn't there?
Been and enjoyed HN since the launch of Justin.tv ... 2006 / 2007.
This exact username Ive used on and off from 2007 to 2013/2014 then solely since then. My karma is low for such an account but my thoughts are odd lol ..i guess
In 2008, I transferred schools and moved to San Francisco with just $600 and a dream. Soon after, I started my first design agency, Badaboom Labs, hiring my college roommate and friends. With no company formation experience, I had no idea how to get clients either, so I walked to every coffee shop in the city, hoping to land my first gig.
My break came at The Creamery in SoMa. They were still remodeling, but I was determined to talk to the owner (shoutout to Ivory if you're reading this!). Eventually, they became our first client, then Vans. Back then, Squarespace, Stripe, and Shopify didn’t exist, so I hired developers off Craigslist to build the e-commerce side. Looking back, the opportunities were endless in building software!
We barely made any profit, but we had our first client and were building something real. At the time, I was more focused on building with a team than understanding customers. I knew little about scaling or growth, but I just needed to start—and learn as I went.
As the team moved on, I sold the business to a small print shop. That experience led me to experiment with new ideas, but my limited technical skills slowed me down. I knew I needed to level up, so I worked at startups, then moved into SAP & Apple—but corporate life wasn’t for me. I learned what I could, then quit.
The YC Journey
Around that time, I started meeting founders from YC through mutual friends and our soccer club in the Mission. I didn't understand what YC was exactly, but I was intrigued.
Some of them lived in a hacker house on Howard & Rausch St. in SoMa, where I remember meeting Justin Kan, Drew Houston, and Brian Chesky for the first time. Twitch didn’t exist yet, Dropbox was still new, and Airbnb was struggling with growth.
Imagine if I invested in just one of these companies. holy cow.
It was a defining era, but at the time, I had no idea just how much these companies would shape the future—honestly, I don’t think anyone did. I was simply inspired by the energy, the community, and the drive to build something great!
That’s when I decided to apply to YC with my third company, RecurPal
I was rejected multiple times..
But I kept pushing.
Then, YC opened up applications to their second program. I applied, interviewed, and got in.
Shoutouts + Gratitude
I’m super grateful for the mentors, friends, and investors who shaped my journey:
Jude Gomila (always believing in me & taking a chance), Anton(wisdom + friendship!), AJ Asver(former co-founder & friendship), Immad Akhund (support + friendship), Roger Dickey (building epic community at Greenwich Castle), David Langer (wisdom + friendship!), Sumon Sadhu, Dilan Dane(my first Burning Man Project), Gustaf Alströmer ( footy teammate + friendship), Keith Rabois, and many more!
Lastly, thanks to Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, and the YC Community.
Excited to see YC continue shaping the future and fueling the next generation of founders!
I sometimes forget that this is a venture capitalist website with a weirdly computer science name. Okay fine. You can have this one day, main YC website.
It really is the strangest community. Clearly an ex-slashdot flavor to it like free the penguins and then someone will make a comment that right-to-repair "increases costs and reduces profitability" and shouldn't be allowed. I don't think these people would naturally have a beer together.
I used to look up to YCombinator, but now I am disappointed in the role YCombinator played in platforming anti-democratic figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, etc. who espouse scientific racism and eugenics with their obsession of race-based IQ levels and their desire for European whites to dominate over others. Big Tech's disruption model is not good for stability and notions of tolerance and decency. Happy 20th Birthday I guess.
We're getting complaints from users that your comments are LLM-generated. Of course it's hard to say for sure, but if they are (in whole or part), please stop. Generated comments aren't allowed here; HN is for human conversation.
What you have identified is nurturing tech development and this has become easier. But more complex tech development should now be the next focal point of incubators. And this means founders who have more speciality in the work they do.
There is still a gap that needs fulfilling. YC is one player who can fulfill it. Late-stage startup development is a business structuring problem and the biggest blank slate for new founders. From term sheets to understanding convertible debt to navigating VC maze.
HN is increasingly a significant participant in current US politics. Attempting to pretend otherwise really doesn't work.
HN has a policy of moderating discussions of YC companies less than other threads (and yes, "less" != "not at all"). There's a strong argument that a similar policy should apply to HN-adjacent politics and political acts.
Posting to what was once called Twitter today is an increasingly political act. and a strongly anti-democratic one. Yang (as evidenced by his Wikipedia bio) is a political actor.
HN is the media arm of a venture fund with a portfolio nearing a trillion dollars, as mentioned prominently in TFA.
If you want to talk size, the US House has 438 members, the Senate 100, the Supreme court 9. Their significance has nothing to do with size and everything to do with position, connections, and capacity.
Unfortunately, politics is everywhere where there is more than one person and something to divide, and America is the most politicized country in the world where everything is highly regulated by laws, because the laws are strictly enforced. Politicians fight for power = control over people's lives and that’s how money and the economy are created, so everything becomes secondary to politics. If the world’s politicians would unite and stop wars and do everything for the humanity, we would have hundreds and thousands of better YCs across the planet. But until that happens, it’s better to sell a startup to politicians for big money. For now, we have the only wonder of the world, YC in the USA which is the best, as long as this forum hasn’t closed, IMHO.
Garry Tan and the rest of YC leadership are 100% aligned with Musk's goal of crashing the American economy so they can subjugate labor and buy assets cheap. It can't be a surprise they post on X.
HN has always been a curated/moderated site. I'm not really sure what "censor" means other than that, at least in the context of an internet forum like HN.
We basically moderate posts that break the site guidelines (the ones that we see, at least).
Is there a particular post that you feel was censored that should not have been? I'd be interested to take a look.
Why did they post on X? Most of the people on there probably think HN is a Soros front. Also, why does it say twitter.com and not x.com? Would have been better just to post a link from their blog.
HN's software rewrites URLs back to twitter.com for two reasons: (1) people still call it Twitter colloquially, which is the real measure of what a thing is called; and (2) anything else feels weird.
I worked with pg in a three-person startup in a basement in Harvard square just before he started YC. I was an undergrad at MIT and met him after arguing with rtm (who was a TA for my class) about TCP backoff. It was called Aspra and we were trying to build an app development platform for mobile phones. The idea was that you could build an application that could "render" to either an IVR system, for dumb phones, or the kind of web page that a Motorola "smartphone" of the day could view. Ahead of its time, like Paul. It didn't go far, and not long after he started YC. Good thing he did, for the industry and many of the folks here! Anyway, the "20 years" got my attention because I didn't feel that old, and thought someone might like the little story.
So myself and 3 others worked for Intuit and we traveled, from Mountain View CA, to your tiny office near Harvard to look at acquiring the company. I believe Intuit made a lowball offer and eventually you sold yourselves to Yahoo for twice the price. At Intuit we did not offer you guys money for the product, it really was not that special at all, but for the people—I thought only 3 folks at the time? I don’t think we actually talked to Paul that day but I remember Trever well and the tiny ‘server’ room.
It possible we may have met you too. It was a long time ago.
Wow! I've read all the essays and thought I knew all the startups ideas he had tried by now. This is a new one.
Love this story. Thanks for sharing. I learned about YC/HN via my tools course at Purdue, and it continues to be a great resource.
Also, thanks to @dang for keeping the community in-line with the rules/guidelines.
I wish. But thanks!
My list of "greatest all time community-runners" is pretty short, and I'm having a hard time thinking of anyone I'd put ahead of you.
+1
nah its true, this is one of the few places left on the web thats friendly and thoughtful (most of the time at least). That is directly related to your work keeping things civil. thank you
Hell yeah !
"Founders at Work", written by Jessica is what got me into HN (and I was an initial lurker for quite sometime).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_at_Work
Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched the subsequent year (2007).
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
In case you’re not aware, there is a podcast by Jessica Livingston and Carolyn Levy called “The Social Radars” that interviews founders.
Downloading it now. I didn't know about it. Looks like there are a lot of big names!
Such an inspiring book - I still have it by my desk :) I bought it because they covered Joel's FogBugz and 37Signal's Basecamp (I was building a competitor product back then).
It’s the book that started it all for me. The Hotmail story is one of my favourites.
I remember the initial PG announcement about the founder's summer program and wanting desperately to be a part of it. I wasn't at a place in my life where I ever could join YC but the tribe that's been built by everyone involved has added tremendous value to my life. I'll always be incredibly grateful that this place and YC exists.
HN has been a daily read for last 15 years. Appreciate the information flow.
Incidentally, after years of lurking, applied to the latest YC batch. Didn't make it, but will try again once further along, or with a new idea.
Congratulations YC! I remember prior to HN, pg used to post his essays to Slashdot under the username Bugbear and all the attendant sniping and lame memes that would come back in response. Hacker News was a breath of fresh air and continues to be my favourite online community.
Happy birthday YC! YC has created a ton of value, and I can say is responsible for the major inflection point in my career. I'm forever grateful to Paul, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor for seeing the value in the reddit team before anyone else did.
Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 is always fun to look at, 18.5 years ago.
1 indexed?
Edit: HN is apparently written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp.
Almost all DBs have a default starting ID of 1.
Indeed, though HN didn't use a database when it was first built.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515628
Fun there's enough posts in HN you could type your DOB (no leading zero) and find a submission for it:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52590
There are actually enough that you can type your DOB in the format YYYYMMDD and find a submission for it!
This has been true since https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=20190615 was posted on June 15, 2019.
It took me a moment to think through what a leading zero on a DOB meant and that it wasn't a Long Now foundation thing.
52950
What format of DOB is that? M/DD/YY?
Or possibly a Julian date for a first-millennial.
Huh. I upvoted it.
[I guess the tweet refers to YC the incubator, not the web site of news, but I want to focus on the latter]: I registered on HN a few days after it was created. The HN community was incredibly instrumental to my career, my ability to keep up with the development community, with like-minded people, and to have a voice, the times my posts and projects reached this home page. Thank you, for for all of that. Now, I see that, inevitably, as this place becomes bigger and bigger, there is no longer that strange, odd and wonderful "90s News Groups" alike quality. Despite the decline, I still find quite some value visiting this place every day.
Agreed. HN was how I learned about tech growing up in poverty (back when I used to think Googlers all wore lab coats!) and gave me the inspiration to both study CS and pursue the career I was lucky enough to end up in. The bigger HN gets the more it has qualities I don't really like, but it's also the last text platform I consume without curation on my part. (I know dang and the mod team do a heroic job, but I do very little curation of my own here, unlike Bluesky, X, or Discord where I do a lot of things to keep my feeds/channels useful to me.)
I agree. For me though it was only when slashdot started to shrink that I heard about HN, so I was a bit late to the party. To be fair, I still check slashdot almost daily!
ciao
I still use newsgroups (NNTP) and IRC everyday, hackernews is pretty good considered it's HTTP based
https, if we're goin oldskool
YC changed my life, and I'll be forever grateful to PG, Jessica, and the team for taking a chance on a homeschooled, GED-wielding solo founder.
It's really good to read those stories.
I applied twice (once alone, once with a really amazing co-founder) and it felt like applying to a large faceless corporation, both times.
Automatic rejection after 30 days with zero feedback.
Kind of sucky, to be honest.
I'd just love to hear that the idea was shit, the application was shit, that my face was ugly, or anything, really.
Probably hard to give valuable feedback on tens of thousands of rejected applications.
Quick bump for The Social Radars which is an amazing podcast co-led by Jessica. A treasure trove of true startup stories.
I keep forgetting there's a front page to this website. What a cool story!
There's going to be a lot of "the big successes already happened" type comments about YC but I think they're wrong.
Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship & web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe, or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important ways, but huge successes will surely happen.
When YC started, people were saying literally the same thing; the dotcom bust had already happened, and the era of big internet companies was 'dead.'
As usual, the death of entrepreneurship and startups has been greatly overstated. :)
Doesn’t YC still predominantly fund young men who aren’t at all industry experts in some mature field? It appears like the majority of startups I see are “AI for X” type applications.
I think this is more a reflection of the applicant pool. It's easier to put together a team when folks are early in their careers - also if you've been in industry for some time you might know VCs and are already an 'insider' to that industry
The business is built on the fact that young founders have an extra 10-15 years to learn everything compared to older ones. I think this will soon change when older people start rejuvenating and extending their lives. Also, it's just a trend like TikTok and startups founded by 25-year-olds sell better. Given the startup maturation cycle of 7-10 years, the founder will be 32-35 yo and they'll need another 10 years to present a success story for the system to work
I‘m not so sure YC is really targeting industry experts in their fields who are doing startups, or?
HN is the only internet community I’ve found to be largely good. Thank you to everyone for all your kind posts and comments, and intellectual discussion. Love to you all.
It’s the only place where you can causally talk to multi millionaire startup founders and CS legends.
It’s also amazingly inclusive. There was a poster here who complained that they were effectively homeless and upset their Pixel phone would no longer hold a charge. Someone offered to send them a used laptop.
I think we thoughtfully discuss issues related to tech, even though we don’t always agree.
Agreed. Thank you to all for the endless curious discussion.
It's a good community. The part I struggle with is the anti-science trend I've seen here over the last 10 years.
For me, it's the politics. There's a certain kind of user that keeps pushing them here, to people who don't care about them, and which are barely related to technology if even. If you point it out, they will say "everything is political"...
Space isn't political!
https://youtu.be/g1Sq1Nr58hM?si=ZyRYleQAfTe3PJMX
[flagged]
I feel like this is kind of pedantic - if your definition of the word "political" renders their point moot, then clearly they must be using a different definition.
But I understand what you mean. The problem is that 99% of online discussions about politics are not about how it relates to anything else. They are usually the same 5 conversations rehashed over and over again. And for some reason, they are aggressively derailed in that direction.
I like it enough to keep coming back, but lobste.rs is slightly preferable in my experience; more goodwill/less pedantry, and less Trumpelon apologism.
(If you are gearing up to reply to the last three words of the previous paragraph, I can promise you I'm not interested in hearing it. You have your preferences and priorities, and I have mine)
Thanks for the lobsters link. May I request an invite?
By all means! Email's in my bio.
I found that lobste.rs had a much narrower range of views on every topic. And the intolerance of other views is presented far less eloquently than here. People just get hard downvoted or banned. Not just the obvious political ones but technical views too: dynamic typing is rubbish, cryptocurrency is rubbish, etc
Started reading HN nine years ago, when I screwed up my third startup the year before, was devastated, and needed some inspiration. And among the shared news were stories that inspired me again, that made me come back to this site every single day ever since. I like the cultivated discussions, like the things I learn about, and I feel like I never miss any tech trend. Excellent community. Love it.
Thank you PG, thank you Dang! Thank you to all the contributors for the high quality content.
> I screwed up my third startup
You're half way there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42771676
You only discovered HN after your 3rd startup? :p
what happened next!?
Jessica is my hero. Paul is a guiding force.
Every effort has some defect but it’s intention and effort which matters.
World would be a very different place without YC.
Thank you all !
Did Stilgar write this
Haha wow, good one
Looks like the Dune show even introduces a YC:
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Ynez_Corrino
Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search engine.
>> but it’s intention and effort which matters.
I think I understand what you're saying, but this is a very dangerous generality. I think the HOW matters more than the intent.
The idea here, AFAICT, is that the right intention matters even if the implementation is lacking and imperfect. If the intention is there, the implementation will improve.
The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then the intentions would include doing an evil thing as an intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention does matter.
Intent is the only thing that ever really matters.
HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.
I love the near-non-BS nature of it. And even though the techland changes, HN itself has had very little change, so it acts somewhat safe stable ground/forum/club for observing the ever changing techland. Although I recognize there is somewhat minimal degration in comment quality (less professional pragmatic comments over the years, at least so I feel), it still trumps every other alternative there is.
So, thank you PG/HN, and of course the HN community that makes most of it.
PS. I have been read-only mode for the past ~15y (and there was nothing valuable for me to comment on anything), but now I created account and this is my first comment :)
> HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the ambient and relevant view of the techland.
I bet a lot of people here would say the same thing about Slashdot ten to fifteen years ago. @HN: Thanks and please don't change.
HN has outlasted Slashdot by a wide margin at this point.
IIRC, Slashdot stopped being great around the same time as the decline of the Digg era. It started to sink in quality around 2007, which gave it ten years at most of being a central part of the online tech community (1997 - 2007).
I started reading HN in 2008. It's lasted nearly twenty years as an incredible community.
Here are some graphs:
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/01/slashdot-fail.html
LOL thanks for the link!
You visit every day for 15 years and never left a comment? That's kinda crazy. It makes me wonder if this is actually common and we don't realize.
I'm at ~19 years - HN as daily home page since inception :)
Before HN, I used to hang out on Joel on Software and Eric's Business of Software forums; I occasionally used to post there and here but lost old accounts. If you have friends who have friends who has HN archeology skills and access, maybe I can recover my old account :)
We can try to dig up your old account if you want! You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, or if you want to "do it live", post here and we can ask for the community's help if needed.
Thank you so much! Sent an email :)
Alas we didn't make it work. I was all ready to gloat over recovering your old account for you—probably got too confident about it. Hopefully some other information will resurface and we'll get it done another day.
Thank you for all your efforts and immediate attention, sorry that I couldn't make your job easier. What mattered the most was that I got a chance to have a brief chat with the actual human being behind the legendary HN username that makes everything run smoothly. Cheers, Daniel!
Needs more cocaine and angry jacket throwing, lol ;-)
Oh man I used to hang out on Joel on Software as well. Good times.
I remember reading a stat on reddit that 10% of users upvote and 1% of users comment. So if my memory is (near) accurate, that's very common behavior.
The 90-9-1 rule, which is common across many mass-participation media modalities, not just online.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=90-9-1_rule>
I have plenty of semi-technical friends that do this. Some of them only look at the links (e.g. via social media bots), and aren't even aware that HN has comments.
They're the kind of people who consider themselves "tech enthusiasts", they can install a nifty tool via pip if the instructions are clear enough, maybe even figure out what's wrong if there's an error, but they're definitely not programmers by any means.
Quite a few of them speak "tech English"; they can figure out a settings window or a signup form, they know enough tech vocabulary and basic grammar to mostly understand manuals, maybe with some help here or there, and can barely string an English sentence together. Ask them to define "lettuce" or "salmon" and they're lost.
Everyone is an expert in their own activity. If they have something insightful to say (or to ask) one trick is to write the comment in their native language and use autotranslation (double check technical words, because sometimes autotranslation picks the wrong synonym) (also check the output, because if the original has a one letter typo, sometimes it's translated to a very different word).
Another possibility is to write the comment in English inside gmail, and let suggestion gmail fix all the errors.
Very common. I was a daily reader of Slashdot for ten years without ever creating an account. Took me only five to create one for HN :)
Probably. I created my account almost 13 years ago, but I read for years before creating it. I didn't create a reddit account until 2014, or a twitter account until 2015. I was reading Slashdot in the 90's though, to give you a sense of my age and how long I've been following stuff. I'm just a very late adopter...
Absolutely. Some of us see (or at least I see) the level of discussion and feel it would be hard for me to say something worthwhile that sounds kinda smart. So I mostly lurk while being grateful for those who do write incredibly insightful comments.
If you comment once on HN you are easily in the top 5% of users by comment count.
This thread made me finally make an account after at least 5+ years reading through the top 30 nearly everyday :)
Welcome
Same here. I have been reading this site for 10 years and even though it got a bit worse, it's still the best source out there. Keep it up everyone.
I thank dang for putting up with me.
I confess.
... with all of us.
Happy Birthday, YC! I've been a regular participant in the HN community since 2012. All these years HN has inspired me and during this time I've learned a lot. I started back in the days of building FIDO, when the first point networks appeared. Of course, I’d love to see more communities and fewer bots, but progress is unstoppable. I wish the HN community to thrive and remain strong for many years to come.
I'm creating a mobile reader (iOS app) specifically for HN and if you want to join to speed up the process, you're Welcome!
https://www.acpul.org/blog/yc-happy-birthday-20
For those who don't have iOS, I started a Twitch stream for the vibe.
https://www.twitch.tv/guynpc
PS: I fear that I’ll never get into YC and in the future there will be no more startups, only an AI, and I’ll have to work as a battery cell in the Matrix.
Hacker News is just 19 years old? I remember my professor at university mentioning it when I told him I am using .net for my project. According to him I should use OS language like Java and recommended me to HN. I thought it is much older. Time flies.
I wonder if he is raeading HN still...
Y Combinator is 19 years old. Hacker News was launched in February 2007, so it just turned 18.
For the longest time I thought Hacker News must have been some proof of concept for Reddit and must pre-date it, which is not true. Reddit was launched in June 2005, shortly after Y Combinator.
As I remember it HN was initially a “response” to Reddit written in Arc, as by that point Reddit had already become focused on politics and some other more general stuff and had left its programming focus behind. HN was meant to fill that gap, with the important addition of the “entrepreneurial” / start-up business mambo-jambo behind which I could never get, but there were a lot more people that did get it seriously back then and which now have a lot more assets than people like me (didn’t care about start-ups, we were in here only for the programming stuff) now happen to posses. Lesson learned, I guess.
Happy birthday, YC!
There isn’t a website on the internet that I’ve learned more from than this one.
Thank you.
While I've never worked with YC directly (though have lots of friends who have been involved with YC in one way or another), I found HN during the pandemic and it has been my favorite place on the internet ever since. I have learned so much from this community, across so many different disciplines. I truly cherish the community we have here and I thank Dang, PG and others for maintaining this gem in a hidden corner of the internet. And while I agree there have been some changes even in the time I've been a part of the site, it's still the best online group of people I've ever come across. Thank you also to all of you who make this such a great, informative, inclusive community.
Who else applied to YC 15 times and never got an interview?
Just out of curiosity, what did you apply with?
Happy birthday and thank you!
Eternally grateful to PG and Jessica.
I wonder when it's HN birthday.
This community provides the most informational value to me. Thank you people and long live.
My HN account is 18 years old. Still no successful businesses to speak of after a few attempts. Have started an NGO instead to promote better urban planning and design.
HN has been an outstanding corner of the Internet, seemingly invulnerable to all the trash that has consumed the rest. I'd love to know how HN has avoided the bots and the spam, while retaining a simple and elegant login process.
dang is an amazing moderator
Nah, he's become a cynic. dang thinks Hacker News is a "swamp of amnesia". It's not a great attitude.
That reflects well on his communication skills; 'Swamp of Amnesia' is a less hackneyed phrase than 'Eternal September'
No, he thinks things don't matter because no one will remember them. He's wrong.
Dan's moderation practices are viewable via his comment history*. They align well with my preferences, but, with a little imagination, I can see how some people wouldn't like them. One person's idea of good moderation is another person's terrible moderation.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
You're not seeing everything he does. For example, he removes capabilities from people's accounts and he can't remember why he did it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42917749
He says he likes things to be "informal" by which he really means "opaque".
HN is a very particular public digital garden and @dang is a gardener doing his gardening stuff, just wondering what is your purpose here if you don't mind sharing?
By informal I do not mean opaque. What I mean is that anyone is welcome to ask questions about HN and we're happy to answer them.
What we don't do is try to answer all the questions in advance. That's for several reasons, the first of which is that it's impossible.
But you're not willing to be upfront by including that information on the user's account.
That's opaque.
No, that's formal. Formal systems that purport to answer all questions in advance are a bureaucratic bane, and as long as I'm in charge of HN, we won't go there. I'm confident that the community feels the same way as well.
If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.
Dude, you're leaving people guessing. That's no good. That is not nice "informality".
I don't like tone policing in general, but be nice to dang. He has earned that courtesy, at least.
I don't think it's a good idea to complain publicly about the moderation regime here. To me it seems dang and whoever else has thought things through and made reasonable decisions based on, among other considerations, the amount of labour they have at their disposal. Changing that would likely require a very strong incentive, and chatter does not amount to one.
For those curious about the source: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43097876>
Looks like he's just talking about how users that start flame wars around the contentious topic of the day will forget about it soon and move on to the next topic. Even if you disagree with him in regards to the topic that was posted on, I don't see how anyone can honestly misinterpret that badly enough to think he's describing HN as a whole.
A benevolent dictator.
indeed
[dead]
Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator
Thanks PG, and daang. HN got me my first real job in security.
Thanks for existing, HN! And thanks to everyone that makes it awesome. My no. 1 stop on the interwebz for going on 10 years now. Please keep being the only not-s** online community left standing.
Been here since day 1, I was already semi-following PG because of his writing on Lisp.
Founders - what would the ideal accelerator (or call it what you like) look like today?
I’d suggest more specialization to reflect that some domains have materially different execution models, evolutionary timelines, and product playbooks when done optimally. There is some of this but it feels like there is often a tacit default model that every startup is social media, simple SaaS business, or similar and is biased toward what works in those domains. There are VCs that specialize in less conventional startup domains but the accelerators that teach people how to quickly and effectively execute some of these domains are limited when generic startup advice no longer applies.
If you are doing hardcore data infrastructure software, some kinds of defense tech, et al the startup building process is sufficiently different that first-time founders would benefit immensely from accelerators that really understand from direct experience what those startups need to do to be successful.
I'd say the only real reasons any founder needs "accelerator"/any kind of VC firm is lack of money and/or domain-specific professional help/mentoring when encountering a problem that seems to be too hard to overcome by yourself.
So, ideal accelerator/VC would be one that would want to fund your (ad)venture without taking too much motivation off by having large ownership/control, and have connections/pool of domain-specific professional expertise. And wants to believe in you.
Thank you to PG and dang. I reckon this is one of the best places on the Internet.
Thank you everyone. I come here to learn and I do. The standard of discourse is heightening.
You're amazing
Thankful for this nice community.
Also thankful for demonstrating that investors are just lucky humans and there is no secret sauce to all of this. 20 years of YC, nearly the same time frame as the low interest rate policy (started at 2008). The rising tide lifted all boats and thanks to social media we can also see the magic go away in real time.
Happy birthday YC!
Appreciate this community. HBD Y!
Long live Y Combinator, the source of endless inspiration and innovation.
YC built the culture of the valley, community and startups <3
Thanks for making HN, the best forum since the old slashdot. Thanks for moderating it for us, dang.
Happy Birthday! I'm happy to be a part of this community - it's the only real place nowadays on the Internet outside some financial forums where you can really chat with founders, startups, and see the converge of business and tech!
Happy birthday and thank you! I am really lucky to find this community.
It seems the first few batches of YC were VERY successful. But, the number of successful YC companies I can think of from the last 10 years of batches is very minimal despite them investing in thousands of companies.
Makes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype wise).
Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
I'm always surprised people just seem to discount timing.
The mid/late 00s came with the rise of "Web 2.0" and mobile that was a gigantic technological shakeup, and YC was definitely in "the right place at the right time", and their Web 1.0 pedigree and expertise transitioned perfectly to these new technologies. Importantly, these technologies required relatively little capital for new startups because all the infrastructure in terms on the Internet, GPS, mobile, etc. had already been built.
I'd just argue that in the past 10 years there simply hasn't been nearly the "greenfield" tech landscape that existed in the mid 00s. AI obviously has been a tech sea change, but so far the contours of that change just look much harder to monetize. The frontier models are becoming more and more commoditized, and everyone else is just trying to figure out how not to get shoehorned as "just an OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper". Looks like there may be some winners that are really putting all pieces together in an attractive package (Cursor and Glean come to mind), and it's fair to wonder why YC doesn't have one of these "AI app winners" (and maybe they do, or will, I don't know), but in general, I think there is just nothing like the opportunity there was in the late 00s/early 10s to gobble up a big part of the new tech landscape.
There are many factors (YC needs to allocate more capital, not founder-led anymore, needs to fill more batches...) etc.
But another one is that the first batch has had 20 years to grow and compound while the rest has had less time to become massive.
I'm not saying YC is perfect now (though it's still great). But I think a simple factor could just be time for many portcos.
Agreed, to compare you would have to not just look at current magnitude but rather compare the historical trajectories of growth
Or that most of the largest opportunities have been filled and newer companies are aiming at much smaller niches, or to be alternatives to well-established competitors.
Also, in 2005 there wasn't that much of an acquisition ecosystem. I feel like fewer founders back then actually thought about getting acquired and instead shot for building big companies.
You had to go big or your thing would fail, whereas nowadays you can fill a tiny niche and get rich by being acquired by the incumbent you're a complement to.
The era of "any promising startup gets swallowed by big tech" seems over with antitrust, but M&A is still happening.
Companies take time to become successful, so the verdict is still out on most of the companies that started in the last 10 years. Time will tell.
Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top companies")
I believe median time to unicorn status is now about 7 years, so this is not as uncertain as you think. In other words, 50% of YC's 7-year old unicorns have already showed up. The number is higher for older companies.
Dropbox and Airbnb were superhot companies within 2 or 3 years after YC. My first Airbnb booking was in 2013, and that I felt like a late adopter.
Yes, but average time to unicorn status has been increasing since the time of Dropbox and Airbnb. I assume you can draw more inferences from companies that are earlier-stage, too.
If you read their tweets, YC's message is that their companies are growing faster than ever
Just looking at how most have done since going public , most VC backed companies including YC are just exiting and finding the “bigger fool”. YC has done phenomenal for itself. For the public that bought at IPO - not so much.
https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report
If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of the S&P500! 14 of the 17 companies lost money for the investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO value. Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500 benchmark
Of course? On average, companies that are still standing after ~15 to 20 years are going to be a lot larger than the companies who started more recently.
The alternative is that it takes x > 10 years to become very successful. But that seems somewhat doubtful.
Well Dropbox (ycs first big success?) was founded in 2007 and only went public in 2018
Reddit (yc 2005) only went public last year
I know "going public" doesn't define success, but it does show that companies can still be growing after 10+ years
> Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
Most of their recent communication is going all in on AI. Saying stuff like this batch prefers hiring devs that use AI, and 95% of their codebases are all AI generated.
It's because every market inefficiency eventually disappears as entrepreneurs capitalize on it. It's like there's an optimal architecture for the economy at a given technology level, and the job of the entrepreneur is to find that architecture and refactor the economy, piece by piece. And if they're successful, they get to take everything of value in the old, obsolete parts of the economy that get destroyed.
When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for disruption.
Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and less successful. The big successes already happened. I could see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999 entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3 technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he was totally on point.)
You might find this blogpost eye opening: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pulling-back-the-curtain-...
Wow, there's so few solo founders, and so few non-US companies. I bet nowadays, there's very few non-AI companies. So if you aren't a US-based AI-startup with multiple founders, perhaps ycombinator is not for you.
YC has a known bias towards multiple founders. They accept solo founders, but solos have to stand out more or maybe already started their business. YC even provides a co-founder matching system (of unknown efficacy).
PG said "Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be."
Also see: Does YC fund solo founders: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/7P-does-yc-fund-solo-fou...
These are two well-known biases of YC. I believe the reasons are the following:
* YC founders are usually very young, and young people can be capricious. They don't want a solo founder just deciding to do something without a second founder having some leverage to protect YC.
* YC is in the US and has a very pro-US perspective, so they invest in what they know and like.
Non US companies — but many non-US founders. It’s much better to be a U.S. startup than in most other places.
https://capbase.com/why-european-startups-register-in-us/
If you have a cofounder it forces you to get in the habit of delegating really early on. Prolific solo founders like pieter levels just do everything themselves, which is great for their ego but not enough to build a venture scale business.
Solo founders can have employees.
They have a disproven ability to find people and rally them around a common cause though. Whether it's due to their personality or the idea or some other thing like timing, the inability to find a co-founder could be considered signal, for some.
I think all the recent AI slop dominated batches will be their downfall in 2-3 years time when they all become junk and the AI-hype is over.
Ya that is my fear. Just like the whole crypto dominated batches. My fear is Garry Tan is leading YC and he falls for every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing.
> he falls for every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing
Isn't this what an early-stage VC firm is supposed to be doing? Lots of investments in companies working in whatever the hot new tech may be. Most companies lose, some break even, one wins so big you forget about the rest.
High risk, high reward, high volume is always how I thought of a firm like YC. And one expects a lot of investments to evaporate to nothing for such an industry.
Yep, since Garry took over YC has fallen off drastically in my opinion
A) Very true!
B) peaked* :)
C) Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist, but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first place."
EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post: https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a... The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely massive wins that they have yet to (and shouldn't expect to!) replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.
Yeah it's a good question to ask:
Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it actually due to YC selecting so well.
Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article and a few social media posts.
But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for a few people.
= Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity infrastructure company.
yeah. That YC hasn't produced another Google or made a Facebook should in no way mean it's an utter failure.
> Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?
OpenAI and Anthropic come to mind
That’s… fair, I guess. Both are majority controlled by MANGA, but they are indeed new companies. That’s kinda illuminating: it takes the breakthrough of the century to establish a new name these days, and even then you’ll probably end up selling slices of yourself to the giants.
Neither are profitable.
10 years, not weeks.
> tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?
Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak, Marshmallow.
Discord is cool! Anduril is both evil and overvalued. The rest… I mean, I think the names speak for themselves ;)
what do their names say to you?
I do think YC has become chasers of the latest trend rather than creating the trend. That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.
Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped companies and it really seems that the a-level players are missing.
Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and care.
I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a passion.
I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that YC has not had a success for a very long time.
It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen to the tech industry.
Well it’s a function of those that apply and are accepted, and pitches are going to reflect the current hype. YC occasionally puts out a call for applications in areas they think are interesting but perhaps they haven’t seen many compelling pitches for. Have they recently put out a call for specific areas of interest?
Except now their call for startups are focusing on tech solutions (use LLMS to do x), instead of focusing on problems that need solving. They're now doing exactly what they've railed against, solutions in search of problems
Yeah I think they do it every batch or at least every year. https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
Thanks, I see that one is full of AI, but I notice they are guiding toward specific areas, probably so they don’t get a thousand vague AI pitches
> That is why most of the successes are skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the internet.
Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat forums.
All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky, made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same way on AOL 15 years before.
Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an existing idea or resell polished turds as new.
and before that, there were literal community message boards. corkboard at the grocery store. people gossiped before there was Facebook. the only real innovation was going from verbal communication to the written word, but now with TikTok, we're back at verbal communication, just with a lot of extra steps. there's no other innovation that's happened in the world since writing, isn't there?
I love this community, the only social media worth investing time into. Here's to another 20 years.
Been and enjoyed HN since the launch of Justin.tv ... 2006 / 2007.
This exact username Ive used on and off from 2007 to 2013/2014 then solely since then. My karma is low for such an account but my thoughts are odd lol ..i guess
COOL, maybe update the site now? Just sayin....
Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator!
In 2008, I transferred schools and moved to San Francisco with just $600 and a dream. Soon after, I started my first design agency, Badaboom Labs, hiring my college roommate and friends. With no company formation experience, I had no idea how to get clients either, so I walked to every coffee shop in the city, hoping to land my first gig.
My break came at The Creamery in SoMa. They were still remodeling, but I was determined to talk to the owner (shoutout to Ivory if you're reading this!). Eventually, they became our first client, then Vans. Back then, Squarespace, Stripe, and Shopify didn’t exist, so I hired developers off Craigslist to build the e-commerce side. Looking back, the opportunities were endless in building software!
We barely made any profit, but we had our first client and were building something real. At the time, I was more focused on building with a team than understanding customers. I knew little about scaling or growth, but I just needed to start—and learn as I went.
As the team moved on, I sold the business to a small print shop. That experience led me to experiment with new ideas, but my limited technical skills slowed me down. I knew I needed to level up, so I worked at startups, then moved into SAP & Apple—but corporate life wasn’t for me. I learned what I could, then quit.
The YC Journey
Around that time, I started meeting founders from YC through mutual friends and our soccer club in the Mission. I didn't understand what YC was exactly, but I was intrigued.
Some of them lived in a hacker house on Howard & Rausch St. in SoMa, where I remember meeting Justin Kan, Drew Houston, and Brian Chesky for the first time. Twitch didn’t exist yet, Dropbox was still new, and Airbnb was struggling with growth.
Imagine if I invested in just one of these companies. holy cow.
It was a defining era, but at the time, I had no idea just how much these companies would shape the future—honestly, I don’t think anyone did. I was simply inspired by the energy, the community, and the drive to build something great!
That’s when I decided to apply to YC with my third company, RecurPal
I was rejected multiple times..
But I kept pushing.
Then, YC opened up applications to their second program. I applied, interviewed, and got in.
Shoutouts + Gratitude
I’m super grateful for the mentors, friends, and investors who shaped my journey:
Jude Gomila (always believing in me & taking a chance), Anton(wisdom + friendship!), AJ Asver(former co-founder & friendship), Immad Akhund (support + friendship), Roger Dickey (building epic community at Greenwich Castle), David Langer (wisdom + friendship!), Sumon Sadhu, Dilan Dane(my first Burning Man Project), Gustaf Alströmer ( footy teammate + friendship), Keith Rabois, and many more!
Lastly, thanks to Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, and the YC Community.
Excited to see YC continue shaping the future and fueling the next generation of founders!
and still none of the people in the charge have decreased eyesight for the site to have a more accessible theme. Amazing
Congratulations HN! (And @dang of course).
Can we please add target="_blank" to the links now?
(Seriously, I've got a crisp new $50 bill for whoever takes 30 seconds and slips it into prod. )
why on earth did they not post this directly to HN? who goes to twitter in 2025
HN is cool, the startup factory - meh
YC has been exploiting naive founders for 20 years. Congrats everyone.
I sometimes forget that this is a venture capitalist website with a weirdly computer science name. Okay fine. You can have this one day, main YC website.
It really is the strangest community. Clearly an ex-slashdot flavor to it like free the penguins and then someone will make a comment that right-to-repair "increases costs and reduces profitability" and shouldn't be allowed. I don't think these people would naturally have a beer together.
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He should get a bsky
I used to look up to YCombinator, but now I am disappointed in the role YCombinator played in platforming anti-democratic figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, etc. who espouse scientific racism and eugenics with their obsession of race-based IQ levels and their desire for European whites to dominate over others. Big Tech's disruption model is not good for stability and notions of tolerance and decency. Happy 20th Birthday I guess.
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We're getting complaints from users that your comments are LLM-generated. Of course it's hard to say for sure, but if they are (in whole or part), please stop. Generated comments aren't allowed here; HN is for human conversation.
What you have identified is nurturing tech development and this has become easier. But more complex tech development should now be the next focal point of incubators. And this means founders who have more speciality in the work they do.
There is still a gap that needs fulfilling. YC is one player who can fulfill it. Late-stage startup development is a business structuring problem and the biggest blank slate for new founders. From term sheets to understanding convertible debt to navigating VC maze.
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On Twitter, with all that's going on?
One of the things that makes HN great is that it largely avoids the Current Thing discussion.
There's plenty of places to get into that. Can't we have one that's focused entirely on hacker news and not any political news?
(hmm that's a frequently asked question; I wonder if we should have a list of such things)
If you want to know how we think about this, here's a pointer to a bunch of past explanations:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
HN is increasingly a significant participant in current US politics. Attempting to pretend otherwise really doesn't work.
HN has a policy of moderating discussions of YC companies less than other threads (and yes, "less" != "not at all"). There's a strong argument that a similar policy should apply to HN-adjacent politics and political acts.
Posting to what was once called Twitter today is an increasingly political act. and a strongly anti-democratic one. Yang (as evidenced by his Wikipedia bio) is a political actor.
HN is increasingly a significant participant in current US politics.
HN is about the size of a medium-popular subreddit. Its impact on US politics is not much different than that of /r/relationshipadvice.
HN is the media arm of a venture fund with a portfolio nearing a trillion dollars, as mentioned prominently in TFA.
If you want to talk size, the US House has 438 members, the Senate 100, the Supreme court 9. Their significance has nothing to do with size and everything to do with position, connections, and capacity.
HN punches far above its weight.
Unfortunately, politics is everywhere where there is more than one person and something to divide, and America is the most politicized country in the world where everything is highly regulated by laws, because the laws are strictly enforced. Politicians fight for power = control over people's lives and that’s how money and the economy are created, so everything becomes secondary to politics. If the world’s politicians would unite and stop wars and do everything for the humanity, we would have hundreds and thousands of better YCs across the planet. But until that happens, it’s better to sell a startup to politicians for big money. For now, we have the only wonder of the world, YC in the USA which is the best, as long as this forum hasn’t closed, IMHO.
HN is the media arm of a venture fund
I'm looking at a medium sized nerd messageboard. Obviously that's not a meaningful thing to compare to a legislative body or court.
Garry Tan and the rest of YC leadership are 100% aligned with Musk's goal of crashing the American economy so they can subjugate labor and buy assets cheap. It can't be a surprise they post on X.
Ultimately that will be the legacy of YC.
What’s going on?
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He's a supporter of the genocide in Gaza, so yes.
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Please stop using X If the bar lets Nazi's in, it's a Nazi bar.
Anyone gonna mention Network Cities and the relationship to YC leadership or we just gonna ignore that?
Hey as a 20th birthday gift to the internet, why not stop censoring comments?
HN has always been a curated/moderated site. I'm not really sure what "censor" means other than that, at least in the context of an internet forum like HN.
We basically moderate posts that break the site guidelines (the ones that we see, at least).
Is there a particular post that you feel was censored that should not have been? I'd be interested to take a look.
Why did they post on X? Most of the people on there probably think HN is a Soros front. Also, why does it say twitter.com and not x.com? Would have been better just to post a link from their blog.
> Also, why does it say twitter.com and not x.com
HN's software rewrites URLs back to twitter.com for two reasons: (1) people still call it Twitter colloquially, which is the real measure of what a thing is called; and (2) anything else feels weird.
Thank you for this.