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

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.

Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count from incorporation :) )

Edit: HN is apparently written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3515628

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52590

This has been true since https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=20190615 was posted on June 15, 2019.

What format of DOB is that? M/DD/YY?

I still use newsgroups (NNTP) and IRC everyday, hackernews is pretty good considered it's HTTP based

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.

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.

As usual, the death of entrepreneurship and startups has been greatly overstated. :)

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.

https://youtu.be/g1Sq1Nr58hM?si=ZyRYleQAfTe3PJMX

Thank you PG, thank you Dang! Thank you to all the contributors for the high quality content.

You're half way there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42771676

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 !

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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 :)

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=90-9-1_rule>

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.

Another possibility is to write the comment in English inside gmail, and let suggestion gmail fix all the errors.

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.

I wonder if he is raeading HN still...

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.

There isn’t a website on the internet that I’ve learned more from than this one.

Thank you.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

He says he likes things to be "informal" by which he really means "opaque".

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.

That's opaque.

If there's any information that someone wants to find out about HN or HN moderation, all they need to do is ask us.

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.

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 everyone. I come here to learn and I do. The standard of discourse is heightening.

You're amazing

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

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.

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.

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.

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")

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

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

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.

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.)

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...

* 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.

https://capbase.com/why-european-startups-register-in-us/

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.

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.

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.

OpenAI and Anthropic come to mind

Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak, Marshmallow.

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.

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!

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. )

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?

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 about the size of a medium-popular subreddit. Its impact on US politics is not much different than that of /r/relationshipadvice.

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.

I'm looking at a medium sized nerd messageboard. Obviously that's not a meaningful thing to compare to a legislative body or court.

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.

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.