Getting Into Y Combinator Is Tougher Than It's Ever Been (bloomberg.com) 18
Amid the flood of big tech layoffs, entry to Y Combinator has become the most competitive it's ever been. From a report: Silicon Valley's premier business incubator has received 44,000 applications so far this year, the most ever, and the acceptance rate for its summer batch was less than 1%, the lowest in the organization's history. Garry Tan, the president and chief executive officer of Y Combinator, said he anticipates "little tech" will thrive even in a turbulent economy. Cuts at big tech companies have unshackled people to work on important, new companies, Tan said on this week's episode of The Circuit with Emily Chang. "I think a lot of large companies started treating their employee base almost as a place to park resources and almost as a competitive moat versus the other giants," he said.
"The amount of talent that was locked up in cushy jobs,â Tan said, "I'm hoping a lot of them actually come over to startups, and they realize, oh, this is what it's like to run fast again." Tan stepped into the top job at Y Combinator in January, succeeding co-founder Paul Graham and Sam Altman, who went on to help start OpenAI. Tan himself was accepted to the incubator as a founder in 2008, the same year Mark Zuckerberg attended the accelerator's regular "demo day" where Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Web Services.
"The amount of talent that was locked up in cushy jobs,â Tan said, "I'm hoping a lot of them actually come over to startups, and they realize, oh, this is what it's like to run fast again." Tan stepped into the top job at Y Combinator in January, succeeding co-founder Paul Graham and Sam Altman, who went on to help start OpenAI. Tan himself was accepted to the incubator as a founder in 2008, the same year Mark Zuckerberg attended the accelerator's regular "demo day" where Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Web Services.
other ways to get funding (Score:2)
I'm sure there is prestige to getting into Y Combinator, and the connections you gain can be helpful. However, you are going to give up too much. There are other ways to get funded that could put you in a better position. Y Combinator is far from the only funding around. Focus on what you need to accomplish for your business and not on serving your money master.
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The high startup failure rate and giving the lucky room to fail, destroy established standards is a bit much to absorb I think. The ideal that regulation starves innovation makes for a good tv show nowadays but the the truth is something else entirely.
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The ideal that regulation starves innovation makes for a good tv show
The EU regulates more stringently and has way fewer successful startups.
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The ideal that regulation starves innovation makes for a good tv show
The EU regulates more stringently and has way fewer successful startups.
The ideal that regulation starves innovation makes for a good tv show
The EU regulates more stringently and has way fewer successful startups.
And way, way fewer failures? And they give grants and fund studies all the time but a good idea does not necessarily make a good private company is the argument here. You will likely be incorporated in to a larger functional group.
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And way, way fewer failures?
One big success makes up for a hundred failures.
The best way to prevent failures is to never get out of bed.
And they give grants and fund studies all the time but a good idea does not necessarily make a good private company
So the government should decide which startup ideas are good? Are you serious?
You will likely be incorporated in to a larger functional group.
Are you claiming that Europe is more successful at creating large tech companies? That is absurd.
Startups will find it difficult (Score:5, Interesting)
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Interest rates are high
They're really not. They're higher than the extremely low level they've been for a while, but they aren't that far above the long-run average and are far, far below the peak.
Looking at mortgage rates, for example, the rate I got on my first house in the early 90s was 8.125%, and at the time we thought that was fine. Not great, certainly, but not terrible. My parents actually refinanced around that time, too; their previous mortgage was around 12%. My current mortgage (refi'd in 2020) is at 2.125%, but tha
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If you go back 10 or 20 years we had the boomers in their prime investment years where they were at the top of their earning curve, the kids were grown up, the mortgage was paid off, and they were looking to get any kind of return they could get out of their retirement portfolios so there was a *lot* of money being thrown at startups. It was the prime time for investment scams like FTX and Theranos. But those times are behind us. Interest rates are high and are probably going to stay high for the next 10 or 15 years, and a lot of that capital has moved into safer investments as the boomers are moving (or have moved) into retirement. Globalization has been reversing for a few years now, and that means countries need to rebuild their local industrial base that they'd been outsourcing to Asia. That means capital is going to be expensive, and governments are going to be directing spending into rebuilding the local industrial base, such as chip factories and expanding the power grid. That's going go soak up capital that would have been available for Silicon Valley investment. It also explains why tech companies suddenly decided they all needed to stop bleeding money. Cheap capital is gone. It's time to be profitable, or at least self-sustaining. It's doubly bad for gig economy companies, because the flood of cheap exploitable labour they built their companies on back in 2008 is gone. Uber knew this was coming, gambled on self-driving cars and lost. Now's not the time to start a startup... now's the time to take advantage of companies falling over themselves to pay high wages and offer good benefits, and go home at night and enjoy your life. That is, if you can afford a house. Houses are capital. You may have to wait for the boomers to age up a bit more and downsize.
Now isn't a bad time to start a new company but you'll need a better business plan than "APP", "with a computer" or "lets ignore laws and regulations". Actual innovative ideas, changes or meeting underserviced parts of the market are still business worth going into and investing in, it's just that the VC's have been burned by the 2nd dot com rush, except this one didn't hurt anyone but the Vulture Capitalists.
If your business model depends on breaking laws or selling something that doesn't exist, yeah, y
Who Cares? (Score:2)
VC Circlejerk
Lost genius (Score:3)
You do have to wonder what projects, solutions, and innovation may have happened if Google/FB/Apple/Amazon and others weren't paying so many people $200k+ to do pretty basic IT jobs well below those people's abilities.
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You do have to wonder what projects, solutions, and innovation may have happened if Google/FB/Apple/Amazon and others weren't paying so many people $200k+ to do pretty basic IT jobs well below those people's abilities.
People would have had incentive to try their own ideas given the open source environment which was rumored to be discouraged by the private sector. Countries would have been encouraged to support their own talent and infrastructure instead of sending people to the US for pay checks they could never match at home.
44k applications (Score:3)
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Most likely by looking at more than 10 per day.
44k/365 = 120
If you don't include weekends and holidays, they need to look at 200/day.
But, like resumes, they are easy to filter. Spellcheck likely filters out half. People who fail to proofread their business plans will fail at everything.
Then look at the team. Do they have at least one person who has been in management before? At least one person who knows accounting? At least one degreed technical subject matter expert? At least one person with sales and mar
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