The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews. It's turned YC into a self-perpetuating machine by getting smart people to congregate and talk about news YC itself partially generates.
I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
Makes sense. I personally read some of the comments before jumping into an article, mainly because comments most of the time loop me in on something that I am completely clueless or have little aware of. Also to see if the article is worth reading into because obviously if you read 20 people saying "The author of the article doesn't know what he is talking about" then its more possible that indeed the author has written about something he doesn't know or understand.
Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.
The strength of YC is the relatively large value they provide in exchange for your equity. Their "price" is still excellent and continues to clear the market. This becomes rapidly obvious if you attempt to raise early stage funding and start comparing options.
Aside from the actual cash and the famous network, YC and its partners have earned a reputation for sticking with their investments through tough times instead of writing them off. This seems relatively rare amongst early stage investors, especially outside the US. In my relatively few years of experience in business, I've learnt to value people in the "cooperate cooperate" quadrant of the Prisoner's Dilemma very highly, and it's not a reputation you can "buy" quickly.
HN is a place to have civilised discussions thanks to both a seed of core tech personalities for historical reasons drawing a network of quality, and thorough and active moderation. I think "self-perpetuating machine" is harsh and not quite representative of most of the value derived by those of us who are not part of the YC ecosystem and unlikely ever to be (and yes, I haven't read the original article).
PS: nice site! Light, fast and with just one tracker (but "old geeks" would crunch web logs, surely?)
I read a lot less about YC companies on here than I did a few years ago. The site's popularity has partially eclipsed its original intent, for better or for worse.
Agreed but you have to credit PG's earlier work that makes this all credible as an uber-nerd watering hole (i.e. his guide to Lisp, Arc, Hackers and Painters, etc.).
There are great insights in this piece into how Sam thinks about AI and the future of YC.
But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes.
Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you.
A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles.
This comes out in small ways:
1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad-school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator.
2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech’s culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as “a buck,” he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco’s Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity."
3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, “A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ "
Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.
> “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
> "I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
Imagine this coming from an ultra rightwing prepper nutball. Do you still love that quote?
I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.
"Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist."
"I continue to be impressed by the quality of The New Yorker's reporting."
It really is quite good and I have gone out of my way over these past 8 years or so to show them whatever patronage I can. To that end, I subscribe to the digital version on my kindle as well as buy the print version (which I prefer, aesthetically).
Since we're talking about it, I think any discussion of how good the New Yorker is has to touch on how good the London Review of Books is. It's a truly remarkable publication. Very, very left leaning but I appreciate it nonetheless. I highly recommend an LRB subscription to anyone that appreciates good, original, thoughtful reporting and commentary. As a bonus, you get a very different perspective on many world events than you get from US media.
Agreed. This a very long and well written article. It does have some very heartbreaking, personal stories too:
One of Altman’s co-founders at Loopt, Nick Sivo, was also his boyfriend; the two dated for nine years, but after the company sold they broke up. “I thought I was going to marry him—very in love with him,” Altman said
It's great that every week that release some five or so long form articles many of which must take months to complete. I'm duly impressed by every issue which shows at my door.
My impression: It is 46 pages printed. I opened the link, read three paragraphs, and still not a word about the Manifest Destiny mentioned in the title. Closed it. Way too long. Way too much story telling.
> Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing private companies, raised outside funding.
I thought this was an interesting statistic. "80% of the fastest growing private companies did not need to raise capital to become one of the fastest growing companies."
"Altman, who will personally oversee this initiative, believes [Startup School] is the fastest, easiest way to bring ten thousand new founders a year into the network."
In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.
"Economic growth" can exist on a computer screen completely decoupled from the "real world" and independent of a strong middle class.
IMHO An economically strong middle class is needed to maintain social order. This mitigates the public from hunting and and killing the rich and keeps the public from displacing their social frustrations on to each other and creating riots. Generally its a better existence for everyone.
I think he's referring broadly to the fact that startups are net job creators whereas established companies are net job destroyers. In other words, without a continual stream of new startups and entrepreneurs, there would be no job growth in the economy at all, in which case there'd likely be significant political instability.
Altman worked so incessantly that summer that he got scurvy.
You have got to be kidding. So much food has enough vitamin C in it to avoid scurvy that you have to be eating pretty much nothing but ramen noodles to get it.
> "Most people want to be accepted, so they won't take risks that could make them look crazy."
This is a highly dissonant statement, so it's not surprising it's coming from a VC.
Innovation is exploring the crazy and coming back with something that can be shoehorned into reality without upsetting reality's tea cart too much. The problem with VCs is that their jobs consist of spending time investing in crazy things that have far reaching drawbacks that nobody sees until everyone is using the product and the founders and investors have already exited their position.
I found the most interesting point in the whole article the publicly stated consideration of establishing a China presence.
It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!
How is China with 'innovation' though? The portrait we seem to get so often in the West is that China excels at imitation and fails at original thinking. Maybe innovation isn't needed for domestic success, but it is for creating things that penetrate the rest of the world (and, these days, dare I say universe?).
Wth, the no asshole rule is the only way to keep out posers and assholes.
The expansion plans don't work because if you build a community which includes a few assholes they eventually overpower the system and being an asshole becomes the norm.
It's all about real AI today (not based on words and rules - lookup CTM - the real bots have this and its based on vector space). Get the companies and groups that are making very small breakthroughs in this area. The days of regurgitated cut-n-pasted text entry boxes and js (geocities, friendster, myspace, facebook) are over. Time for the new Googles of the world that will solve things bigger than SpaceX like extending human lifespan which is a requirement for space travel.
Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.
I'm not convinced Sam Altman is as brilliant as claimed to be. I've not seen anything particularly outstanding that he's done. Not hating. Facts only. I think this is simply hype and it reminds me of Elizabeth Holmes.
I too am wary of too much gushing praise onto someone still rather young with a limited track record.
The difference from Holmes is that Altman does not have to be particularly brilliant at something specifically, he just has to be the soul of the YC, ie life of the party.
From all accounts he is very good at that and that is of huge value to YC. Being a big ideas guy is an important and valuable position for an organization such as YC.
Holmes couldn't be such a generalist and life of party. She had to execute on a specific niche and failed very very late(I'd say about 10 years late). Holmes epitomizes the "fake it until you make it" taken to the extreme.
If Holmes had admitted defeat earlier maybe she could have been such a life of a party person at Draper's firm.
> By the 1880s, "Golkonda" was being used generically by English speakers to refer to any particularly rich mine, and later to any source of great wealth.
I love Sam and just wish they would have used a different metaphor than "Manifest Destiny". Isn't manifest destiny what led to the genocide of native american populations?
I think the author was likely aware of that. YC wants, and will probably get, great power. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the potential to do harm as well as good. YC may succeed in "settling the West" (metaphorically), but at what price? That's one question it has to ask itself.
I think it's definitely intentional. This profile isn't meant to be purely congratulatory--the undercurrent that some of this is creepy and undeserved that other commentors have picked up on is deliberate.
That's iteresting. I was not aware of such a connotation - to me the term manifest destiny just meant "a destiny that can be clearly seen and that cannot be changed" [1]. Maybe the article's sub-editor was equally ignorant of 19th century US history.
Don't Sam and other YC folks thinks that technological innovation will put most people out of a job, necessitating a "basic income" which makes them permanent government dependents?
It is about the American outlook where the perception is warped to the extent that all that is seen and wanted is only meant for them.
Or in another sense; because it exists, then it exists only for them. It ties into their earlier religion where they warped the belief that an entity called God created the world for mankind and humans, where they only reason and believe that only they themselves to be human and man.
I have no connection to YC (except for reading HN daily) and I don't know Sam personally.
These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based on a sentence or two and they are often way off base.
My takeaway and you may disagree, without getting too heavy: Sam Altman is one of a very small handful of people in the history of the world who has the resources, the awareness, the intelligence and maybe the motivation to do important, mankind-changing things. Sound exciting? Actually to most people who get what that really means, that is very very scary and a bit sad.
This group of people is not limited to SV, but for comparison: Elon and Zuck are also in this handful of people with Sam. Musk has chosen his "inter-planetary species on planet Mars" and he has a plan. Zuck (and his wife LLC) seem to have chosen eradicating all diseases ASAP - his plan is starting now.
I don't think Sam has found his "Planet Mars" yet and that can be really hard on someone. He knows the odds of finding it and the odds of success even if he does find it.
I also think the YC startup thing that pg and Jessica started is of secondary importance here. Sam has the skills to run YC of course, but I'm not sure that's why pg handed it to him...
Sam might have office hours and can spit off advice like "talk to your paying customers more" or "understand the problem being fixed" which new, lost founders always seem to need to be told. This stuff is so easy for someone like Sam and most natural entrepreneurs it's almost laughable and might even get annoying after a while...
I think pg handed YC to Sam not for YC's sake. Many people could have taken over YC. I think one reason that pg did it was to give Sam something else to work on so Sam's search for meaning, for his "Planet Mars", didn't consume him to the point that it broke him and the promise he has. He did it to save Sam's life.
These are all assumptions and personal opinions. As someone familiar with earning a relatively large amount of money at a young age and then wanting to do something more important to me than just make more money, but not knowing what to do, Sam is among those I look to and I am following his career.
[+] [-] johnwheeler|9 years ago|reply
I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
[+] [-] muse900|9 years ago|reply
Also a lot of the times the solutions given or explanations are amazingly good and entertaining. Thanks to YC I've become a better person I'd say.
[+] [-] crdb|9 years ago|reply
The strength of YC is the relatively large value they provide in exchange for your equity. Their "price" is still excellent and continues to clear the market. This becomes rapidly obvious if you attempt to raise early stage funding and start comparing options.
Aside from the actual cash and the famous network, YC and its partners have earned a reputation for sticking with their investments through tough times instead of writing them off. This seems relatively rare amongst early stage investors, especially outside the US. In my relatively few years of experience in business, I've learnt to value people in the "cooperate cooperate" quadrant of the Prisoner's Dilemma very highly, and it's not a reputation you can "buy" quickly.
HN is a place to have civilised discussions thanks to both a seed of core tech personalities for historical reasons drawing a network of quality, and thorough and active moderation. I think "self-perpetuating machine" is harsh and not quite representative of most of the value derived by those of us who are not part of the YC ecosystem and unlikely ever to be (and yes, I haven't read the original article).
PS: nice site! Light, fast and with just one tracker (but "old geeks" would crunch web logs, surely?)
[+] [-] wuschel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lordarminius|9 years ago|reply
Before HN there was PG's blog.
[+] [-] yolesaber|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonnik|9 years ago|reply
But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes.
Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you.
A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles.
This comes out in small ways:
1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad-school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator.
2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech’s culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as “a buck,” he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco’s Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity."
3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, “A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ "
Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.
[+] [-] nathan_f77|9 years ago|reply
> “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”
Hahaha, that's so awesome.
[+] [-] paulcole|9 years ago|reply
Imagine this coming from an ultra rightwing prepper nutball. Do you still love that quote?
[+] [-] joeyspn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kafkaesq|9 years ago|reply
The SV ethos, in a nutshell.
[+] [-] Artoemius|9 years ago|reply
I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.
[+] [-] superplussed|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zardo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxblackwood|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apsec112|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camillomiller|9 years ago|reply
"Launching a startup in 2016 is akin to assembling an alt-rock band in 1996 or protesting the Vietnam War in 1971—an act of youthful rebellion gone conformist."
[+] [-] rsync|9 years ago|reply
It really is quite good and I have gone out of my way over these past 8 years or so to show them whatever patronage I can. To that end, I subscribe to the digital version on my kindle as well as buy the print version (which I prefer, aesthetically).
Since we're talking about it, I think any discussion of how good the New Yorker is has to touch on how good the London Review of Books is. It's a truly remarkable publication. Very, very left leaning but I appreciate it nonetheless. I highly recommend an LRB subscription to anyone that appreciates good, original, thoughtful reporting and commentary. As a bonus, you get a very different perspective on many world events than you get from US media.
[+] [-] DanielRibeiro|9 years ago|reply
One of Altman’s co-founders at Loopt, Nick Sivo, was also his boyfriend; the two dated for nine years, but after the company sold they broke up. “I thought I was going to marry him—very in love with him,” Altman said
[+] [-] codyb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danjoc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dave_sullivan|9 years ago|reply
I thought this was an interesting statistic. "80% of the fastest growing private companies did not need to raise capital to become one of the fastest growing companies."
[+] [-] n72|9 years ago|reply
In the YC scenario, once its network hits a certain size it ceases to become a useful network and is just the world.
[+] [-] cushychicken|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wturner|9 years ago|reply
IMHO An economically strong middle class is needed to maintain social order. This mitigates the public from hunting and and killing the rich and keeps the public from displacing their social frustrations on to each other and creating riots. Generally its a better existence for everyone.
[+] [-] nugget|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|9 years ago|reply
I don't need to be rich that badly.
[+] [-] kordless|9 years ago|reply
This is a highly dissonant statement, so it's not surprising it's coming from a VC.
Innovation is exploring the crazy and coming back with something that can be shoehorned into reality without upsetting reality's tea cart too much. The problem with VCs is that their jobs consist of spending time investing in crazy things that have far reaching drawbacks that nobody sees until everyone is using the product and the founders and investors have already exited their position.
[+] [-] contingencies|9 years ago|reply
It would appear to make a lot of sense given current capital availability in China, world-leading mobile payment penetration, and US/SF issues with visas, overheads, component sourcing. Get over here!
[+] [-] l33tbro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] plinkplonk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intended|9 years ago|reply
The expansion plans don't work because if you build a community which includes a few assholes they eventually overpower the system and being an asshole becomes the norm.
The last 3 paras of that article are worrisome.
[+] [-] thpalmear|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjaminwootton|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] plan6|9 years ago|reply
Now, please ignore it, and go about your business. The worst thing to happen to a person's acceleration would be belief in having success. The only person you race in life is yourself, and you always need to catch up.
[+] [-] _andromeda_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sireat|9 years ago|reply
The difference from Holmes is that Altman does not have to be particularly brilliant at something specifically, he just has to be the soul of the YC, ie life of the party.
From all accounts he is very good at that and that is of huge value to YC. Being a big ideas guy is an important and valuable position for an organization such as YC.
Holmes couldn't be such a generalist and life of party. She had to execute on a specific niche and failed very very late(I'd say about 10 years late). Holmes epitomizes the "fake it until you make it" taken to the extreme.
If Holmes had admitted defeat earlier maybe she could have been such a life of a party person at Draper's firm.
[+] [-] hyperknot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobo_mark|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golkonda#Diamonds
[+] [-] n72|9 years ago|reply
I think that circuit exists and is functioning quite well. It seems to me there's a lot of glory embedded in YC's plans.
[+] [-] yrahmed|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apsec112|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbctol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarkMc|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/manifest%20destiny
[+] [-] snowwrestler|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hoasi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abysmallyideal|9 years ago|reply
Or in another sense; because it exists, then it exists only for them. It ties into their earlier religion where they warped the belief that an entity called God created the world for mankind and humans, where they only reason and believe that only they themselves to be human and man.
[+] [-] qwrusz|9 years ago|reply
These longer profiles invite assumptions, praise and critique based on a sentence or two and they are often way off base.
My takeaway and you may disagree, without getting too heavy: Sam Altman is one of a very small handful of people in the history of the world who has the resources, the awareness, the intelligence and maybe the motivation to do important, mankind-changing things. Sound exciting? Actually to most people who get what that really means, that is very very scary and a bit sad.
This group of people is not limited to SV, but for comparison: Elon and Zuck are also in this handful of people with Sam. Musk has chosen his "inter-planetary species on planet Mars" and he has a plan. Zuck (and his wife LLC) seem to have chosen eradicating all diseases ASAP - his plan is starting now.
I don't think Sam has found his "Planet Mars" yet and that can be really hard on someone. He knows the odds of finding it and the odds of success even if he does find it.
I also think the YC startup thing that pg and Jessica started is of secondary importance here. Sam has the skills to run YC of course, but I'm not sure that's why pg handed it to him...
Sam might have office hours and can spit off advice like "talk to your paying customers more" or "understand the problem being fixed" which new, lost founders always seem to need to be told. This stuff is so easy for someone like Sam and most natural entrepreneurs it's almost laughable and might even get annoying after a while...
I think pg handed YC to Sam not for YC's sake. Many people could have taken over YC. I think one reason that pg did it was to give Sam something else to work on so Sam's search for meaning, for his "Planet Mars", didn't consume him to the point that it broke him and the promise he has. He did it to save Sam's life.
These are all assumptions and personal opinions. As someone familiar with earning a relatively large amount of money at a young age and then wanting to do something more important to me than just make more money, but not knowing what to do, Sam is among those I look to and I am following his career.
I wish him a lot of success and happiness.