[ViscountPenguin]

Y combinator has funded a significant portion of the most harmful tech companies of this century. They're profoundly amoral, just like you'd expect from a profitable venture capital firm.

On the bright side, they also hire dang, so that's one against 100 million.

[raw_anon_1111]

And the few that have gone public have done awful

https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...

[jmalicki]

Most of the bad ones IPOd in 2021, when there was a huge overvaluation of speculative tech companies... Marking performance since IPO is also a bit weird since it's kind of arbitrary date in the firm's history.

[ViscountPenguin]

It's surprising to me that investors have been so wrong about combinator IPOs. I wonder if this has been driven my retail, or by the expectation of a small probability of enormous success.

[catlifeonmars]

Is going public the ultimate goal of every startup?

[eru]

To be honest, I have personally funded almost all of the most harmful companies that are around today, too.

But that's because I funded pretty much all the companies via my investment in an index fund.

YC pretty much takes something like an index fund approach to startups: they finance a lot of them. So naturally they would also have a significant portion of what you deem to be harmful ones.

[turtlesdown11]

What part of buying index funds of public shares in a company (aside from direct investment, IPO or private placement which are not hallmarks of index funds) funds the company?