top | item 46735644

New YC homepage

298 points| sarreph | 1 month ago |ycombinator.com

157 comments

order

PStamatiou|1 month ago

Really love the new site and how it highlights founders so well.

Only minor tweak I'd make is for the desktop viewport size - make it so you can also click the company names instead of needing to precisely scroll for the images to show up for that company. With notched mouse wheels it's all too easy to skip one even with a regular scroll. Or increase the scroll distance.

Also might suggest using a gradient mask to fade out the company logos as you scroll the primary text block up. Some of them get very close to the text and the one-by-one removal feels a tad distracting.

And really minor but kept finding myself trying to click the photos to see things larger. Would be nice if they could come up in a media viewer with a small caption, and let me arrow key or swipe through.

sublinear|1 month ago

I think the items in the carousel are just too wide. There's usually some side margin showing more of the previous and next items.

I turned my phone to landscape and the scroll "sensitivity" no longer felt wrong, but then a new bug was revealed. It chooses to put focus on the right-most item in the carousel. Now the animation doesn't play for the first item.

stingrae|1 month ago

yeah i think the scroll speed is too fast. that would fix all the issues.

amadeuspagel|1 month ago

> YC turns builders into formidable founders.

This is followed by a series of before and after pictures. YC offers not money but personal transformation. Their standard offer of $500,000 for 7% is not mentioned on the homepage, maybe because it would invite comparison ... when you see numbers like this your first thought is: I wonder what other accelators offer? The before and after pictures are something no other accelator can compete with.

c0_0p_|1 month ago

Unless things have changed? It used to be $125,000 for 7% on a SAFE, then $375,000 which converts at your next fundraise at whatever the most favourable terms offered are. So unless you never raise more money it's certainly not $500k for 7%.

cjflog|1 month ago

Interesting pattern to see how many IPO photos on the right are missing an original founder or two.

neilv|1 month ago

Whilst gaining better fashion and haircuts.

trebligdivad|1 month ago

Impressive collection of embarrassingly young founder pictures :-)

nine_k|1 month ago

A good remedy against lookism :)

ianbooker|1 month ago

Its been years since I felt urged to congratulate someone for their "webdesign", but this is really good. No boring glossy landing picture, but a distinct claim, and the the before / whoisit / after Element is unique, in a good way.

moralestapia|1 month ago

Seems that the "it's a numbers game" thesis delivered.

(I know the previous deal was different but just to get an estimate ...)

500k to each of 5,000+ startups = 2.5 billion

in exchange of

7% of 1.3 trillion = 91 billion

~36x return.

It's even better than that as they invest, on average, less than 500k and get, on average, more than 7% equity. (But they also get diluted, so, who knows).

Of note, that 1.3 trillion follows a comically long tailed distribution.

OpenAI is 500B.

Stripe+Doordash+Airbnb+Coinbase+Reddit+Scale is 400B.

The remainder is 5,000+ companies.

another_twist|1 month ago

You dont get 7% of a company, you get 7% of outstanding sharez. So its shares held * stock price. Usually there are less stocks issued at the initial stages with more coming in later as more investors are added. I dont think YC maintains 7% across all their investments.

amelius|1 month ago

Looks cool, though I have to be honest that I'm not a big fan of showing only the survivor stories.

raleighm|1 month ago

I had the same reaction. Also the new vibe feels less like “make something people want” and more like “join the pantheon.”

rrgok|1 month ago

Yep, I would like to see the success/failure ratio. That would give me a good idea whether this VC funding fantasy is a number game, intentional success or just plain old luck.

jonahx|1 month ago

My first thought was I'd love to see everything, from the unicorns to the mid-level success to the failures, all laid out in one big infographic.

mrgoldenbrown|1 month ago

Like a lottery only advertising the winners.

wavemode|1 month ago

Meh. If your business fails, you basically got $500K in exchange for nothing. Still sounds to me like a good deal.

skeptrune|1 month ago

I love that the founders are so prominently featured on this new version.

adamiscool8|1 month ago

Just realizing that in more than a decade of perusing Hacker News, I may not have ever visited the homepage.

0xferruccio|1 month ago

some of the design interactions are really polished. the section written with the quotes from founders is really cool. the hover effect with the before and after of the YC partners is a great touch too!

reddalo|1 month ago

Am I the only one who thinks that the Coinbase [1] picture has been AI generated, or at least heavily AI-altered?

The movie posters behind look like garbage, and what's wrong with that Return of the Jedi poster? Why is there a random blob and a broken face at the top instead of Darth Vader?

And why is there a random Google+ logo on the left?

And why does Fred Ehrsam have a huge thumb and silky smooth legs?

[1] https://bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/beforevs...

mkl|1 month ago

And the Back to the Future title is totally wrong - it's always in the stylised logo form on posters.

101008|1 month ago

No, it's 100% generated. The background posters mke no sense at all, inclunding Google+ there. And also Fred's hands are wrong. I wonder if they didn't have a pic of both of them together and asked AI to generate it, though Gemini or even Grok would do a better job than that.

TheCoreh|1 month ago

Looks good.

A minor piece of feedback, though: might be just me, not sure if anyone else has this pavlovian conditioning, but seeing the black banner/bar on top with the YC logo/color below and HN background color immediately makes me think someone passed away.

BoorishBears|1 month ago

Weirdly enough my top bar has been set to #000000 for years now, so I forget that has a secondary meaning

wizzwizz4|1 month ago

I think it's fine. If it were a black bar and then an orange bar, that would be a different matter.

0003|1 month ago

Turning a builder into a formidable founder, which via the PG quote is someone who seems they will always get what they want is in its self a death. A builder... a truth-seeking creator dies. Devoured by someone who gets what they want, a superego. There should be a black bar at the top.

/s

Shout out to the risk takers.

PyWoody|1 month ago

I think I was on HN for at least three years before I realized they even had a homepage. I might check this one out in the next couple of years.

recursive|1 month ago

I've been here for over a decade. Today is the first time I bothered to check it out.

conductr|1 month ago

The most well funded forum ever

bkfh|1 month ago

Interesting to see the OG Twitter logo rather than X in the footer. Must have been an explicit choice

charlie0simmon|1 month ago

Clean design. I like how it puts founders front and center instead of just listing company logos.

One suggestion: adding a quick filter by batch year or industry would make it easier to browse. Sometimes I want to see what's new in a specific space like AI or dev tools.

dewey|1 month ago

The "Be in the room with …" image hover effects triggering the video are neat.

adrianwaj|1 month ago

Is there a way to see all the inactive companies? Some have great names and addresses. I wonder if there's a way to efficiently use them - even keeping all the paperwork intact.. like buying a shell company and saving a lot of the overheads and registering/signups.

Brands are resurrected in fashion all the time with new designers, CEOs and owners while keeping the name, heritage (codes/motifs/archive,) goodwill and stores intact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentino_(fashion_house) is 70% owned by the Qatari royal family.

You could even have the ex-founders sit on a steering committee or advisory board for the switcheroo mob who could be their new bosses.

With all the unemployment around, startup musical chairs could be a solution. Isn't founders' equity the only valuable thing left in the startup world? No chance in getting rich as an employee - and with AI, who is/will not be replaceable? Also, finding the right people from the get-go is another significant challenge, and users of course.

Why don't those inactive companies share their failure stories to find some value-add? It's 2026: they could be mere hours away from an IPO horizon :)

asadm|1 month ago

the "Be in the room with..." hover videos are cool but seem AI-generated.

nasso_dev|1 month ago

they definitely are. im not sure why they did that, still pictures are okay too and much greener

reddalo|1 month ago

Even the Coinbase still picture seems AI-generated (I left another comment here with details).

topherPedersen|1 month ago

I noticed a photo of the Kalshi founders on the new homepage. I remember when Kalshi launched I thought it was so bad, and that those founders must be the very bottom of their class... they're billionaires now!

testdelacc1|1 month ago

They make most of their money from sports betting. Which isn't a particularly novel business.

thimkerbell|1 month ago

If you feature a quote from someone, prominently, on a prominent website, you might check in with them to make sure they don't have any issues with the usage.

(I do sense artifice. Possibly wrongly.)

oe|1 month ago

The carousel is way too fast to be able to read the texts. I’ve made the same mistake as a developer when I already know each text by heart, but actual users can’t read them fast enough.

NetOpWibby|1 month ago

This looks good. Almost makes me want to apply...but nah. Maybe, idk.

NKosmatos|1 month ago

Impressive! Seeing all the before and after photos is a nice touch. With regards to the actual web page, white text on light background (partners part) makes it nice easily readable.

perfmode|1 month ago

There’s something that bothers me about reducing achievement to stock price and exit valuations. Yet, it is sobering to witness the machinery laid bare.

The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress. I’m aware this is the dominant framework, but that doesn’t make it feel less hollow. Welcome to Heartbreak.

wtvanhest|1 month ago

I’m not against big exits / valuations and showing the numbers. But… what would have added a bit of interest would have been real metrics. For example I believe AirBnB has 2 billion guest nights. Showing that instead of the ipo value is more impressive to people who want to deliver value rather than capture value.

Real world metrics would feel slightly more on brand than valuations

ryandrake|1 month ago

> The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress.

Didn't see anything about ethics either, which, again, is not necessarily what a VC firm is about. It's actually kind of refreshing--the website clearly conveys YC's focus: It's about being "formidable" and "intensive work" and "urgency" and "fast." The editing on this site is impressive. They have boiled away everything down to the core of what the firm believes in, and it's "work hard make lots of money fast". Not something I'd personally be interested in being part of, but the site's wording is remarkable in its honesty, and I clearly know after reading it that the YC experience would not be my cup of tea!

nine_k|1 month ago

Wisdom and authentic progress are hard to measure. They are also not the goals enterprises pursue. Enterprises go for the money, but the money is normally paid by satisfied customers; this side effect is what makes enterprises viable and useful. (In case of VC money, customers even don't have to pay for sustainably for some time.)

An IPO or a large acquisition is like a graduation event for school students. A diploma or a SAT certificate also do not certify wisdom, or even progress. They certify a certain degree of success, and a transition into "adult life". Or think about this as of an orbital insertion event for a spacecraft. Not an end goal, but a precondition for a serious progress.

If you seek wisdom, a VC firm like YCombinator is likely not the most appropriate tool for your quest. (An attempt to found a business may bring some wisdom, as usual, at a cost.)

moomoo11|1 month ago

You know these are businesses, right? And that behind the shiny, cheery language that these are venture capitalists, right?

Right?

pelagicAustral|1 month ago

Crazy talented people. Crazy good products. I really like the redesign, I am a bit old now, but I can see how inspiring it might be for people coming into tech.

hackable_sand|1 month ago

Just as inspiring as the United Citizen Federation recruitment videos!

tasuki|1 month ago

> A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.

This is rather dark actually. True, too. Props to Y Combinator for not trying to sugarcoat things!

matwood|1 month ago

I don’t think it’s dark, but I’ve been told that my similar attitude can rub some people the wrong way. I’m not a jerk about it, but I always show up prepared to get to where I think we need to be. If that rubs people the wrong way so be it.

EDIT

The downvotes are interesting. Do people think the world will just give them things? I'm reminded of a quote I keep nearby from a book I read many years ago.

“His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”

― Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory

timeon|1 month ago

If you think about impact, some of those companies have made on the world, it is rather dark.

coldtrait|1 month ago

Why can't the hackernews home page look like that?

magicmicah85|1 month ago

There's a homepage? Kidding aside, it looks like a good landing page highlighting the top success stories and the purpose of YC.

stewsnooze|1 month ago

This new site owes a lot to Index Ventures. The whole thing seems heavily inspired by the beautiful Index site.

hajrice|1 month ago

Visiting HN brings me back when to when I just started my career as a entrepreneur, I look forward to the nostalgic design it has. Have been familiar w/ YC's & HN design since 2008.

New YC page looks great – but it just doesn't feel "yc" to me.

cya11|1 month ago

Great history, hopefully some of these successful founders will stay in the loop here for all us up and comings.

elAhmo|1 month ago

Love the emphasis on people behind successful companies and humble beginnings that all of them have!

andraaspar|1 month ago

The main quote is cropped on Firefox. It reads:

YC turns builders

nto formidable founders

And a little dirt next to founders.

milancurcic|1 month ago

The company features on the front page was a great opportunity to point out their positive impacts on the world. Instead, they focus on $BBB. Nice new site though.

deaux|1 month ago

> point out their positive impacts on the world.

Not particularly easy when you've been funding the likes of Flock(YC S17).

Computer0|1 month ago

It's a nice website. I still despise ycombinator. They make a hell of a forum though!

EdNutting|1 month ago

"A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way."

...even if those obstacles are reality, the law or basic morality.

hungryhobbit|1 month ago

Redo the co-founder match sub-site next!

That thing hasn't been updated in years, and could really use some love. If they don't want to do it themselves, just open source the sub-site and I'm sure a bunch of tech founders will happily do it for them (if only to be able to say they contributed to YC itself).

Uptrenda|1 month ago

what are the demographics, educational attainment, and avg net worth of prior yc founders, id like to see what unconventional bets look like.

ansk|1 month ago

The implication that OpenAI is a YC company in the same sense as the other listed companies is somewhere between misleading and dishonest. Even more distasteful to show founding teams for all the others, then just Sam for OpenAI.

Mc_Big_G|1 month ago

“A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.”

Yeah, especially laws and regulations.

waterproof|1 month ago

[deleted]

emmelaich|1 month ago

Curious -- was any AI used? No shame in that.

raldi|1 month ago

The “YC/Now” timer starts (and sometimes flips) before the image actually loads.

kneel|1 month ago

sama's double collar is legend

songodongo|1 month ago

Altman with the double polo.

coldtea|1 month ago

The design looks good. The quote is so kitch it could be on a self-help book.

"YC turns builders into formidable founders" - and then a bs faux-definition of formidable.

coffeemug|1 month ago

If you ever met some of the founders in the pictures, you'd know it's not bs.

promiseofbeans|1 month ago

The IEEE-reference feels like a cute nod to HN

yyx|1 month ago

No dark mode. Classic.

yamono432|1 month ago

Idk how i feel about having sama right at the start

archeantus|1 month ago

What stood out to me more than how impressive the carousel of companies was, was the order of them. Wild that they have OpenAI and Stripe second and third to Airbnb.

tjr|1 month ago

Did it change? I see OpenAI listed first.

ukd1|1 month ago

So good!

cdelsolar|1 month ago

they forgot Leftronic

sailfast|1 month ago

Not sure formidable founders getting whatever they want whatever the obstacle (sure market obstacles but what about laws, morality, etc) is a good thing to be honest.

Sometimes folks need to be stopped. Sometimes those walls are there for a reason.

And after IPO, maybe a founder should consider the good of the world instead of what you think you want next for yourself and just bashing down more walls.

But I dunno… I’m just a rando.

padolsey|1 month ago

Yeh I don't think there's much value in a credo if it celebrates Altman. He's a terrible idol to have. He compared Trump to Hitler in 2016, then donated $1M to his inauguration and tweeted about being in an "NPC trap" when he criticized him. Took about six weeks after the election to flip. Testified to Congress that AI regulation is "essential," then lobbied against California's safety bill when it actually showed up. His own board fired him for lying to them for years. His safety team leads quit in protest saying safety took a backseat to shiny products. Multiple former colleagues, including the people who left to start Anthropic, describe psychological abuse and manipulation. Claims a $65k salary while sitting on a billion-dollar fortune built through conflicts of interest. He's not a good guy. He's a guy who says whatever serves him in the moment and has left a trail of people warning us about exactly that.

austinjp|1 month ago

The "before" pictures occasionally hint at what might be optimism and individuality.

The "after" pictures display a uniformly grim corporate homogeneity.

Maybe this is because the "before" pictures are unguarded, taken before the kool-aid sank in. But they still show people who queued up to drink that kool-aid.

It's a "no" from me.

simgt|1 month ago

Interesting how all the examples at the top are in the form of "It started here, now it's worth $xB". At least we've stopped pretending it was for anything else but money, and the power that comes with it.

ghufran_syed|1 month ago

what alternative metric are you proposing?

Keyframe|1 month ago

Was there ever pretending? It was always face value from "seed" to "rounds" to "exit" - all words describing money movement.

qznc|1 month ago

In my memory, the original vibe of Ycombinator was more like "achieve fuck-you money in your twenties" than today's unicorn chase.

anon_anon12|1 month ago

True, it was always greed veiled with an illusion of passion

ismail|1 month ago

Here is my insight: VALUATION is not the same as VALUE CREATION.

Put another way, the ability to accumulate resources, is not a reliable indicator of the "good" being created in the world.

When the quantitative metric of "Money" is used a a proxy for value creation, it creates serious and dangerous side effects.

This is a fundamental failure mode of modern capitalism.

Capitalism requires ethical discipline. Without it, we get runaway resource accumulation, that rationalises actions and strategies (externalisation, extraction, optimisation-at-all-costs) which cause more harm than good.

The techno-optimists (See e/acc/Marc Andreessen)[0], frame progress as intrinsically good.

I believe a more prudent approach is needed, one that is wise and looks at business from the perspective of:

STEWARDSHIP & BALANCE,

rather than

RESOURCE ACCUMULATION & PROGRESS.

While I do not disagree with all he says, and do not think technological progress is bad, you will notice there is no mention of ethics in the entire manifesto other than as an "enemy".

Philosopher Charles Taylor argues that a defining feature of modernity is the rise of what he calls “disengaged reason” [1]:

  > Contrary to a Platonic understanding of reason where a meaningful order exists in the cosmos and in the soul that serves as a source for the highest good for reason to discover and conform to, disengaged reason "is no longer defined in terms of a vision of order in the cosmos" (Taylor 1989, 20). This disengagement allows reason to look at the world from an 'autonomous' viewpoint, leading to the abandonment of all 'horizons' > or frameworks "within which we know where we stand, and what meanings things have for us" (Taylor 1989, 29), thus rendering any inquiry to be independent of an overarching telos.
This idea is captured bluntly in this video (paraphrasing)[2]:

  > The great innovation with modernity was to convince people that money is *GOD*. With the enlightenment *MONEY* replaced *GOD* for a lot of people
In a sense, a lot of people in the modern world treat money itself as "The Sacred"

This is not to say I am arguing that money, profit and competition are morally wrong, but rather the way it is packaged. It is often elevated to the ultimate end (telos), rather than the means.

The fundamental category error is making the assumption that:

VALUATION (or Money in the bank) = Value Creation (For The Greater Good)

As you have rightly pointed out, the "It started here, now it's worth $xB" is an indication of this worldview, where the telos itself is "MONEY"

[0] https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

[1] https://www.academia.edu/26548899/Disciplinarity_and_Islamic...

[2] https://youtu.be/B5FtHagng8c?t=249

tetris11|1 month ago

Vulture culture: always was, always will be.

At least we got some decent side discussions in the small spaces during the interim

ripped_britches|1 month ago

I mean trying to insinuate oai is a yc company is just shady right?

I get that the subtext isn’t dishonest, but cmon, you know what you’re doing

bflesch|1 month ago

It's fine they include openai, they can be very proud of sam. What I found a bit weird is that the reddit founder picture shows only two people. History is written by the winners I guess.

tptacek|1 month ago

They were an early funder. Seems p. reasonable for a VC firm to point that out.

anonnon|1 month ago

> Sam was part of YC's inaugural batch in S05 and founded OpenAI as YC Research in 2015

Notice how they omit any mention of Loopt, and almost try to imply that he's famous for founding OpenAI, when the trajectory was really Loopt -> YC President -> other stuff -> OpenAI, and Loopt was a failure that was acquired for barely more than it raised in VC money, and spent its waning days as a seedy gay hookup app.

Sam's success was preordained, and failure, for him (and his VC backers), was never an option.

JamesAdir|1 month ago

[1] “A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.”

Obstacles are also any legal constraints that will break and pay later in fines, like Airbnb.

asaddhamani|1 month ago

Or economic ruin, societal ruin they may cause along the way, like OpenAI.

autoexec|1 month ago

Doesn't seem to display anything with JS disabled so it's a fail in my book, but I accept that I'll be in the minority here.

robertwpearce|1 month ago

Same! uBlock on Firefox lists ~280 scripts blocked

foresto|1 month ago

Displays a blank page unless scripts are allowed. :(

dang|1 month ago

Thanks - someone else reported this too (as a security issue for some reason!) and I've passed it on.

ls-a|1 month ago

I found the switch of focus from startups/businesses to founders/CEOs particularly strange. Looks like a political campaign to me.

alephnerd|1 month ago

YC has always been founder first.

Back when they started in the 2000s, most traditional VCs didn't recognize that high impact individuals can easily pivot or define product categories, and only concentrated on financial engineering (DCF go brrrrrr).

YC often also mentors founders on pivots (I'd say at least a third of all startups that make it to demo day were mentored into some sort of a pivot).

YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge, both of which really center on the founder first approach or Operators-turned-Angels - which I assume this marketing shift is about.

ls-a|1 month ago

I'm pretty sure the designer used political campaigns as inspiration

yc-critical|1 month ago

“A formidable founder is one who seems like they’ll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.”

Dictator is another name.

waterproof|1 month ago

That also struck me as a pretty weird quote to highlight. Someone who "seems like they’ll get what they want" sounds more like a bully more than a persuader or value creator.

Isn't there something better to aspire to?

smnplk|1 month ago

didnt know they had a website. Do lobsters have a website too ?

dhruv3006|1 month ago

> YC turns builders into formidable founders

Love this quote

bastian|1 month ago

A great sentence needs no explanation.

constantcrying|1 month ago

This is just absolutely insane. Why are you publicly humiliating your most successful founders on the home page of your VC firm?

"Here is an awful photo of our star founders. Look at how terribly they looked and what awkward nerds they used to be, when they came here."

You need to fire whoever green lit this.

another-dave|1 month ago

"You need to fire whoever green lit this." — I'm sure they themselves probably all green lit this.

Why would they be embarrassed?

bigyabai|1 month ago

Gary Tan shows up in a photo at the bottom but nowhere by name. Gotta hand it to YC, whoever handles their PR needs a raise.

Klonoar|1 month ago

What...?

You can CTRL+F his name. He's right there.