I've been going to Demo Day off and on since 2007, and one big thing I've noticed is a change in who gets accepted. I see a lot more "sure bets" and a lot fewer "long shots". When I go to demo day now, I see a lot of companies that are fairly interesting, founded by an amazing team with a lot of accolades and/or exits or previous experience, and most of the companies have already launched and have revenue.

What I don't see a lot of anymore are two people who just finished college (or maybe they didn't even finish yet) working on something that could be amazing or a spectacular failure, who haven't launched yet or have no revenue yet. Look at Dropbox, reddit, and even your own startup, JTV, which of course morphed into Twitch. All of them founded by guys just out of college, all of them now worth over a billion dollars (and unless I'm mistaken, all of them pre-revenue at demo day). And while AirBnB was started by guys who had a couple of years work experience, they didn't have much experience with running a company or anything other than a few years working in industry (and of course also worth well into the billions).

It feels like for the most part the risk analysis has shifted from "a couple of folks just out of college with an amazing idea" to "a couple of folks with a proven entrepreneurial track record and an amazing idea".

I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it's definitely different.

Before YC, startup funding was truly wild west with too many term sheets with bad deals for founders. So kudos to YC for setting standards for founder-friendly term sheet and continuously pushing funding amount up. Some of the things I wish were different:

* Eliminating the whole "batch" concept. Ideas don't tend to born at YC deadlines. There should be a way to continuously accept applications as they arrive.

* Moving away from CA as center: Being in CA costs way too much for startups. I think startups should come to CA for hiring (may be) and then go away to places were things are dirt cheap, distractions are minimal and internet is fast. This alone can extend runway for many startups by an order of magnitude.

* Less discrimination against old veterans: PG had once mentioned that he typically doesn't prefer people who have worked for 10 years at BigCo because a true founder would have left long ago out of frustration. I think this is misguided line of thinking in many dimension. Even if it was somewhat true, it would be hard to rigidly generalize on entire population.

Having been through YC in the second batch in 2006 - their first one in California, and again in 2011, the differences were indeed pretty stark. In 2006, there were 8 startups. We knew each other well and we met with PG at his house a few times which obviously was pretty cool. He was also the one actually doing the cooking at the dinners! There was also lots of interaction with Trevor and Jessica and (less so) Robert. In 2011 there was no such type of interaction as they were just trying to figure out how to scale with 64 startups in the batch, outside money being involved, etc.

The other big difference no one has mentioned is the speakers that came to the dinners. They get the highest profile speakers now, but in 2006, the speakers would meet with each startup after their talk. You could demo to them and they'd give you feedback and personal advice. I distinctly remember a talk by Ev Williams about his failures at Blogger for example. Very raw and emotional. Some of the lessons I carry with me today, 12 years later, were from a few of those talks and after dinner conversations. In 2011 (and on) you're not getting close to one of those speakers unless you just so happen to get to sit by them at dinner.

> In 2007, if you had a B2B startup, you had to reach out cold to potential customers. Now there are over 1000 YC companies you can sell your service to and all of their contact information is in Bookface. As a result, YC alumni companies are often over 50% of your new sales during YC.

This alone would be an interesting angle if you consider the equity given to YC purely marketing and sales spend.

Hey it's Friday and I always wanted to ask: what do the people at YC think about bringing back some kind of smaller-scale investment for a larger number of applicants?

There was a time in my life after I graduated in college in '99, after the dot bomb, before the housing bomb, before YC, when I could have made just about any app/website in 6 months for $10,000. I wasn't driven by money, I just needed basic living expenses for enough runway to get ahead before someone snagged me back into working another day job to make ends meet. To me, microlending to this vast pool of untapped potential was the basic premise of YC and what I found so revolutionary about it.

Would you consider breaking one of your $150,000 investments into 10 or 15 smaller investments? Why or why not? Thanks!

It's the world that has changed. Launching into a relatively open world wide web is fundamentally different to breaking into the consolidated platforms of today. Startup culture was at its peak in the PG days today it's closer to a nadir.

Surprised Stripe didn't explicitly make the list of notable startups from over the years. Bigger than even Dropbox by valuation (obviously not apples to apples vs. public market cap) and arguably has had a bigger positive impact on the world than any other YC startup by actively increasing the GDP of the internet.

I'll be hanging out in the comments this morning if anyone would like to discuss.

YC 2005-2014 = Doing things that don't scale

YC 2014+ = Making the magic of PG, Jessica, Sam et al scalable

Why don't you start a European subsidiary? That would be a really good way to scale without compromising on quality. The need is great for something like that.

Interesting. Personalized rejections (one worded statements given the quantity of applications) would be great.

As you have scaled other things, can't you scale feedback for companies? Atleast, for what you consider top 10% or so?

We applied last batch and got a question around a competitor that had just gotten funding. Not sure if that was the reason of the reject.

When people compare how many companies get into YC vs how many of them become successful companies should understand that beyond what YC brings to startups which is a lot, the success also depends on the founding team execution and the ability to find a market fit, sell and grow the product. I am a first-time applicant and what makes me take the decision was all the great resources YC can bring to my company (advisors, network, knowledge) more than looking at how many big companies or brands went through the accelerator program which is also a way of effectiveness measurement, but for me not the most important.

Michael how much of that early magic is lost now with PG not actively involved, with the bigger batches and the more industrialized machine?

Don't get me wrong, what YC has become is pretty amazing but boy what I wouldn't give to have been part of one of those first few batches or especially that first one with Aaron Swartz.

Im looking to get in but I have been stalking the hacker page trying to skim every single information I can and believe me...I'm a walking hacker news...lol. Seibel is doing a great Job in encouraging soon to be/ start-ups to apply to Yc...he's shown an uncommon belief in startups regardless of what they do or where they from. That to me is a great change to the psyche of yc. If a lot more people are open as you are we'll have more start-ups. I'm not trying to schmooze you incase I say less about yc community...I haven't had that experience yet.

YC just announced YC China[1]. What will you say when they ask you to call it the "June Fourth Incident" instead of "Tienanmen Square Massacre"? You're not naive, you must see that moment in the future, or have some idea to dodge it somehow? Will you kowtow?

What's your attitude towards the Republic of China (Taiwan)?

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/

What's the average/median number of applications for startups who get in?

It's pretty awesome that you can actually apply 3 times within one year and did right that with https://fulfilli.com. It's good to take a look back and see how we've progressed.

What percentage of YC founders end up working for another YC company after their venture fails?

Awesome!

> Startup culture was at its peak in the PG days today it's closer to a nadir.

Yes, totally. I became interested in startups in 2009. I was a CS major and there was a tiny group of other students who shared my interests - we had a weekly "internet entrepreneur society" meetup where we'd discuss Paul Graham, Eric Ries, "Getting Real" (37Signal's book), and so on, along with the various projects we were working on and ideas we had.

By the time I graduated in 2012 the field was already starting to change. In the first two years out of university I worked with 3 different co-founders on various ideas, none of which went anywhere (frustratingly). Two of those co-founders had no genuine interest in technology or innovation -- I believe that they only became interested in startups after they became the hot thing to do. They wanted prestige and they wanted to raise funding for the sake of it. They weren't excited by the potential of the new platforms that had just appeared.

(After that I ended up working for a medium-sized tech startup for a while, got disillusioned and burnt out, took some time off, and then spent the last 3 years building myself back up. I still want to take a real shot at starting a startup, but the industry has changed so much now. The fun and excitement has gone).

I think there were several factors that changed startup culture:

1. The technology of the web matured. We are now in the Gartner cycle "plateau of productivity". Once upon a time you could upload some PHP scripts and a little bit of AJAX and have an interactive app that was admittedly crappy, but also genuinely novel and interesting. Now you need to know a complex backend framework, the modern JS ecosystem, automation/build tools, etc, just to compete. That's fine for a 10-man dev team, for 2 founders out of college it's a daunting amount of work.

2. Startups became a much more popular and prestigious career path. "The Social Network" movie (2011) made startups much more glamorous. Tons of articles were boosting "disruptive innovation". By the time I graduated, suddenly all the kids who'd been polishing their IB/consulting applications decided they wanted to be entrepreneurs, maybe after 2 years at Goldman/Bain/etc. Some of these guys were genuinely talented and cool. Many were arrogant and douchey, had a shallow understanding of tech, and treated their technical cofounders as code monkeys (yes, I had a few bad experiences).

Many interesting startup ideas (Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google) came from young technologists working on ideas they thought were cool, yet were niche and weird at the time. Once the IB kids started entering tech en masse the culture shifted. (Granted the Winklevoss twins tried to recruit Zuckerberg back in 2004. So this is not completely new. But I think the techie/suit ratio changed dramatically in the early 10s).

3. Lots of cheap capital. This meant more ideas funded, ideas that got funded raising more money, and more market saturation in web, mobile, everywhere. In some ways this helped entrepreneurs, but it also made fundraising more necessary.

4. A controversial one: all the "sexism in tech" controversies that kicked off a few years ago. I paid close attention and I remember that this exploded in 2013. You had things like a Github founder being ousted (along with Github apologising for their "meritocracy" carpet), people being fired for tweets, etc. Sexism is wrong and there were probably many invisible barriers to female founders. However the big social justice activists (Shanley Kane, etc) were not concerned with technology, they were motivated by ideology, and they created a very hostile atmosphere. Make an edgy joke on a blog post intended for about 100 friends to read? Suddenly 50,000 people on Twitter have read it and are calling for your head. PG made a poorly-worded comment during a long interview -- suddenly every media outlet quotes it out of context, takes it as proof of his sexism, and it becomes untenable for him to remain in charge of YC. (I know this wasn't the only reason he stepped down, but it was a factor).

5. Regulation. GDPR is the biggest one, though there are others. It is not a startup killer, startups can still operate, but it makes it much harder. The idea of putting a prototype online, getting some early users, and rapidly iterating based on feedback is now much more dangerous. You need to invest heavily upfront to become compliant (even then your legal status will be unclear), and if you pivot, or make drastic changes, you bear the risk of becoming non-compliant. The EU legislators assume that everyone is a big company with a stable business model, not a 3-man team experimenting with various ideas. These regulatory changes went hand-in-hand with increasing political hostility to tech entrepreneurs. Say you manage to succeed despite all the obstacles put in the place of tech entrepreneurs in 2018, and become the next Mark Zuckerberg -- you can expect to be treated like the current Mark Zuckerberg, that is, have everyone hate you and try to get you fired.

It's probably because Stripe didn't go through the traditional YC program.

"What’s interesting is that unlike 99% of YC companies, Stripe didn’t actually go through the standard startup bootcamp process. Patrick had already been through it once and didn’t feel the need to do it again. The amount YC invested was in the $20k-$30k range." [1]

[1]: https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-...

> YC startup by actively increasing the GDP of the internet

Sorry, but what does this actually mean? Before Stripe existed, you most certainly could process a payment online, so why would Stripe's existence increase the overall market for goods and services online?

Seems like kind of a weird thing to really take note of, but it wasn't just a general list, both parts had criteria that exclude Stripe ("household name" [i.e. consumer brand] and "funded in the last five years," respectively).

> [..] bigger positive impact on the world than any other YC startup by actively increasing the GDP of the internet

How is selling more stuff on the internet better for the planet? If anything online sales with all the additional packaging and logistics is worse than traditional retail (at least when looking at ecological factors).