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Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

It might be helpful if you pointed to specific companies which you see as more "lifestyle" businesses.

As others have pointed out, YC (and VCs in general) have definitely expanded outside of pure software companies and a number of them have done well (see Dollar Shave Club). I think it remains very hard to classify companies as lacking in huge potential from the start—originally, I was very skeptical that DSC would ever be worth a billion.

I suspect that it's still a requirement for YC founders to be interested in aggressive growth. It's still for startups after all—I don't think anyone would get in if they admitted their sole goal was to reach <$1m/yr in profit.

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Not that my opinion matters for anything, but I don't want to call out specific companies as having "low" potential. Now is probably uncertain and stressful for each of them, and I wouldn't want to undermine anyone's confidence as some anonymous armchair investor on their big day. (I know one should not be affected by that, but we're all human.)

To your point, I wonder if there is some sort of calculus within YC: Company A has 1% potential of a $10B exit, Company B has 50% potential of $100MM/year ... what do we do? Cold logic says we invest in Company A over Company B (not that this is zero-sum), but they can only make so many investments and the real numbers are much smaller than one-percent. Whereas, a series of conservative investments keeps them solvent long-term, while the bigger exits slow boil.

Fair enough, but I think by definition if a company's founders are targeting high/huge potential then it's not a lifestyle business.

> To your point, I wonder if there is some sort of calculus within YC: Company A has 1% potential of a $10B exit, Company B has 50% potential of $100MM/year ... what do we do?

These days, I think the answer is increasingly: both. YC is in the enviable position of fantastic deal flow and also being able to scale up their operation (classes have been getting much bigger).

Of course, they definitely still are going to miss out on some great companies. But I suspect those cases are increasingly ones of YC not recognizing the potential, not cases of passing on companies with only $100MM/year potential.

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