Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Say what you will about YC, but they've pretty much managed to live up to these; they were in that sense well-chosen.

Not to detract from YC's adherence to good principles... but I think this post was written now. Just putting it out there because if seems from your comment that you're assuming these were written in the past, which is what I assumed before reading the article and seeing the "October 2017" date on it.

Would love to be told I'm wrong if I'm misunderstanding the publication date...

Edit (based on comments): I agree that this accurately summarizes YC's principles as stated over the years. I was just mentioning/wondering whether this specific list was ever put in this form before. I absolutely think this is a good list of principles and it has guided YC, if not explicitly in this form all these years, certainly in spirit.

You can say it was written in the past. pg and Jessica have written about YC's philosophy multiple times in greater detail over the years. This post just summarizes all of their writing. imo most of the post is still accurate except for one: "by helping founders to start them." I could be wrong, but I feel today's YC is more about helping companies get from seed to series A and beyond instead of just getting started. Not that this is a bad thing, but it's different from old YC. It's also understandable since the former is much harder to scale and building products is much cheaper today.

I think the other big allure for joining YC, aside from the promise of helping you grow, (at least for me) is that it's like a union for startup founders. Unlike other firms, YC won't screw you. In fact, they will fight for you if anyone else attempts to screw you over.

> union for startup founders.

"Any industry that still has unions has potential energy that could be released by startups... industries afflicted by unions are sclerotic so have left lots undone."

Typically when you quote someone you attribute the quote to them.

I felt like the GP's citation was probably enough - "pg and Jessica have written about YC's philosophy multiple times in greater detail over the years."

(Graham is regularly quoted on HN without citation, especially in threads about his writing, which is how I classify this one.)

He's pretty obviously referring to what Graham said, and not favorably (this is one of the more disappointing Paul Graham twitter quotes).

These were the principles YC was founded with. That is, in 2005.

I followed pg's writing in basically real time since 2005. He wrote basically these principles, said them in interviews, re-told them in talks at Startup School and others, the whole time. This is a concise summary of a decade of intention and actions.

What's in this article has been said before, but not everything said before is in this article. Paul threw a lot of darts, and while they do have clusters, this is just as much him drawing the bullseye.

His comments about naughtiness / "what you can't say" / etc., for example, don't play particularly well right now between back-to-back Facebook advertising scandals, and Kalanick, and aren't in here. But he's talked about that as much as many of the things that are in here.

“What you can’t say” wasn’t even about startups or investing in the first place.

It also wasn't an invitation to build a company company with a toxic culture.

It absolutely is. The culmination of the "why" section is basically "because you will run a business better":

"In any competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands—something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the problem."

You can make the same kind of argument about this criticism of Graham. When it comes to YC's business principles, we have more to go on: the success of YC startups, and the way YC has transformed the funding landscape for startups. Those are real changes that YC was right in the middle of.

I'm not interested in looking to Paul Graham for advice on how to handle general issues in society (and am usually disappointed by what he has to say about them), but I'm also not interested in pretending that YC has been unsuccessful because it's politically convenient to make him a villain.

My bullseye metaphor was maybe a little off; the "target" I was talking about was not economic success, in which case YC hitting it is indisputable. It's the idea that this essay contains the principles necessary to achieve those financial results.

My claim is that YC has many principles that led to its financial success, and not all of them are, or are really compatible with, other principles mentioned in this essay.

("Good" as used in this essay also shares a kind of empty essentialism with Google's "evil" - a focus on BEING good or not BEING evil, rather than the trickier question of how to DO good / avoid DOING evil - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/10/what-...)

What you can't say is even more relevant today than it was when the essay was written. In the past decade, we've seen free speech in retreat, both in local and global terms.

College campuses that were once bastions of free speech have become so hostile to hearing differing opinions that it's common for people to pull fire alarms or even wear masks and commit violence upon attendees. Canada and European countries have increasingly turned to punishing various stigmatized political speech. China has greatly tightened the screws in enforcement of speech in private chat groups and use of VPNs.

Even more chilling is that speech codes are now being enforced globally. Not long ago, a Swedish author whose books strongly criticized the CCP was kidnapped from Thailand and detained in China. On a grander scale, China punished the entire country of Norway both diplomatically and economically for 6 years for a rights activist being granted the Nobel Peace Prize.

Perhaps the most extreme issue is the attempt to enforce anti-blasphemy laws on a global scale. Artists, authors, clergy and even comedians are increasingly at risk of being murdered by jihadists, regardless of what country they live in. Compounding the problem, western academic institutions are coming under increasing pressure not to offend any powerful group. Rational criticism of religious doctrine is often mistaken as racism and criticism of non-western states is mistaken as imperialism.

In times like this, it's extremely valuable to have both a good sense of what is okay to say publicly and how far that may diverge from what is true. That's exactly what the essay was about.

I'll say.

Y Combinator's principles remind me of this:

"Ambition[1]. That can be a virtue when it drives us to excel. Resourcefulness[2], courage, perhaps not on the battlefield, but... there are many forms of courage. Devotion[3], to my family and to you."

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html

[3] http://www.ycombinator.com/principles/

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5j1wduFWl0 :p ;)

My previous reply was downvoted into oblivion and flagged, but my question was sincere.

You started your comment with:

>Say what you will about YC

Which implies that there are negative (perhaps commonly known) things being said about YC. I'm not familiar with any and was simply asking what these might be/why you'd chose that phrasing?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com