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orliesaurus

Okay hear me out:

Ycombinator was an unfair advantage back in the day 10ish years ago:

- Incredible mentorship

- Incredible network of angels / alumni

- Incredible location to start a company - almost like a requirement

Today:

- Ok mentorship but most content can be found online

- You literally can connect with anyone through LinkedIn and everyone's email/social is super simple to find - also people are way more eager to meet you than 5-10 years ago

- Literally not a requirement anymore to work from SV to launch something successful!

Is Ycombinator still an unfair advantage in 2022?

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The pro's of YC are staggeringly overweight in comparison to the cons. You trade 7% of your mostly-worthless startup for $500k and the YC network? That's such an easy decision.

You cannot literally connect with anyone through Linkedin or social media. It just doesn't work like that.

My company did YC in 2017. Raised $5M. Disconnected mentorship. Agreeable coaches with no industry insight.

Since then, we folded, and started a new company. We didnt go for YC, but StartX and directly connect with funds such as First Round and others. We raised $12M, and not having YC in the cap table really helped our investors to dive in.

Would you mind sharing which companies these were?

What makes you say that you can connect to anyone on LinkedIn? You can purchase a premium LinkedIn account and craft a nice message and if you're actually a match for the expectation you can connect. Source: everyone I know receive messages from LinkedIn Premium users - they read at least the first sentence before discarding or accepting.

Huh? All the good engineers I know send anything from LinkedIn straight to /dev/null, because of exactly the phenomenon you describe: anyone can pay Microsoft money to send them spam.

not everyone's an engineer in the world - there's tons of sales and biz people that you can connect to ;)

7% seems like a great deal for some startups and a bad deal for others.

You missed funding.

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