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Comment by ahstilde | Hacker News Reader

I did YC in W21 in NYC. I was not allowed to meet people in large groups until April (after the batch).

I disagree with each and every one of these ratings and conclusions.

Firstly, the comparison should be "Is the alternative to YC worth it?" For many companies, the alternative is raising nothing and bootstrapping, or raising at significantly lower valuations.

Additionally, I believe founders approach YC the wrong way. YC is not there to coddle you. They are there to give you access to hundreds of exceptional founders, brilliant partners who have seen much more than you, and a fundraising platform.

It is on the founder to adapt their behavior to get the most out of Y Combinator. Unfortunately, many founders are unable to do so, and waste the opportunity.

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YC will absolutely coddle you if you manage to become one of their “darling” startups, just like any other incubator or VC firm.

That’s the type of thing that you have to earn, and if you earn it you don’t need it.

That's totally true, we also heard that the attitude is dramatically different if you're in the top of the batch.

Unfortunately, long-term performance is proven to not correlate well with performance during the batch, and YC are transparent about it. So I wouldn't recommend over-stressing it.

its almost like... and i know this is crazy... they are just money vampires?!

That seems a little extreme!

It's true that the business is governed by power laws at every level and you can't ignore those and succeed. I hope that doesn't prevent people from still being decent to each other.

> For many companies, the alternative is raising nothing and bootstrapping, or raising at significantly lower valuations.

The review has four stars for fundraising. So it's not like they don't address that.

However I don't understand "1.2. Network of clients/partners". I wonder why YC is expected to provide that. And for the Money one, that's common knowledge and only makes sense if you don't get a lot of value out of it.

The most concerning one to me is that Networking isn't 5 stars and I would like to hear reviews from others because I suspect it might still deserve that.

>They are there to give you access to hundreds of exceptional founders

Define "exceptional"? Is that major exits above a certain valuation? YC has hundreds of these?

> They are there to give you access to hundreds of exceptional founders

Is there anything you can't do on your own? Like finding email and writing? Mentioning that you're from YC in the beginning adds less to the conversion than the actual message you're conveying, imo.

If you have enough of those to send, seems like something easy enough to A/B test. You only have a few sentences before an email recipient marks your email as spam. If one of those mentions your YC batch and that's what keeps their attention for another couple sentences, hey.

As a YC alum, of all the emails i get spammed with, I'll give YC founders are read and a reply. More often than not it's a "sorry can't help" but I will at least give it a look.

> I was not allowed to meet people in large groups until April (after the batch).

I don't understand this. Why would they stop people talking to each other?

covid

Oh duh, of course.

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