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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

why should they want to scale?

the point of YC is quality over quantity...if they go after quantity, they are just diluting what they have to offer.

If they have 1000 startups, how much support can they really offer?

The reason we want to grow YC is (a) to see how big an effect we can have and (b) as PB says in the article, because it's better for the startups.

As for not being able to support 1000 startups, maybe we couldn't. 1000 is a lot. But if you'd asked me in 2005, I would have been skeptical about the idea of supporting 66 startups at a time, and yet the last batch turned out better than ever. That's the thing about scaling. You can always do better than you expect. I'm not saying there's no upper limit, just that experience has taught me to reserve judgment about where it is.

Scaling could also mean ways of making individual startups bigger, on average.

Thats obviously the point with startups but do you have thoughts on ways of scaling in this dimension?

I don't think there is any shortage of problems to solve / companies to start, so I say, keep scaling.

Higher education is in need of reinvention. YC may be the most successful experiment to date towards that goal. I would really love to see a quantified ranking of top business schools by the total value of companies created per student-month in the last five years.

Business schools aren't designed for entrepreneurs. The hint is in the title--Master of Business Administration.

Business schools train you to be an officer aboard a battleship. YC trains you to build yourself a dive bomber and pilot it.

But don't you think that YC is a business school, by any definition of the word? And wouldn't it be interesting to do a comparative ranking alongside traditional business schools?

There was a time I wished I had gone to HBS or Stanford GSB. While those remain fine institutions, wouldn't any young nerd today prefer YC?

> But don't you think that YC is a business school, by any definition of the word?

No; it's not a school, and it's for entrepreneurs, not businessmen, which is the heart of the distinction I made previously.

> And wouldn't it be interesting to do a comparative ranking alongside traditional business schools?

No, because there's no basis of comparison. You can be a successful MBA without ever in your life working for a company with less than 10,000 people or having more than a token amount of equity compensation. Some MBAs prefer it that way.

> There was a time I wished I had gone to HBS or Stanford GSB. While those remain fine institutions, wouldn't any young nerd today prefer YC?

Any "young nerd", as far as I understand the term, would prefer a succession of stable job titles with "engineer" on the end from their first job out of college to retirement to an MBA. Now it turns out most of these engineers can be more valuable as founders, which supports the mission of YC. If it wasn't for the bubble and the social proof surrounding YC it would have never attracted the business-school types and you'd never have this confused association in your head.

I suspect our differences are mostly semantic. I consider all entrepreneurs to be businessmen (although not the reverse, of course). You may have a different definition. That's ok!

Here's the way I view it:

- Look at YC as a transfer function. In go individuals who want to learn how to successfully start a business. Out go many individuals who do indeed succeed starting a business.

- Look at HBS at a transfer function. Difference is that the individuals spend a lot more time inside the black box, do a lot more "makework", usually end up with debt not equity, and fewer of them succeed at starting a business. Still a great institution! And clearly many HBS students want to go work for Goldman Sachs, and go on to have great careers doing so.

I'm just saying that higher ed needs to be reinvented, and that reinvention will necessarily happen in ways that dont look like conventional education. Like YC.

To whatever extent business schools are replaced by something like YC, it'll be to the same extent that large businesses are replaced by smaller and more granular businesses generating massively more revenue per employee. That was more or less what I was hinting at with the battleship/dive bomber analogy. It's not that YC is taking the place of business school, or that the types of people who went to and thrived in business school will be attracted to YC. It's that creative people like hackers and designers will learn just enough business to handle it themselves and the types of people who get MBA's will have to learn to work for a living.

If they can scale, they can create more value (for themselves, for the alumni network, for founders in general). If they successfully can scale it, there'd be minimal dilution (and, as they mention in the article, some additional network benefits to the companies/founders).

What if the number of quantity startups has grown though? If last batch they had 66 startups that were judged as good enough to be in the program and this time they see 100 that make that grade, they can take 100 and quality shouldn't drop off.

It sounds like they have room to grow on the quality scale. They miss some good ones, as a recent HN post on a successful reject (who just missed the cutoff) showed.

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