Is Y Combinator a slave trade? | Hacker News Reader

Is Y Combinator a slave trade?

2 pointsNicholasMan5 comments

I've started to understand something about you guys watching from Southern California and getting some run off from your culture. This vesting thing in technology and minute percentage is all about slave trading. VC capital these days is just finding talented people, giving them a tiny amount of hope in meaningless percentages for 3-4 year stretches (much like prison) and then buying and selling them. It is interesting, but also sad. I guess if I ever get enough money maybe I'll join in, but it is in fact wasteful from all of the good ideas of the slaves will be spent into products less valuable than what they could probably create on their own.

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No, it's a lottery. You put in hard work and an idea, and in return for giving up a (small) stake you get to attempt to change your luck. If you're accepted the one thing that is certain is that YC is out some cash. And YC is one of the best lotteries in that they are actually on your side.

Calling anything a slave trade when clearly all parties are in there by their own volition is incredibly dumb and a pretty bad insult to anybody that's the victim of actual slavery.

Just imagine: YC has MANY more applicants than they have slots, I figure if they were enslaving people then there would be a lot of attempts to leave rather than to get into the doors.

They're creating those products that they would be creating on their own, but probably with a higher chance of success.

Your account is all of 45 days old and you still haven't figured this out?

From a certain point of view, all work is slavery. But I think if you met some actual modern-day slaves and some actual startup founders, you would notice some important differences between their lives.

I think Betteridge's law of headlines applies here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

Is Y Combinator a slave trade?

No.

Don't trivialize the slave trade so you can make a weak rhetorical critique of YC.

No one is obligated to join YC. You do it if you think you'll gain something from it.

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