Why are there no good YCombinator startups any more?
Feels like YC is full of grifters nowadays.
Is it because zero interest rate policy made every VC look like a clever person?
Was there ever a secret sauce at YC?
14 comments
I think a lot of the low hanging fruit for the internet/mobile space has already been picked, so we're seeing more capital intensive projects. It seems like a lot of money is betting on AI revolutionizing things.
3d|
Anonymous
||"more capital intensive projects" - but is that actually the case? For many years, the mantra was "hardware startups are so capital intensive" and now they invest much more capital but it seems like everyone is buying the same nvidia off-the-shelf hardware or sinking millions into cloud. I don't seem to see ambitious hardware startups spawning from YC who later receive tens or hundreds of millions in funding.
3d|
Anonymous
||I share the same sentiment. Many of the startups from recent batches appear to be just LLM wrappers
3d|
Anonymous
||Well I guess LLM wrappers are an evolution of the previous batches being AWS wrappers...
3d|
Anonymous
||reframing dropbox as AWS wrapper is just nasty LOL
3d|
Anonymous
||Maybe it's become more difficult to be a disruptor? A decade ago a small team could move faster than the giants, but now the giants move pretty fast
3d|
Anonymous
||is it even a good deal for founders? Investment amount doesn't seem large enough to be practical in today's economy
3d|
Anonymous
||It's was never a "good deal for founders" if you're thinking about how unlikely it is for you to strike big as a founder of a SaaS or similar.
3d|
Anonymous
||The hype that technology can solve everything died out, and alongside side it, people's motivation to work on hard problems via get-rich-quick startups. I'm coining the term "Startup Winter" right here and now, because the pendulum will eventually fall back the other way
3d|
Anonymous
||Just speculating, but I wonder if the emerging geopolitical situation will create demand for domestic manufacturing "startups".
3d|
Anonymous
||AI ate easy startups, and all the good ideas in software are outside of realm of startups. Nowadays you just start a git repo. And with web3 and p2p you don't need to formally organize anyone, just start a repo and disrupt the old world. Old internet is dead anyways.
3d|
Anonymous
||This feels similar to the “why did we stop producing affective research” question that people ask about academia. It’s probably a bunch of factors including that the low hanging fruit has been picked off
2d|
Anonymous
||Academia is now about following research because pace everywhere is crazy
1d|
Anonymous
||Taleb has a bit to say about why academic research doesn't deliver. I know opinions vary on him but I think he makes some valid points on this. The tldr is plans fail- what succeeds is creating (research) environments where the cost of failure is minimized. The bangers will arise from that environment.
Nobody wants to fund that though, money needs a plan with an outcome.
Nobody wants to fund that though, money needs a plan with an outcome.
1d|
Anonymous
||Add a comment