| Same here, there's a huge difference between YC in the early days and now. the Series A program, which coaches seed-stage alums on how to nab follow-on funding Pushing startups further into the hands of VCs who'll get rich whenever they're acquired or IPO. YC China, a standalone program that will be run out of Beijing once it gets up and going Lots of ethical questions about this that are just never answered. Is it okay to funnel capital into another country that is vastly different from the US in terms of politics, market, etc.? “We’ll fund a lot of people doing a lot of things that sound really dumb, and most of the time they will be. And some of the time, it will seem like a bad idea and be jaw-droppingly brilliant. The very best startup ideas are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of, ‘sounds like a bad idea,’ ‘is in fact a good idea.'” This particular quote from Altman just reminds me of PG's essay on why smart people have bad ideas: http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html It just makes me see OpenAI as suspect now because they just opened a for-profit branch? And they are keeping some of their research hidden? I mean, where's the openness in that? |
"We expected the most common proposal to be for multiplayer games. We were not far off: this was the second most common. The most common was some combination of a blog, a calendar, a dating site, and Friendster. Maybe there is some new killer app to be discovered here, but it seems perverse to go poking around in this fog when there are valuable, unsolved problems lying about in the open for anyone to see."
It sounds like a lot of people were trying to make Facebook in 2005.