[jacquesm]

> Thursday night would be considered pure insanity coming from someone else.

Time will tell. The genius of YC was to spot the hackers as the driving force of a new generation of tech companies, to be founder friendly, to use the classes to get rid of the problem that every angel investor has to contend with ('is this a good investment or not?') and to tell the story in a very compelling way and with their own money on the line.

Everything else so far is underwhelming at best, but the viral nature of YC and the alumni network are not going to be stopped for a long long time.

It's a bit along the lines of 'what have the Romans ever done for us?', if that's all that came out of it then it is already a spectacular success by any measure.

[atomical]

This is unfathomably harder than anything YC has ever dealt with in the past. Judging by what happened with IBM's Watson and Theranos I really doubt Sam will be given a blank check for the black box that is likely to emerge.

[jacquesm]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Labs

Is a good case study for investments on reputation alone.