[beaconstudios]

why do you think YCombinator isn't willing to exploit people? They're a VC accelerator, of course they are. Just because the profit motive doesn't always lead to immoral behaviour, doesn't mean that profit-motivated people aren't going to pursue immoral behaviour if it's profitable.

[throwanem]

It's a little surprising to see YC start to risk the brand this way, though, and as others have noted in this thread, not for the first time recently - Skip the Interview, in particular, being of note in this connection, after having shut down the same day it launched due to a complete, and frankly rather easily predictable, failure of product-market fit.

Right now, and in the past, "YC-backed" has consistently been a very solid selling point, both for following rounds and in recruitment. Maybe it's just a transient bobble, and I strongly hope that proves true. Still, at this rate, I'm starting to wonder a little what "YC-backed" might come to mean a few years hence, and whether it'll still be worth the same.

[beaconstudios]

The low-hanging fruit have been picked over. The easy wins of SaaS and consumer web tech have been won already, but they still have an obligation to generate the same levels of profit (have you ever seen a company gracefully shrink with its industry, especially a financialised company?), so they will start to both go for niches, and go for exploitation. Growth is always most rapid at the introduction of a new industry, and if you're a hypercapitalist (as VCs tend to be) you're going to be under pressure to see continued profit levels long after the industry can sustain them healthily.