[arrel]

Didn’t YC already try this with Yuri Milner ten or so years ago? From what I remember they canceled it because it was creating zombie companies, where the founders felt like they couldn’t give up on a bad idea because they still had so much runway.

[tabbott]

I have no inside information on this but I think it may have had more to do with concerns about whether they wanted to be encouraging every YC company to take Yuri Milner's money. See e.g.:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-faceboo...

Also the total funds at the time was ~$150K, aka roughly what YC was doing before this announcement: https://techcrunch.com/2011/01/28/yuri-milner-sv-angel-offer...

(I believe the history is that at the time, YC didn't have the free cash flow themselves to invest in every YC startup).

[Liron]

I'm confident that the Ron Conway / Yuri Milner "Start Fund" idea worked out great financially, although I think one difference is that it was optional while this new deal is mandatory, so there might have been a significant selection effect (positive or negative), e.g. I'm not sure if Coinbase (YC S12) took the deal and that would matter a lot to the returns.