[poomer]

It does feel like there are more and more startups every YC batch that are just cynical cash grabs. For example, all the recent LLM-related startups that are just UI wrappers around APIs - its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money, or solely for the reason of wanting to be in YC.

Unfortunately, this is a tech industry problem, not just a YC problem. Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol, and increasingly new entrants in the field are the types of folks who would've gone into law or finance in the past.

[taurath]

> Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol

Its about $$$, there's been a ton of disillusionment about all the companies especially unicorns who've taken billions in investment and still have yet to prove that they can make a continuous profit. All the ride shares, delivery apps, so many SaaS companies are all burning massive amounts of cash trying to get to a network effect and becoming an "infrastructure provider" but every time there's more than 1 and they have to actually compete it turns out they can't survive without more investor money. That and people finally realizing that the crypto industry is a den of snakes and grifters.

For the past 3 years on the Who's Hiring threads almost every other post was crypto, now its LLMs - they're the companies that are getting investments from VCs, almost purely out of hype or not wanting to miss the "next big thing".

The tech sector as a whole seems to be primarily about moving money out of legacy industries (advertising, business solutions, automation) and into knowledge workers. The thing is its also an engine for massively concentrating money power and wealth. Human labor is getting cheaper by the minute and there's a massive power and wealth imbalance. Which is ironic given how in the early days tech skills were very democratizing of earnings and power. I hope something comes along that will bring about that sort of thing again. Or at minimum maybe we can provide a basic standard of living for everyone - an iPhone doesn't give shelter.

[satvikpendem]

> its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money

...Yes? It's a company, the sole purpose is for the founders to make money from their products, which a VC like YC would also want. At least it's better than companies which don't make money (or profit, rather), like many in the 2010s.

[AnimalMuppet]

YC used to be about "There's a need that I care about. Let's see if I can build a company to fill that need." That's massively different from "I want to build a company that makes money. What can it do?"

How is it massively different? In one case you care about the need; in the other case you care about money. From those different motivations flow different actions, which lead to different kinds of companies (and even different kinds of comments on HN).

[jrochkind1]

How do you distinguish a "cynical cash grab" from something else, what do you think makes a startup a "cynical cash grab"?

Like... whether they truly believe their product is going to make the world a better place, or something like that?

I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves.

The VC's are mostly investing based on whether they think a thing will make them lots of money, and always have been, no?

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

Your last sentence asks about VCs but the parent comment is talking about founders. Considering that, it doesn't seem that the things are mutually exclusive. It could be that founders are increasingly starting businesses that "are just cynical cash grabs" (I'm not attempting to define that, FWIW) and VCs "are mostly investing based on whether they think a thing will make them lots of money".

> I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves.

This is likely a common thing, which further ambiguates this. Makes me wonder if there's something about recent goings-on which makes founders more willing to deceive themselves, therefore increasing the likelihood that their intentions are assumed by outside observers to be more negative.

[singleshot_]

I think you look at a company and you say, “is this an honest, principled cash grab?” and if the answer is no, it might be a cynical cash grab.

[jrochkind1]

great answer! ha

[lazide]

There are fewer obvious untackled problems that are amenable to technical solutions, it’s natural.

Also startups are about making money (generally), it’s a means to an end. Otherwise it would be an open source GitHub project, no?

If someone can make $1bln integrating some APIs and negotiating hard, writing a bunch of CRUD code duplicating what a bunch of other folks have already done is pretty silly.

[codegeek]

Yes. Even YC veterans like Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell have talked about it in videos like these below [0]. They call these people "conformists"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia7IKW0yuG0

[diatone]

It would be great for someone with experience from the dot com bubble to weigh in here, to describe if similar dynamics occurred back then

[diceduckmonk]

> its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money

Ultimately, startups are about making money.