[carlgreene]

Any other founders feel like YC has lost its luster? Not only are the number of AI companies in the portfolio ridiculous, but the large class sizes seem so much less personal.

Not to bag on anyone who’s in YC right now, but it seems to be going the way of many ivy leagues - still meaningful, but very much not the same proxy for extraordinary it once was.

[setgree]

Off-topic but when was the Ivy League a proxy for extraordinary? Yale selected for height until at least 1965, Harvard was super dedicated to excluding Jews in the 30s and its athletes had SAT scores that were 100 points lower on average as of 2005, etc.[0]

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in-ivy...

[tptacek]

What ever was the "luster"? It depends on what you thought YC was. Everything else it did or could do aside: if you're building a company that is going to need to raise funds for the business model to work, YC is still the most straightforward path to doing a high-dollar syndicated unpriced seed round, which is a funding model that YC more or less pioneered.

[decocted]

YC didn’t start as a VC firm, but it is one now. You don’t even mention pre-seed here, which is what YC was: the first pre-seed for an absolutely tiny batch of promising founders, who actually got a disproportionate advantage compared to average pre-seed rounds overall. Now, YC only gives disproportionate advantage against unfunded startups, and only a proportionate one against the average raise of equivalent size.

YC has lost all of the people who were there at the start. Saying something like “what ever was the ‘luster’” is akin to saying “who the heck was Steve Jobs, who cares, Apple is still the same business.”

Sheesh.

[swores]

> "YC has lost all of the people who were there at the start. Saying something like “what ever was the ‘luster’” is akin to saying “who the heck was Steve Jobs, who cares, Apple is still the same business.” Sheesh."

Apple does still make hugely popular products and still makes a huge amount of profit.

Plenty of institutions, from universities to businesses, have managed to continue succeeding across multiple generations, just as many have failed after losing a generation.

I've no idea how YC helps now vs. the beginning, but different people isn't proof of it being worse.

[yumraj]

I had met someone once who made a point that the value of a Harvard MBA was not the education, but rather that you got selected/admitted to this program and could use the brand.

I believe the same is true for YC. The primary value is being able to claim that you’re funded by YC and you were part of a cohort. That opens doors, to both investors as well as potential partners. The education/advice is standard and freely available everywhere.

[fakedang]

I'd like to argue for YC in the same way as I would argue when someone brings up my alma mater (or an Ivy League uni) - it's not the uni that shines, it's the people you're studying with.

YC's huge advantage is that they have an internal network of startups who support each other with YC money as customers, which then get pushed to VCs as revenue growth numbers. VCs have learnt to get in on the gravy train early, because the brand-name still carries value downstream. For no-name startups and no-name founders with no fancy universities (who are increasingly being ignored), this is a huge disadvantage.

If you want to look at YC's actual success rate, take a look at any of their public market companies' performance. Hint, none of them have outperformed their IPO price. In fact, many of them only found their ways into exits through the SPAC frenzy of 2021.

[LanceJones]

Looks like YC is moving to 4 cohorts annually -- and I agree with you on the AI product density in the past few batches -- but I've heard (from two alum) that the smaller sub-cohorts (i.e., within a batch) make it feel smaller and more intimate.

[senko]

Yes.

250ish per cohort meant the partners were spread very thin, and founders could realistically connect with just a subset of batchmates.

I'm glad they're scaling back the batch size.

[dbbk]

Yes the sheer number of AI slop companies is so uninspiring. Where is the creativity? There are still plenty of great technology companies to be built that are not ChatGPT wrappers.

[senko]

Go build one? (with or without YC support)

I do like your comment as the critique of contemporary tech entrepreneurship culture that is very hype oriented, likely at the expense of comparatively few blue ocean ideas that get crowded out.

However I do fear that's global and not something specific to YC or the valley. Here across the pond we have the same gold rush, except at minor league level.

[dbbk]

I am building one

[echelon]

> AI slop companies

There is so much market up for grabs. Most companies will fail, but the ones that succeed can win really big. And the surface area is so much larger than attempting a non-AI company since the advantages are potentially huge.

> ChatGPT wrappers.

Create value. Doesn't matter how you do. Just create value.

[xelamonster]

I like your first point, hadn't thought of it that way; makes it seem just a bit more reasonable. Regarding "create value" though, that's where I think a lot of the negative sentiment comes in: the vast majority of these new AI companies offer nothing at all of value to anyone. Outside of a very small few even the ones with an attractive premise fail to live up to the experience they advertise.

[SR2Z]

The point is that the small few will become extremely popular.

ChatGPT isn't particularly useful.

A wrapper around ChatGPT which extracts specific entries from a PDF bill? That's incredibly useful.

The only niche so far that seems to have caught on for LLMs is code autocomplete, but that's already recording real revenues.

[threeseed]

> but the ones that succeed can win really big

May. Not can.

There is no evidence yet that AI is anything other than a feature.