[dang]

Nothing to do with the hot news of the moment. It's just YC doing what it always does.

I think there is probably some kind of headline bleedover effect where, because of repetition, we start seeing these things everywhere, like the afterimage of a bright light.

[bbor]

I think the point being made is more subtle than you're appreciating: it's not just any defense firm, it's a defense firm founded by engineers who have worked on multiple Elon projects. I understand we try to stay away from politics here, but speaking objectively+non-normatively: Elon has been known to greatly favor working with people that have worked at his companies, and he now has immense influence over the contracting processing of the federal government.

In other words: two Cybertruck engineers starting a defense company in February 2025 is naturally going to raise some eyebrows, especially when they're selling a technology that they're counting on other people to invent soon.

More interestingly/generally, your mention of confirmation bias/Bader-Meinhoff raises a question for me: is Y-Combinator really investing more in government and heavy industry as it appears? And it looks like the answer is yes, though it's still a tiny minority compared to general B2B SaaS companies:

https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-last-decade-of-y-combi...

Government is a bigger slicer than it's been since 2017, and similar for industry. More drastically, the pool of companies has greatly constricted in geographic terms, with almost all of the 2024 batch coming from the US. Most importantly--as many of y'all probably already know, but I didn't--they just backed their first pure-defense startup in August, Ares Cruise Missiles.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries

As far as company mottos go, "Missiles are cool" is a fucking terrifying one... Every day I fear the LessWrong people were less wrong than I thought they were.

[dang]

You guys are welcome to connect whatever dots you like, but the idea that YC funding decisions would change depending on the politics of the CEOs of the companies the founders used to work for strikes me as absurd, and I think I have a basis for saying that.

YC's process looks something like this: smart founders? check. Technical? check. Big important problem? check. Technically credible on this problem? check. "Did $Thing at $Company" can help on that last point for obvious reasons, but the idea of some triple-bank-shot collusion/corruption with Big Political Players is Too Much Internet.

This matters! I would hate it if any smart, technical, wants-to-work-on-big-problem founder were to read HN threads and think "I don't have connections, so I guess YC is not for me." Please don't anyone think that! If that's you, then YC is for people just like you. You have as good a chance as anyone, precisely because these externalities don't make the difference.

To shift gears to your other question:

> is Y-Combinator really investing more in government and heavy industry as it appears?

I don't know, but it's possible. However, the reason might not be what you'd expect. Trends among YC startups have to do with what founders want to work on, and that is mostly determined by macro factors beyond YC.

I suppose both my points could be summed up like this: "YC is all about the founders". A nice, simple, true sentence, but with a lot of implications that are easy to miss.