[neilv]

Besides that, is YC building new trust?

One recent concern I have is (anecdotally) how poor a deal YC startups I've seen are offering for founding engineers.

Before YC started, early hires who helped make a startup successful could get rich on stock.

YC may have changed the investment scene for the better in some ways, such that founders are less likely to screwed by investors. But today, early hires are the ones who seem to be getting screwed.

In cases I've seen recently, even if the startup has a nice exit for founders and investors, employees would have been better off as a worker drone at a FAANG-like.

Do we need PG to write an essay (or the richest managing partners to make a video), about the value of incentivizing early hires?

Or, don't even talk about the value of it (since some aspiring founders are aggressively confident now, that they know how all the ducks are lined up), but talk about new criteria: YC looks for a respectable pool to incentivize early hires as positive signal, when determining who to fund.

[moomoo11]

Because the truth is that recent batches are filled with nepo founders and companies that are not really at the caliber of those that carry these VC names from the past (like pre-2015). Lots of fraud-aligned people/companies too.

Now its just a way to sell these companies to those OGs.

[dang]

It's so easy to post substanceless slurs, but I've been around YC since 2009 and it hasn't changed much from my perspective. The primary difference between pre-2015 and now is that those earlier startups have been around for over a decade longer. Of course the ones who turned out to be successful are better known.

[moomoo11]

I'm just giving my opinion from what I see. In no way did I "slur" and my point isn't about YC but the founders..

you raise a valid point about survivorship bias I guess, but as of the last few years it seems a lot of rage bait and do anything to get signal instead of the positive optimism that I felt a lot of the companies offered those years ago. i guess what i'm trying to say is that it has become the final version of itself as a venture firm, whereas before it was quirky (again, I am outsider!! so this is my POV) and backed companies that made products/services that I think made my life objectively better.

end of the day, I really like YC and think they do a good thing overall. but I think people/founders have realized how to game it, if that makes sense.

[dang]

I appreciate this follow-up. There's another variable, which I think may be relevant: all of us who have been following YC for the past 10+ years are by definition 10+ years older than we were back then. Some people (edit: at least on internet forums) tend to get more jaded and cynical over time*. I mention this not to accuse you of more than your share of this, but because it's on my mind a lot about the HN community in general. It's why we added "don't be curmudgeonly" to the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, for example.

(* Edit: and they seem to be highly motivated to post comments!)

[neilv]

I hope you find a good way to help HN be genuinely more optimistic.

Of course, right now, gloom is all over most of social media, and everywhere else, for understandable reasons of world reality (besides engagement manipulation/dynamics reasons).

And, within our field, a lot of the current enthusiasm and curiosity for tech news is for getting our economic tickets, in a tech gold rush that is not nearly as optimistic as the Web one was.

Will the optimism on HN come from topics that are interesting, but detached from all that threatens us, like a break or a reminder that there is still goodness and greatness?

Will it come from finding ways to correct or fight against what threatens humanity?

Will it come from tantalizing hints of personal advantage or opportunity to wind up on top?

[dang]

I hope so too and I take your comment as encouragement in that direction!

Another question that's orbiting around this in my head is how do we explain to the community what we're looking for and why. Knowing HN, and the internet in general, I can imagine the backlash from certain segments of the commentariat ("Oh so we're only allowed to do happy talk now?" - "Once again the corporate overlords crack the whip" - etc. etc.)

On the other hand, I also know that other sizeable segments of the community have been tired of the cynicism here for a long time - so there will be positive repercussions too.

[dang]

(Edit: factoring this bit into a different post because I want to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 - I hope that's ok!)

What you wrote above is so different than what I thought I was reading above that I had to ask myself why it felt that way in the first place. Probably the "nepo founders" bit was what got me, and "fraud-aligned" didn't help either. Maybe also this is a case of the 'rebound' phenomenon where the reply comment says more clearly what was originally meant; that happens a lot too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[moomoo11]

Ok

[neilv]

This got downvotes, after getting upvoted.

I wonder who thinks that a practice of combining sub-market salary with miniscule ISO grants (not even real equity) for early hires is a good idea for startups that want to win big.