If the funding is available immediately (not just an immediate commitment for funding once they start a batch), would it address the following problem I've run into a few times?
In the last year alone, I've had to bow out of co-founding two promising startups with good biz co-founders, because first-year MBA students wanted to finish their degree before they sought funding.
Two ways funding could help:
1. I couldn't afford to work over a year as a technical cofounder, executing in full-time startup mode like usually needs to be done, for over a year, with no income. While they were part-time, and getting an MBA and networking out of it during this period. Even ramen lifestyle funding would've made this closer to an equitable balance of contribution and risk among the cofounders.
2. There's also the concern that MBA programs seem to push students to have a hypothetical startup, so there's always a chance that the MBA student won't be fully committed to the business once they graduate. Maybe accepted funding could make this a firmer commitment. (Even if there's no contractual obligation to pursue the startup, I'd guess that new MBA graduates don't want to burn bridges in the small world of investors.)
This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society
If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.
How many YC founders end up rich before 30? Or even at all? I think it’s likely a highly valuable experience running a business experiment someone else will fund (not to mention connections you wouldn’t otherwise make), but the odds of actual, liquid wealth from the experience and time spent are very low.
Alot of them do, not only that, they build skills that help them start their next company. Many of which are bootstrapped and profitable. This whole idea that startups are a complete lottery ticket is not only false, its increasingly less false, more money is being made now in startups than ever
Based on public exit and liquidity event information, startups still remain a lottery ticket for most. 90% of startups fail entirely, for example (CB Insights). YC startups have more longevity, and more get to a Series A then non YC startups, but the best batches based on performance have been between 2009 and 2013. 10% achieve an exit, 4.5% became unicorns. Only 17 companies backed by YC (out of almost 5k) have gone public, and all except Airbnb, Instacart, and Reddit have underperformed post IPO.
Have fun, learn, develop and grow your skills and network, take the investment, but it’s important to be honest with one’s self about odds of success and outcome. If you win, respect and appreciate the lottery ticket for what it was. Hard work and years of grinding is table stakes, but you can still fail (and most do).
If you think "exit" automatically means millions, you've probably never seen an exit before. Of those that exit, the majority of startups get almost $0 for the common shareholders. I continue to believe that a lot of YC's alpha comes from the fact that they are very good at angling people toward small exits where they basically make no money but YC recovers their investment.
Let me make this simple for you: you will not get rich by 30.
I know, I know...there are examples! And yes, there are, but statistically, they won't be you. You're playing the lottery, only it's a lottery that steals your youth and gives you psychological problems.
If your only goal is to get rich, then don't do a startup. You have to have some more fundamental reason, or the agony will beat you.
I live in NYC, I have met alot of very rich startup founders. But not only that, lots of people making 50k a month from a startup they built post YC, raised no VC, and have no boss.
Its an outdated take to think people arent doing this
Sure. Google "selection bias". You aren't meeting the 10,000 who failed.
I also live in NYC. I lived in SF, during possibly the all-time greatest period of wealth creation in the last 50 years. I knew billionaires when they couldn't afford bar tabs. I ate leftover boxes of Obama-Os (again, Google it) that nobody wanted.
I'm still telling you the truth. Every one of those people who succeeded went through hell and back, and even then there was no guarantee that there was a reward at the end of the hell. Doing a startup is like getting punched in the face repeatedly for many, many years, with only your faith -- in something -- to carry you forward. You have to have more than just a desire to be rich.
You dont have to create a billion dollar company. Especially after raising VC and failing, its much clearer how to build a business. Very reasonable to think a smart hard working person can build a company making 1M a year. Life owning a company that makes even a moderate amount is 1000x better than a career. I think your analysis is outdated
Entrepreneurship isn’t getting showered with millions for doing nothing other than being accepted as a part of the blessed elite and access to an infinite spigot of free money when all other sources have been dammed off and diverted to the ever shrinking minority of ever increasing ultra-wealth.
For people who took a second to get this (like me), @fijiaarone means it is.
And I concur - in this AI hypecycle more than ever it seems to be about how can peacock the best. Its neck and neck with the crypto hypecycle a few years ago for the incidence rate of vaporware and snake oil. Sure there are some legit founders building meaningful product but they seem to be a small minority.
This would be a better comment if it asserted what the poster believed entrepreneurship IS rather than what it is not.
FWIW, to me entrepreneurship is an amazing path, but starting a company right out of college?? There’s a LOT of skills to develop. Have someone to copy. Make sure you draw enough salary. Keep an identity outside of your company (networking!) so you can pick yourself up if (when) it crashes.
To what extent is YC's current strategy a form of "cookie-licking"? I.e. capture a small fraction of every plausible startup created by the next generation of students?
100% at this point. The industry's leading AI for start-up ideas has run out of AI for _____ suggestions. It was pretty obvious they were scraping the bottom of the barrel a month ago when I made this list from their current batch:
Acrely — AI for HVAC administration
Aden — AI for ERP operations
AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation
Agentin AI — AI for enterprise agents
AgentMail — AI for agent email infrastructure
AlphaWatch AI — AI for financial search
Alter — AI for secure agent workflow access control
Altur — AI for debt collection voice agents
Ambral — AI for account management
Anytrace — AI for support engineering
April — AI for voice executive assistants
AutoComputer — AI for robotic desktop automation
Autosana — AI for mobile QA
Autotab — AI for knowledge work
Avent — AI for industrial commerce
b-12 — AI for chemical intelligence
Bluebirds — AI for outbound targeting
burnt — AI for food supply chain operations
Cactus — AI for smartphone model deployment
Candytrail — AI for sales funnel automation
CareSwift — AI for ambulance operations
Certus AI — AI for restaurant phone lines
Clarm — AI for search and agent building
Clodo — AI for real estate CRMs
Closera — AI for commercial real estate employees
Clueso — AI for instructional content generation
cocreate — AI for video editing
Comena — AI for order automation in distribution
ContextFort — AI for construction drawing reviews
Convexia — AI for pharma drug discovery
Credal.ai — AI for enterprise workflow assistants
CTGT — AI for preventing hallucinations
Cyberdesk — AI for legacy desktop automation
datafruit — AI for DevOps engineering
Daymi — AI for personal clones
DeepAware AI — AI for data center efficiency
Defog.ai — AI for natural-language data queries
Design Arena — AI for design benchmarks
Doe — AI for autonomous private equity workforce
Double – Coding Copilot — AI for coding assistance
EffiGov — AI for local government call centers
Eloquent AI — AI for complex financial workflows
F4 — AI for compliance in engineering drawings
Finto — AI for enterprise accounting
Flai — AI for dealership customer acquisition
Floot — AI for app building
Fluidize — AI for scientific experiments
Flywheel AI — AI for excavator autonomy
Freya — AI for financial services voice agents
Frizzle — AI for teacher grading
Galini — AI guardrails as a service
Gaus — AI for retail investors
Ghostship — AI for UX bug detection
Golpo — AI for video generation from documents
Halluminate — AI for training computer use
HealthKey — AI for clinical trial matching
Hera — AI for motion design
Humoniq — AI for BPO in travel and transport
Hyprnote — AI for enterprise notetaking
Imprezia — AI for ad networks
Induction Labs — AI for computer use automation
iollo — AI for multimodal biological data
Iron Grid — AI for hardware insurance
IronLedger.ai — AI for property accounting
Janet AI — AI for project management (AI-native Jira)
Kernel — AI for web agent browsing infrastructure
Kestroll — AI for media asset management
Keystone — AI for software engineering
Knowlify — AI for explainer video creation
Kyber — AI for regulatory notice drafting
Lanesurf — AI for freight booking voice automation
Lantern — AI for Postgres application development
Lark — AI for billing operations
Latent — AI for medical language models
Lemma — AI for consumer brand insights
Linkana — AI for supplier onboarding reviews
Liva AI — AI for video and voice data labeling
Locata — AI for healthcare referral management
Lopus AI — AI for deal intelligence
Lotas — AI for data science IDEs
Louiza Labs — AI for synthetic biology data
Luminai — AI for business process automation
Magnetic — AI for tax preparation
MangoDesk — AI for evaluation data
Maven Bio — AI for BioPharma insights
Meteor — AI for web browsing (AI-native browser)
Mimos — AI for regulated firm visibility in search
Minimal AI — AI for e-commerce customer support
Mobile Operator — AI for mobile QA
Mohi — AI for workflow clarity
Monarcha — AI for GIS platforms
moonrepo — AI for developer workflow tooling
Motives — AI for consumer research
Nautilus — AI for car wash optimization
NOSO LABS — AI for field technician support
Nottelabs — AI for enterprise web agents
Novaflow — AI for biology lab analytics
Nozomio — AI for contextual coding agents
Oki — AI for company intelligence
Okibi — AI for agent building
Omnara — AI for agent command centers
OnDeck AI — AI for video analysis
Onyx — AI for generative platform development
Opennote — AI for note-based tutoring
Opslane — AI for ETL data pipelines
Orange Slice — AI for sales lead generation
Outlit — AI for quoting and proposals
Outrove — AI for Salesforce
Pally — AI for relationship management
Paloma — AI for billing CRMs
Parachute — AI for clinical evaluation and deployment
PARES AI — AI for commercial real estate brokers
People.ai — AI for enterprise growth insights
Perspectives Health — AI for clinic EMRs
Pharmie AI — AI for pharmacy technicians
Phases — AI for clinical trial automation
Pingo AI — AI for language learning companions
Pleom — AI for conversational interaction
Qualify.bot — AI for commercial lending phone agents
Reacher — AI for creator collaboration marketing
Ridecell — AI for fleet operations
Risely AI — AI for campus administration
Risotto — AI for IT helpdesk automation
Riverbank Security — AI for offensive security
Saphira AI — AI for certification automation
Sendbird — AI for omnichannel agents
Sentinel — AI for on-call engineering
Serafis — AI for institutional investor knowledge graphs
Sigmantic AI — AI for HDL design
Sira — AI for HR management of hourly teams
Socratix AI — AI for fraud and risk teams
Solva — AI for insurance
Spotlight Realty — AI for real estate brokerage
StackAI — AI for low-code agent platforms
stagewise — AI for frontend coding agents
Stellon Labs — AI for edge device models
Stockline — AI for food wholesaler ERP
Stormy AI — AI for influencer marketing
Synthetic Society — AI for simulating real users
SynthioLabs — AI for medical expertise in pharma
Tailor — AI for retail ERP automation
Tecto AI — AI for governance of AI employees
Tesora — AI for procurement analysis
Trace — AI for workflow automation
TraceRoot.AI — AI for automated bug fixing
truthsystems — AI for regulated governance layers
Uplift AI — AI for underserved voice languages
Veles — AI for dynamic sales pricing
Veritus Agent — AI for loan servicing and collections
Verne Robotics — AI for robotic arms
VoiceOS — AI for voice interviews
VoxOps AI — AI for regulated industry calls
Vulcan Technologies — AI for regulatory drafting
Waydev — AI for engineering leadership insights
Wayline — AI for property management voice automation
Wedge — AI for healthcare trust layers
Workflow86 — AI for workflow automation
ZeroEval — AI for agent evaluation and optimization
Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again?
There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:
- new parents
- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled
The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?
We might, and I'm sure you're right that there are many great founders not applying to do YC because they don't want to move here.
But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.
People in those situations can and should start companies without an accelerator (or at least without this one). The joke around the SF scene is that even a founder with a boy/girlfriend is a sign of a startup doomed to fail, and YC doesn't seem particularly invested in changing that culture.
It’s a form of self selection. YC (and silicon valley at large) isn't interested in founders with pesky things like real life responsibilities or anything else that will prevent them from focusing on their startup 24x7.
YC is so early on some of these deals that the primary gauge is team - which means personality of founders. Very hard to measure remotely.
I'm in a group, not as big or famous, that does early checks. We're 95% remote. IME, it's so hard to make those judgement calls through web-cam.
Agreed that founder focus is a big factor and that life gets in the way (of deals). However, if you don't like YC conditions there are 100s of other places to (attempt a) raise.
I loved YC and can't recommend it enough. But if you're going to start a company, please consider working at another company first, even if briefly. (And make it a company you respect and want to emulate.)
The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.
> You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.
having worked at a few dysfunctional companies, there's value in it. you learn to spot red flag decisions and the kinds of people that tend to cause organizations to explode from within. a Lot of the success at my current company can be attributed to decisions I've made that came from experience at failed startups where we did the opposite.
Great, then at least you can see what you don't like! (But really, I intentionally said a company you want to emulate, because I do agree – no point in taking this advice if you go to a bad company)
I learned a lot working for other people but I’ve learned the most running my own thing.
I do think many college grads generally don’t understand how business works though because they just haven’t experienced it yet. School is a totally different beast.
Cannot +1 this enough! Joining a team you respect and seeing how they operate gives you a really good baseline to work off of and take what you like and modify what you disagreed with.
You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself
I made this mistake. I love where I've wound up, but I would have gotten there much more quickly and with a lot less heartache if I'd worked as part of an existing company before starting my own.
If the funding is available immediately (not just an immediate commitment for funding once they start a batch), would it address the following problem I've run into a few times?
In the last year alone, I've had to bow out of co-founding two promising startups with good biz co-founders, because first-year MBA students wanted to finish their degree before they sought funding.
Two ways funding could help:
1. I couldn't afford to work over a year as a technical cofounder, executing in full-time startup mode like usually needs to be done, for over a year, with no income. While they were part-time, and getting an MBA and networking out of it during this period. Even ramen lifestyle funding would've made this closer to an equitable balance of contribution and risk among the cofounders.
2. There's also the concern that MBA programs seem to push students to have a hypothetical startup, so there's always a chance that the MBA student won't be fully committed to the business once they graduate. Maybe accepted funding could make this a firmer commitment. (Even if there's no contractual obligation to pursue the startup, I'd guess that new MBA graduates don't want to burn bridges in the small world of investors.)
This is basically ensuring YC starts to get more absolute top graduates. Entrepreneurship is more and more seen as the default path for top people in the USA. All other career paths are for people that want to take the risk of ending up in a 50 year assembly line. This is probably good for society
If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.
How many YC founders end up rich before 30? Or even at all? I think it’s likely a highly valuable experience running a business experiment someone else will fund (not to mention connections you wouldn’t otherwise make), but the odds of actual, liquid wealth from the experience and time spent are very low.
Alot of them do, not only that, they build skills that help them start their next company. Many of which are bootstrapped and profitable. This whole idea that startups are a complete lottery ticket is not only false, its increasingly less false, more money is being made now in startups than ever
Based on public exit and liquidity event information, startups still remain a lottery ticket for most. 90% of startups fail entirely, for example (CB Insights). YC startups have more longevity, and more get to a Series A then non YC startups, but the best batches based on performance have been between 2009 and 2013. 10% achieve an exit, 4.5% became unicorns. Only 17 companies backed by YC (out of almost 5k) have gone public, and all except Airbnb, Instacart, and Reddit have underperformed post IPO.
Have fun, learn, develop and grow your skills and network, take the investment, but it’s important to be honest with one’s self about odds of success and outcome. If you win, respect and appreciate the lottery ticket for what it was. Hard work and years of grinding is table stakes, but you can still fail (and most do).
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pulling-back-the-curtain-...
https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report
> More than 50% of companies are still alive after 10 years
I’d rather have a 50% chance at my own startup being alive after 10 years than go work some big corp job.
To each their own. If you must do a startup, do so.
10% chance at millions fresh out school sounds great!
If you think "exit" automatically means millions, you've probably never seen an exit before. Of those that exit, the majority of startups get almost $0 for the common shareholders. I continue to believe that a lot of YC's alpha comes from the fact that they are very good at angling people toward small exits where they basically make no money but YC recovers their investment.
Let me make this simple for you: you will not get rich by 30.
I know, I know...there are examples! And yes, there are, but statistically, they won't be you. You're playing the lottery, only it's a lottery that steals your youth and gives you psychological problems.
If your only goal is to get rich, then don't do a startup. You have to have some more fundamental reason, or the agony will beat you.
I live in NYC, I have met alot of very rich startup founders. But not only that, lots of people making 50k a month from a startup they built post YC, raised no VC, and have no boss.
Its an outdated take to think people arent doing this
You live in NYC.... there are a lot of "startup founders" who already come from generational family wealth
Sure. Google "selection bias". You aren't meeting the 10,000 who failed.
I also live in NYC. I lived in SF, during possibly the all-time greatest period of wealth creation in the last 50 years. I knew billionaires when they couldn't afford bar tabs. I ate leftover boxes of Obama-Os (again, Google it) that nobody wanted.
I'm still telling you the truth. Every one of those people who succeeded went through hell and back, and even then there was no guarantee that there was a reward at the end of the hell. Doing a startup is like getting punched in the face repeatedly for many, many years, with only your faith -- in something -- to carry you forward. You have to have more than just a desire to be rich.
You dont have to create a billion dollar company. Especially after raising VC and failing, its much clearer how to build a business. Very reasonable to think a smart hard working person can build a company making 1M a year. Life owning a company that makes even a moderate amount is 1000x better than a career. I think your analysis is outdated
If it's 1000x better than a career and you believe it's achievable, why haven't you done it yet?
why do you think i havent
Entrepreneurship isn’t getting showered with millions for doing nothing other than being accepted as a part of the blessed elite and access to an infinite spigot of free money when all other sources have been dammed off and diverted to the ever shrinking minority of ever increasing ultra-wealth.
For people who took a second to get this (like me), @fijiaarone means it is.
And I concur - in this AI hypecycle more than ever it seems to be about how can peacock the best. Its neck and neck with the crypto hypecycle a few years ago for the incidence rate of vaporware and snake oil. Sure there are some legit founders building meaningful product but they seem to be a small minority.
dude we just invented computers you can talk to
This would be a better comment if it asserted what the poster believed entrepreneurship IS rather than what it is not.
FWIW, to me entrepreneurship is an amazing path, but starting a company right out of college?? There’s a LOT of skills to develop. Have someone to copy. Make sure you draw enough salary. Keep an identity outside of your company (networking!) so you can pick yourself up if (when) it crashes.
its still better than these people fighting over promotions in finance
To what extent is YC's current strategy a form of "cookie-licking"? I.e. capture a small fraction of every plausible startup created by the next generation of students?
100% at this point. The industry's leading AI for start-up ideas has run out of AI for _____ suggestions. It was pretty obvious they were scraping the bottom of the barrel a month ago when I made this list from their current batch:
Acrely — AI for HVAC administration
Aden — AI for ERP operations
AgentHub — AI for agent simulation and evaluation
Agentin AI — AI for enterprise agents
AgentMail — AI for agent email infrastructure
AlphaWatch AI — AI for financial search
Alter — AI for secure agent workflow access control
Altur — AI for debt collection voice agents
Ambral — AI for account management
Anytrace — AI for support engineering
April — AI for voice executive assistants
AutoComputer — AI for robotic desktop automation
Autosana — AI for mobile QA
Autotab — AI for knowledge work
Avent — AI for industrial commerce
b-12 — AI for chemical intelligence
Bluebirds — AI for outbound targeting
burnt — AI for food supply chain operations
Cactus — AI for smartphone model deployment
Candytrail — AI for sales funnel automation
CareSwift — AI for ambulance operations
Certus AI — AI for restaurant phone lines
Clarm — AI for search and agent building
Clodo — AI for real estate CRMs
Closera — AI for commercial real estate employees
Clueso — AI for instructional content generation
cocreate — AI for video editing
Comena — AI for order automation in distribution
ContextFort — AI for construction drawing reviews
Convexia — AI for pharma drug discovery
Credal.ai — AI for enterprise workflow assistants
CTGT — AI for preventing hallucinations
Cyberdesk — AI for legacy desktop automation
datafruit — AI for DevOps engineering
Daymi — AI for personal clones
DeepAware AI — AI for data center efficiency
Defog.ai — AI for natural-language data queries
Design Arena — AI for design benchmarks
Doe — AI for autonomous private equity workforce
Double – Coding Copilot — AI for coding assistance
EffiGov — AI for local government call centers
Eloquent AI — AI for complex financial workflows
F4 — AI for compliance in engineering drawings
Finto — AI for enterprise accounting
Flai — AI for dealership customer acquisition
Floot — AI for app building
Fluidize — AI for scientific experiments
Flywheel AI — AI for excavator autonomy
Freya — AI for financial services voice agents
Frizzle — AI for teacher grading
Galini — AI guardrails as a service
Gaus — AI for retail investors
Ghostship — AI for UX bug detection
Golpo — AI for video generation from documents
Halluminate — AI for training computer use
HealthKey — AI for clinical trial matching
Hera — AI for motion design
Humoniq — AI for BPO in travel and transport
Hyprnote — AI for enterprise notetaking
Imprezia — AI for ad networks
Induction Labs — AI for computer use automation
iollo — AI for multimodal biological data
Iron Grid — AI for hardware insurance
IronLedger.ai — AI for property accounting
Janet AI — AI for project management (AI-native Jira)
Kernel — AI for web agent browsing infrastructure
Kestroll — AI for media asset management
Keystone — AI for software engineering
Knowlify — AI for explainer video creation
Kyber — AI for regulatory notice drafting
Lanesurf — AI for freight booking voice automation
Lantern — AI for Postgres application development
Lark — AI for billing operations
Latent — AI for medical language models
Lemma — AI for consumer brand insights
Linkana — AI for supplier onboarding reviews
Liva AI — AI for video and voice data labeling
Locata — AI for healthcare referral management
Lopus AI — AI for deal intelligence
Lotas — AI for data science IDEs
Louiza Labs — AI for synthetic biology data
Luminai — AI for business process automation
Magnetic — AI for tax preparation
MangoDesk — AI for evaluation data
Maven Bio — AI for BioPharma insights
Meteor — AI for web browsing (AI-native browser)
Mimos — AI for regulated firm visibility in search
Minimal AI — AI for e-commerce customer support
Mobile Operator — AI for mobile QA
Mohi — AI for workflow clarity
Monarcha — AI for GIS platforms
moonrepo — AI for developer workflow tooling
Motives — AI for consumer research
Nautilus — AI for car wash optimization
NOSO LABS — AI for field technician support
Nottelabs — AI for enterprise web agents
Novaflow — AI for biology lab analytics
Nozomio — AI for contextual coding agents
Oki — AI for company intelligence
Okibi — AI for agent building
Omnara — AI for agent command centers
OnDeck AI — AI for video analysis
Onyx — AI for generative platform development
Opennote — AI for note-based tutoring
Opslane — AI for ETL data pipelines
Orange Slice — AI for sales lead generation
Outlit — AI for quoting and proposals
Outrove — AI for Salesforce
Pally — AI for relationship management
Paloma — AI for billing CRMs
Parachute — AI for clinical evaluation and deployment
PARES AI — AI for commercial real estate brokers
People.ai — AI for enterprise growth insights
Perspectives Health — AI for clinic EMRs
Pharmie AI — AI for pharmacy technicians
Phases — AI for clinical trial automation
Pingo AI — AI for language learning companions
Pleom — AI for conversational interaction
Qualify.bot — AI for commercial lending phone agents
Reacher — AI for creator collaboration marketing
Ridecell — AI for fleet operations
Risely AI — AI for campus administration
Risotto — AI for IT helpdesk automation
Riverbank Security — AI for offensive security
Saphira AI — AI for certification automation
Sendbird — AI for omnichannel agents
Sentinel — AI for on-call engineering
Serafis — AI for institutional investor knowledge graphs
Sigmantic AI — AI for HDL design
Sira — AI for HR management of hourly teams
Socratix AI — AI for fraud and risk teams
Solva — AI for insurance
Spotlight Realty — AI for real estate brokerage
StackAI — AI for low-code agent platforms
stagewise — AI for frontend coding agents
Stellon Labs — AI for edge device models
Stockline — AI for food wholesaler ERP
Stormy AI — AI for influencer marketing
Synthetic Society — AI for simulating real users
SynthioLabs — AI for medical expertise in pharma
Tailor — AI for retail ERP automation
Tecto AI — AI for governance of AI employees
Tesora — AI for procurement analysis
Trace — AI for workflow automation
TraceRoot.AI — AI for automated bug fixing
truthsystems — AI for regulated governance layers
Uplift AI — AI for underserved voice languages
Veles — AI for dynamic sales pricing
Veritus Agent — AI for loan servicing and collections
Verne Robotics — AI for robotic arms
VoiceOS — AI for voice interviews
VoxOps AI — AI for regulated industry calls
Vulcan Technologies — AI for regulatory drafting
Waydev — AI for engineering leadership insights
Wayline — AI for property management voice automation
Wedge — AI for healthcare trust layers
Workflow86 — AI for workflow automation
ZeroEval — AI for agent evaluation and optimization
> Tecto AI — AI for governance of AI employees
is wild.
Incredible list. Thanks for sharing.
Please tell me your AI tool did that for you and you didn't do it manually
Yo this is nuts lol!
Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again?
There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:
- new parents
- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled
The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?
We might, and I'm sure you're right that there are many great founders not applying to do YC because they don't want to move here.
But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.
People in those situations can and should start companies without an accelerator (or at least without this one). The joke around the SF scene is that even a founder with a boy/girlfriend is a sign of a startup doomed to fail, and YC doesn't seem particularly invested in changing that culture.
Check out https://tinyseed.com/
It’s a form of self selection. YC (and silicon valley at large) isn't interested in founders with pesky things like real life responsibilities or anything else that will prevent them from focusing on their startup 24x7.
This is too flippant.
YC is so early on some of these deals that the primary gauge is team - which means personality of founders. Very hard to measure remotely.
I'm in a group, not as big or famous, that does early checks. We're 95% remote. IME, it's so hard to make those judgement calls through web-cam.
Agreed that founder focus is a big factor and that life gets in the way (of deals). However, if you don't like YC conditions there are 100s of other places to (attempt a) raise.
Except that all acceptance via YC is actually done remotely. They don't meet you in person until after they have already wired the money.
From "Ask HN: How to Price a Product" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41180492#41220971 :
> Asset Value = Equities + Liabilities
> /? startupschool pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=startupschool+pricing
/? site:startupschool.org pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:startupschool.org+prici...
> Startup School > Curriculum > Ctrl-F pricing: https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum
YC Library: https://www.ycombinator.com/library
/? YC Library : pricing: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/search?query=Pricing
I loved YC and can't recommend it enough. But if you're going to start a company, please consider working at another company first, even if briefly. (And make it a company you respect and want to emulate.)
The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.
> if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works.
You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.
> You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.
having worked at a few dysfunctional companies, there's value in it. you learn to spot red flag decisions and the kinds of people that tend to cause organizations to explode from within. a Lot of the success at my current company can be attributed to decisions I've made that came from experience at failed startups where we did the opposite.
Exactly! being able to recognize the wrong thing is just as valuable as recognizing the right thing
Great, then at least you can see what you don't like! (But really, I intentionally said a company you want to emulate, because I do agree – no point in taking this advice if you go to a bad company)
also helpful to see a dysfunctional company (or four) to cover your bases on shitty management practices
I learned a lot working for other people but I’ve learned the most running my own thing.
I do think many college grads generally don’t understand how business works though because they just haven’t experienced it yet. School is a totally different beast.
Cannot +1 this enough! Joining a team you respect and seeing how they operate gives you a really good baseline to work off of and take what you like and modify what you disagreed with.
You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself
I made this mistake. I love where I've wound up, but I would have gotten there much more quickly and with a lot less heartache if I'd worked as part of an existing company before starting my own.