Seems like a good thing for founders, doesn't force them to quit school to start a funded startup. Especially for under-privileged youths who might not be able to miss a high paying job opportunity or have no income for months.
Seems like a bad signal for YC though - if you aren't committed enough to quit school or at the very least reject job offers and do your startup anyway - feels like you might not be committed enough to do what it takes?
But if anyone does, YC knows how to pick founders with the right mindset.
The number of people we are talking about as a percentage of CS like graduates is tiny. They aren’t kids either. It seems like a low risk experiment on both sides.
Wanting to finish school is a negative signal. Also
> Also we know that many students spend a lot of time in Fall or during their final year applying for jobs or internships. Early Decision gives students another option: apply to YC and bet on yourself.
So now YC is an alternative to searching and apply for jobs? I think if you're marginal on trying to find a corporate job or starting something, then you should prob find a corp job. Objectively starting a startup is worse, you work harder, lower odds of success, more stress, less money, etc. You have to be a little crazy and hardheaded to make it work
Finally everything that YC does to increase it's applicant pool so they still maintain exclusivity. If you have 2% acceptance rate, why are you trying to maximize the top of the funnel? You should discourage people to apply.
Asking people without experience, skills and maturity to know what they want in their life to commit to YC way before graduating comes off as simply too much.
Interestingly, this mirrors the kind of thing that has been happening in finance, especially in private equity. Normally, you start out at an investment bank, do two years as an analyst there, learn the basics, then make a choice whether you want to stay in IB or move to PE (or somewhere else).
Eventually, PE started recruiting earlier and earlier to the point where they were hiring college graduates for two years in the future who hadn't even started their IB role. Obviously, these people don't even know what they like doing, and you have no idea if they are any good at their job.
The end result was Jamie Dimon of JPM slamming his fist on the table to knock it off. This has led other banks to follow suit and major PE firms to commit to stop recruiting this early. At least for now.
But it seems that something similar is now happening on the VC side.
For awhile now I’ve felt like YC has turned into another badge for the type people who are obsessed with prestige. It’s all about checking a box and not about the substance of what they want to do.
This is evident in how disappointed certain people are when they’re rejected from YC. Their startup is merely a vehicle to get into the club.
All things have a life cycle. Despite what yc wants you to believe, it will come and go. Perhaps it’s becoming a prestige institution in the hopes to increase its longevity.
That being said, belonging to a group is a central component of being a human as we are highly social animals. So it’s not wrong to want to belong to a group and then being sad when you are rejected. It requires a lot of maturity and stoicism to cut your own path. This is somewhat ironic since traditionally founding your own company is considered cutting your own path but I think yc and others have made it much less so. There is a formula now to follow which is why there is now an in group and an out group. Cutting your own path by definition does not include a set formula.
I have been thoroughly enjoying re-watching HBO's Silicon Valley, appreciating all the little details and sub-plots I missed during my first watching long ago. It's aged so well.
It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.
A classmate of mine dropped out to do this. Failed, and ended up picking up later to finish the last two years of college. It really didn’t seem to have slowed them down, and finishing college a few years later (with some startup founders experience) seems to have been overall good. Unfortunately did end up going to Boston Consulting Group from on-campus recruiting, so not a great end to the story, but historically that’s a high-ish paying and hard to get job.
Honestly I think there are two different audiences. The type of person that is open to traveling, exploring jobs, etc. in their twenties is different from the “institutional pipeline” track of good high school > good college > good job.
This early decision thing is functionally going to move a few pipeline kids from the corporate world to the startup world, which probably isn’t a terrible outcome. But it also reflects how YC has become a marker of institutional pipeline success for a lot of people.
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, 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 actually do the startup 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, so would take the commitment fairly seriously.)
Mostly I agree. But I also think that someone who is very good, and in a very good MBA program, can do their share of contributions, iff they're committed fully to the startup upon graduation.
But if the follow-through doesn't happen, then the whole thing was probably a huge waste for non-MBA-student co-founders. (Unless those co-founders weren't really committed themselves.)
Being able to burn away at a startup while you are studying would be great. Uni was the most productive time in my whole life due to all the free time.
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.
Because a university's ability to charge the prices they do depends on people being on location. Nobody is going to pay 50k or 100k for an online course.
Plus if rich fucks can't buy a building to put their name on that kids will walk through they won't donate money.
You make it sound like it's a decision based on school administrators putting learning first.
I like how other than being triggered by the word rich fucks your reply has nothing to do with universities being remote or in person, just you bragging about personal accomplishments? I mean congratulations, but universities are still going to charge more by requiring you to go on location.
I agree, to add on - I think places like Open University are absolutely fantastic for folks who want to learn but have other "real world" responsibilities. The last time I heard a out OU was when a new parent was happy having being able to get a degree from there (while I think studying at night).
To be fair, it is a 3mo batch. The better analogy would be a long business trip or on site project, not a remote vs. in office job.
Moreover, for better or worse, the all day every day work culture typical of venture-backed startups isn't really compatible with being a new parent etc. anyway.
Because San Francisco is a truly singular place that drastically increases your odds of success in starting a venture-backed company by simply existing there (even temporarily).
There's also people who are driven, don't have a real-world situation that pins them to their location, but don't believe that they need to move to SF to do a startup, because they shouldn't have to..
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.
I don’t usually wear my ring day to day because it’s poorly fitting, but I wear it to meetings with private equity because I want to filter out anyone with that mentality.
This doesn't resemble anything I've ever heard at YC in the many years I've been here. People don't think or talk that way at all...they're far more normal and decent than that.
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.
Life is short. Play long term games with long term people. While a batch bakes in a season, a cap table rests like a boulder in a hillside. If you’re smart there are better ways to find a lever with which to move the world.
Consider incentives. Don’t accept a hammer when you need a bulldozer. Don’t ask which paths exist: find where you want to be, ask what needs to be done. Do it.
Less riddly: Don't take money if you don't need it. if you have to, take it from people who have values/incentives (with life and business both) aligned with you.
These kids are (typically) in some of the best colleges in the world and in incredibly high demand. They have lots of options and enormous amounts of agency.
Hard to buy that "here's another option" is predatory.
In fairness young people can have high agency, back their own judgements, and have grit, perseverance, et al. and still lack experience and be more easily influenced by perceived mentors than they might be a decade later in their career paths.
Sure but the founders who will generate the greatest returns for investors are the ones who won’t be pushed around by boards. Facebook’s board advised Mark Zuckerberg to take Yahoo’s $1B offer in 2006 [1]. He was 22 years old. He refused, and Meta is now valued at nearly $2T. That’s the kind of founder that the most ambitious startup investors are looking for.
We’re discussing the cynical assertion that YC is looking for founders who will be compliant and subservient to boards. I’m just pointing out that if there is any defining quality in the kinds of founders that an investor like YC is looking for, it’s that they are not compliant and subservient to anyone, including or especially boards :)
When pg and others talk about the qualities they look for in founders, they use terms like “formidable” and “force of nature”.
Just 7% ownership while being one of the most important pipelines for early investment opportunities in the valley, which has extensive relationships with the people who will be on the boards. Additionally, YC might not take board seats, but its ceo certainly does.
The idea that someone fresh out of college should start and run a business is deeply concerning. These are kids who have just (hopefully) learned about ethics and what it takes to run a business, yet you expect them to be responsible stewards of their users' data, to comply with laws and regulations, while you throw $500,000 at them, give them minimal guidance, sell them fantasies about infinite riches, and skim whatever you can from the top.
Yes, I'm aware that Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and others, started their businesses before even finishing college. But a) these are outliers, and b) when someone refers to users of their products as "dumb fucks", do we really want to put them in charge of running a company?
Jared's description about why YC is doing this now seems clear. If you know more or better, you're welcome to make a substantive argument. But please don't use this site for shallow putdowns—it's not what it's for.
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
Please don't spam the threads with massive lists. It's enough to link to the information.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to show, other than that YC funds a lot of startups and a lot of them are working in AI, which is what you'd expect during any major tech wave.
In fact, YC funds so many startups that your list is actually misleadingly short, unless you meant to argue that AI startups are a low percentage.
You should create a startup based around an AI for collapsing lists if clicking [-] is too difficult and they are so annoying.
110 of those were from their summer 2025 batch of 170, so your statement is actually misleading unless you meant to argue that 65% is a low percentage.
Tecto AI is my favourite, as it forms the "AI for AI" ouroboros. Outrove also sounds confusing, because doesn't Salesforce already purport to have their own native AI features? And when I look them up, it seems they're just AI for recruiting, which is also what VoiceOS purports to do.
Looking up the founders is fascinating too. So many of them seem to have graduated and immediately started trailing what appear to be a string of back-to-back failed businesses, rarely with more than a year of staying power per attempt. It's hard to tell if that's "failing quickly" (desirable) or "frantically trying to get-rich-quick" (undesirable and what I run into in Melbourne most often).
I'm actually the CEO of a startup that created the very first AI for AI for _____ list generation service. Already in our 347,985th round of funding, currently valued at $382,457,203.
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)
This is partially why the average age of a successful founder is late 30s to early 40s at the time of founding.
There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.
Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.
But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.
And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.
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.
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
> And make it a company you respect and want to emulate
Personally I would caveat that they be a small company. Large companies are a very different beast. What it takes to get ahead and succeed at there is often very different from a startup, in ways that don’t become obvious until you’ve worked at a startup.
Rather than learning which wheels not to re-invent, you have one data point and reflexes that you’d need to deprogram.
Working at the company I most highly respect and would want to emulate (Stripe), I don’t think the skills would have been at all the right ones. (Admittedly I was in a highly toxic and political org.)
If this is what tips the scales for someone in deciding between being a founder and taking a 9-5 job, they don’t have the level of commitment needed to be a successful founder.
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.
I feel like being "the best and brightest" is quite orthogonal to having what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
I also feel like highly intelligent people might quite reasonably decide for themselves that they shouldn't have to take on that kind of risk to get what they want out of life.
This. There is a huge opportunity cost, even more so for the “best and brightest” (by whatever definition). The odds of striking it rich are really not in your favor. You may be better off working at big tech for a few years, save up, let the money work for you while you explore your entrepreneurial urge. You have a cushion and maybe that will let you take on bigger and bolder bets than what you could when you come out of college, and you maybe forced to take a “relatively safer” bet because you also have to make money soonish
No you want to take these bets when you are young, its the opposite, you go into stable careers when your appetite for risk and working around the clock has waned
Thought experiment: What group do you think will have the higher median total earnings over 10 years - the group that worked at BigTech or the group that worked at a YC startup?
You make your money first, let it make money for you and then do a startup.
There's an entire generation of FAANG millionaires that just spent a decade out of school working at one of those places and got fabulously wealthy off of it. In fact, it's probably the most likely career to get you rich instead of betting your time on startup equity that might be worth something in 6-10 years.
It’s not just the companies are growing. If you get an offer from BigTech with cash + RSUs and the stock stays stagnant, you will still be better off statistically than spending 5-7 years of your life at a startup.
YC is not really advocating you to become a worker at a startup. They want you to become a founder. As a founder you don't need to be a huge success for you to be well off. I'm one of 3 founders currently in a bootstrapped company that has done okay. We are approaching end of year 5. This year we will make 700k revenue, 240k profit and 50% yearly growth. Typically this kind of business is not something a VC would consider investing in, but it can still be profitable for the founders.
I'm not very liquid at the moment. My salary is a measly 60k a year. Most of 80k that is my share of the profit will stay in the company instead of go into my pocket, but the 33% ownership in the company is valuable. Very typical valuations for companies in general is 10x profit, which would mean my share of the company is worth 800k. Companies getting strategically acquired can be 20x revenue, which makes my share of the company worth 4.7million.
At FAANG I would have likely made a liquid 300k * 5 = 1.5million, which would allow me to spend more money and enjoy life right now. However, the next 5 years with my company will likely be a lot more valuable. If we manage to grow 30% a year then after 5 years profit will be 900k. That means 300k a year profit share, 3m valuation at 10x profit and 17m valuation at 20x revenue.
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).
This is the part I think young people don't understand. My husband and I worked around 16 years combined in tech. We started pretty late, since we both have PhDs, and we're not engineers so we aren't making top of the market. We still had enough money after that time to buy a house, have 2 kids and go on a multi-year sabbatical. And most of this working period was not at FAANGs.
If you're young, talented, single and bringing home $200k a year including RSUs, you are on track to basically do whatever you want in a decade. Make it to senior manager / Staff level and you should be clearing $400k a year at least. And if you do it smartly you're working 9-5, not some 996 bullshit. That's a ridiculous amount of money.
It's not as sexy as building a startup. But at least for me the ROI has been incredible. And I'm not super smart- my whole college career I looked down at people who spent their lives in front of a computer. I completely missed the trend of tech and Silicon Valley, and I definitely don't work any harder than the next guy. But if you do good work I've found that it tends to pay off.
People really underestimate how much FAANG pays, all things considered.
If you spent the last 10-15 years as an engineer/manager in FAANG (and these past 5-10 years have been very far from what’s called the “golden age”), and were financially responsible, you’re a multi millionaire, most likely still in your 30s.
If you’re a couple that worked there, well damn you’re not just rich you are wealthy.
I can’t think of a better starting point for founding a startup. Or retiring.
Sacrificing 10 years seems a lot when you’re fresh out of college. But 1. it’s not really a sacrifice since your life is much more comfy than most 2. in the grand scheme of things 10 years is not a lot. You will most likely spend way more time on a failed startup while having the worst time.
I have a problem with the analogy “lottery ticket”. I think analogies are helpful as long as we are talking perhaps a singe order of magnitude difference between the two things.
The chance of winning most popular US lotteries is approximately 1 in 300,000,000. In comparison, the chance of IPO-ing a YC company is approximately 1 in 300. You can count how many orders of magnitude of difference that is.
I buy a lottery ticket for $1, in a moment, with no further effort. A YC startup founder grinds for years, if not a decade, to reach IPO with unknown opportunity costs. They are not the same. How many lottery tickets over how many lottery draws to equalize the odds is a fun thought experiment to quantify a dollar value for the option premium.
17 YC IPOs over how many total YC founder years (Lifetime YC companies * # of founders * years YC company active, roughly)?
(I’ve put a lot of thought into being a founder, from an aggressively data driven perspective about how to spend time, which is non renewable)
It's all about the opportunity cost. There are always assumptions that need to be made, but it will be hard to argue that lottery tickets are better than startups. I don't think they are.
A more useful comparison would be a serious statistical analysis between startups and other occupations.
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.
Having done this, and acknowledging the fuzzy definition of "rich" etc - going through YC after graduating is a great career move. You have to do everything yourself so you learn a lot. About business, about a specific industry, about programming, whatever. You make connections. But unless you walk an absolute golden path (hey it happens), > 90% chance you don't get rich. > 99.9% chance you won't get rich by 30.
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
It seems like you would've mentioned your own success rather than those around you when talking about how feasible it is. It's a lot easier to say something is achievable when you've done it yourself.
And again, I think you would've simply responded "I have" rather than ask me what I think. Obviously I could be wrong.
> 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.
I am 30, I am rich by most measures of wealth and probably in the minds of most college grads. I worked in various big tech companies (incl stints in FAANG) after graduating with my BS in CS. A lot of my peers did do startups, and they had varying degrees of success. But almost everyone who went to big tech has set up their next generation for success at this point
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.
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.
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.
yeah and its amazing, that doesnt mean you dont have charlatans, hucksters, hustlers, opportunists etc. come for the gold rush. In fact, you should expect them to
Seems like a good thing for founders, doesn't force them to quit school to start a funded startup. Especially for under-privileged youths who might not be able to miss a high paying job opportunity or have no income for months.
Seems like a bad signal for YC though - if you aren't committed enough to quit school or at the very least reject job offers and do your startup anyway - feels like you might not be committed enough to do what it takes?
But if anyone does, YC knows how to pick founders with the right mindset.
Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once.
Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!
I can't quite put my finger on it, but this announcement gives me bad vibes.
The number of people we are talking about as a percentage of CS like graduates is tiny. They aren’t kids either. It seems like a low risk experiment on both sides.
I think a few things:
Wanting to finish school is a negative signal. Also
> Also we know that many students spend a lot of time in Fall or during their final year applying for jobs or internships. Early Decision gives students another option: apply to YC and bet on yourself.
So now YC is an alternative to searching and apply for jobs? I think if you're marginal on trying to find a corporate job or starting something, then you should prob find a corp job. Objectively starting a startup is worse, you work harder, lower odds of success, more stress, less money, etc. You have to be a little crazy and hardheaded to make it work
Finally everything that YC does to increase it's applicant pool so they still maintain exclusivity. If you have 2% acceptance rate, why are you trying to maximize the top of the funnel? You should discourage people to apply.
Asking people without experience, skills and maturity to know what they want in their life to commit to YC way before graduating comes off as simply too much.
Interestingly, this mirrors the kind of thing that has been happening in finance, especially in private equity. Normally, you start out at an investment bank, do two years as an analyst there, learn the basics, then make a choice whether you want to stay in IB or move to PE (or somewhere else).
Eventually, PE started recruiting earlier and earlier to the point where they were hiring college graduates for two years in the future who hadn't even started their IB role. Obviously, these people don't even know what they like doing, and you have no idea if they are any good at their job.
The end result was Jamie Dimon of JPM slamming his fist on the table to knock it off. This has led other banks to follow suit and major PE firms to commit to stop recruiting this early. At least for now.
But it seems that something similar is now happening on the VC side.
It's all about riding that idiotic AI bubble until the huge burst
Exactly the same feeling here, it's such a strange thing to promise a kid they are accepted into a program, but it starts in like 4 years.
As if all of your education (and probably side-projects, life decisions) is meant to lead to YC.
They just want warm bodies. Why else would they focus on people that don’t have experience?
Neither experience nor hard skills, let alone soft ones.
Something tells me the business is became the product.
For awhile now I’ve felt like YC has turned into another badge for the type people who are obsessed with prestige. It’s all about checking a box and not about the substance of what they want to do.
This is evident in how disappointed certain people are when they’re rejected from YC. Their startup is merely a vehicle to get into the club.
Better to start our own club then.
All things have a life cycle. Despite what yc wants you to believe, it will come and go. Perhaps it’s becoming a prestige institution in the hopes to increase its longevity.
That being said, belonging to a group is a central component of being a human as we are highly social animals. So it’s not wrong to want to belong to a group and then being sad when you are rejected. It requires a lot of maturity and stoicism to cut your own path. This is somewhat ironic since traditionally founding your own company is considered cutting your own path but I think yc and others have made it much less so. There is a formula now to follow which is why there is now an in group and an out group. Cutting your own path by definition does not include a set formula.
I have been thoroughly enjoying re-watching HBO's Silicon Valley, appreciating all the little details and sub-plots I missed during my first watching long ago. It's aged so well.
It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.
For whoever wants to re-read one of the articles that mentions the idea, there you go: https://paulgraham.com/before.html#f7n:~:text=You%20can%20do...
2030: YC kindergarten pre-preparation and selection program.
They can make it just like tennis!
2031: Pregnant mothers are encouraged to signup their child before they're even born. No pressure.
2032: Sperm scan available for teenage boys for future child's YC eligibility.
Gives me weirdo Thiel vibes who pays (or used to pay) kids to drop out of college and start a company for him.
It seems kind of the opposite to me. YC is allowing you to finish school. You don't need to drop out.
In fairness, while I’m sure it didn’t work out for all of them, one of these students became one of the youngest self made billionaires in history
He did it to the smartest kid in our CS class. I feel bad now because I feel like he deserves a degree.
A classmate of mine dropped out to do this. Failed, and ended up picking up later to finish the last two years of college. It really didn’t seem to have slowed them down, and finishing college a few years later (with some startup founders experience) seems to have been overall good. Unfortunately did end up going to Boston Consulting Group from on-campus recruiting, so not a great end to the story, but historically that’s a high-ish paying and hard to get job.
He'll receive plenty of opportunities regardless of degree so I don't see why you feel sorry for him.
He would have made a fantastic professor in my opinion. But I think also, certain opportunities just require a degree on a policy level.
Doesn't mean that this was a good thing for them. For example, many kid actors who become rich and famous are not happy.
I mean... is it self-made if a billionaire helped you?
Whatever statement is more relatable at the time hence better for their business.
Honestly I think there are two different audiences. The type of person that is open to traveling, exploring jobs, etc. in their twenties is different from the “institutional pipeline” track of good high school > good college > good job.
This early decision thing is functionally going to move a few pipeline kids from the corporate world to the startup world, which probably isn’t a terrible outcome. But it also reflects how YC has become a marker of institutional pipeline success for a lot of people.
Fun fact, not every startup needs funding. Seems like post paul doesn't really talk about this anymore.
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, 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 actually do the startup 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, so would take the commitment fairly seriously.)
Yes, I think it would.
If your cofounder isn’t full time, that’s not your cofounder. That’s a part time contractor who owns 50% of your company.
Mostly I agree. But I also think that someone who is very good, and in a very good MBA program, can do their share of contributions, iff they're committed fully to the startup upon graduation.
But if the follow-through doesn't happen, then the whole thing was probably a huge waste for non-MBA-student co-founders. (Unless those co-founders weren't really committed themselves.)
Maybe a 18-24 months cliff would solve it?
if one of the founders is an MBA graduate, your chance of success just drop 50%.
Being able to burn away at a startup while you are studying would be great. Uni was the most productive time in my whole life due to all the free time.
You should consider placing them into a 1 or 2 year “on the job training” program at another YC company before sticking them in a batch.
Maybe you could offer that as a “waitlist” option.
Yeah so all our talent can line the pockets of SV.
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.
Because a university's ability to charge the prices they do depends on people being on location. Nobody is going to pay 50k or 100k for an online course.
Plus if rich fucks can't buy a building to put their name on that kids will walk through they won't donate money.
You make it sound like it's a decision based on school administrators putting learning first.
So much emotion! I graduated from a fairly shitty (and getting worse) state school and I started my own company. Which failed!
Then I started another. Horrible failure! Then another. And another!
And now I own a successful company built off all my previous learnings and failures. The “rich fucks” work for me now!
I like how other than being triggered by the word rich fucks your reply has nothing to do with universities being remote or in person, just you bragging about personal accomplishments? I mean congratulations, but universities are still going to charge more by requiring you to go on location.
I was triggered because people rationalize why they fail because of “other people”. But the reason you fail has nothing to do with universities
Universities are still a scam though, that was the point of the original comment
There are plenty of remote schools, always have been, they’re just lower quality and solve a different problem than traditional in person university
I agree, to add on - I think places like Open University are absolutely fantastic for folks who want to learn but have other "real world" responsibilities. The last time I heard a out OU was when a new parent was happy having being able to get a degree from there (while I think studying at night).
To be fair, it is a 3mo batch. The better analogy would be a long business trip or on site project, not a remote vs. in office job.
Moreover, for better or worse, the all day every day work culture typical of venture-backed startups isn't really compatible with being a new parent etc. anyway.
Because San Francisco is a truly singular place that drastically increases your odds of success in starting a venture-backed company by simply existing there (even temporarily).
There's also people who are driven, don't have a real-world situation that pins them to their location, but don't believe that they need to move to SF to do a startup, because they shouldn't have to..
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.
I don’t usually wear my ring day to day because it’s poorly fitting, but I wear it to meetings with private equity because I want to filter out anyone with that mentality.
This doesn't resemble anything I've ever heard at YC in the many years I've been here. People don't think or talk that way at all...they're far more normal and decent than that.
Unless your girlfriend is your laptop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmFoNXkQTt8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkZ8MAk2oH4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z-_py5WgOM
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.
I think you are talking about phase-1 and I was talking about a phase-2 of the process (of N phases).
We're just addressing different steps.
A lot of other places are just YC-lite/-wannabes and have either niche focuses (this is good) and/or not enough innovation-seekers (this is bad).
Would you invest in Australia?
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
Check out https://tinyseed.com/
Doesn't TinySeed require some measure of traction already?
This is great in principle. A word of advice:
Life is short. Play long term games with long term people. While a batch bakes in a season, a cap table rests like a boulder in a hillside. If you’re smart there are better ways to find a lever with which to move the world.
Consider incentives. Don’t accept a hammer when you need a bulldozer. Don’t ask which paths exist: find where you want to be, ask what needs to be done. Do it.
This is a bit riddly. Have a concrete example?
Less riddly: Don't take money if you don't need it. if you have to, take it from people who have values/incentives (with life and business both) aligned with you.
I like this, thank you.
I think this is oddly predatory, and sends the wrong idea to graduating students who have not even entered the real world.
There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.
YC's gotta groom the next generation of grifters out of the gate.
These kids are (typically) in some of the best colleges in the world and in incredibly high demand. They have lots of options and enormous amounts of agency.
Hard to buy that "here's another option" is predatory.
Putting inexperienced kids with good credentials who are amenable to listening to a board in charge of these things is part of the yc business model.
YC is looking for people who have high agency and can back their own judgement. All the most successful founders fit this profile.
In fairness young people can have high agency, back their own judgements, and have grit, perseverance, et al. and still lack experience and be more easily influenced by perceived mentors than they might be a decade later in their career paths.
With no disrespect to YC, of course.
Sure but the founders who will generate the greatest returns for investors are the ones who won’t be pushed around by boards. Facebook’s board advised Mark Zuckerberg to take Yahoo’s $1B offer in 2006 [1]. He was 22 years old. He refused, and Meta is now valued at nearly $2T. That’s the kind of founder that the most ambitious startup investors are looking for.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/an-ugly-truth-mark-zuckerber...
Sure but one example is a point in the cloud of all responses, granted the cloud tips toward a particular part of a large multi variate space.
Unless ... your point is that all YC founders are homogeneous interchangeable cyborgs? ( surely not ).
We’re discussing the cynical assertion that YC is looking for founders who will be compliant and subservient to boards. I’m just pointing out that if there is any defining quality in the kinds of founders that an investor like YC is looking for, it’s that they are not compliant and subservient to anyone, including or especially boards :)
When pg and others talk about the qualities they look for in founders, they use terms like “formidable” and “force of nature”.
YC doesn't take board seats.
edit: removed snarky attack
a "board" presumably like a "medical school acceptance board" and not a corpo board
> You don't know what you're talking about.
Please don’t comment like this on HN. Your point would carry more weight without the snarky personal attack.
Noted.
Many thanks!
Just 7% ownership while being one of the most important pipelines for early investment opportunities in the valley, which has extensive relationships with the people who will be on the boards. Additionally, YC might not take board seats, but its ceo certainly does.
Not just predatory, but irresponsible.
The idea that someone fresh out of college should start and run a business is deeply concerning. These are kids who have just (hopefully) learned about ethics and what it takes to run a business, yet you expect them to be responsible stewards of their users' data, to comply with laws and regulations, while you throw $500,000 at them, give them minimal guidance, sell them fantasies about infinite riches, and skim whatever you can from the top.
Yes, I'm aware that Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and others, started their businesses before even finishing college. But a) these are outliers, and b) when someone refers to users of their products as "dumb fucks", do we really want to put them in charge of running a company?
How do we give this post less points? I don't want to see YC spam here.
Eternal September for the startup world.
bad, ideologically-motivated idea when thiel did it, and bad, ideologically-motivated idea now
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Jared's description about why YC is doing this now seems clear. If you know more or better, you're welcome to make a substantive argument. But please don't use this site for shallow putdowns—it's not what it's for.
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
Please don't spam the threads with massive lists. It's enough to link to the information.
I'm not sure what this is supposed to show, other than that YC funds a lot of startups and a lot of them are working in AI, which is what you'd expect during any major tech wave.
In fact, YC funds so many startups that your list is actually misleadingly short, unless you meant to argue that AI startups are a low percentage.
You should create a startup based around an AI for collapsing lists if clicking [-] is too difficult and they are so annoying.
110 of those were from their summer 2025 batch of 170, so your statement is actually misleading unless you meant to argue that 65% is a low percentage.
Tecto AI is my favourite, as it forms the "AI for AI" ouroboros. Outrove also sounds confusing, because doesn't Salesforce already purport to have their own native AI features? And when I look them up, it seems they're just AI for recruiting, which is also what VoiceOS purports to do.
Looking up the founders is fascinating too. So many of them seem to have graduated and immediately started trailing what appear to be a string of back-to-back failed businesses, rarely with more than a year of staying power per attempt. It's hard to tell if that's "failing quickly" (desirable) or "frantically trying to get-rich-quick" (undesirable and what I run into in Melbourne most often).
This makes me want to reach for a tool that definitely has no AI whatsoever involved.
Specifically, the one described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287474.
Incredible list. Thanks for sharing.
>Verne Robotics — AI for robotic arms
Kiko the Monkey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KaWPYOLuT8
Please tell me your AI tool did that for you and you didn't do it manually
I'm actually the CEO of a startup that created the very first AI for AI for _____ list generation service. Already in our 347,985th round of funding, currently valued at $382,457,203.
Yo this is nuts lol!
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
Learning what NOT to do is almost as valuable as knowing what to do.
This is partially why the average age of a successful founder is late 30s to early 40s at the time of founding.
There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.
Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.
But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.
And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.
So it's not too late !
Still, I think you need to be well connected, or already profitable for VC fundraising.
Otherwise your just another programmer with hacked together prototype.
Better than just another Idea Guy with an MBA.
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.
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
> And make it a company you respect and want to emulate
Personally I would caveat that they be a small company. Large companies are a very different beast. What it takes to get ahead and succeed at there is often very different from a startup, in ways that don’t become obvious until you’ve worked at a startup.
Rather than learning which wheels not to re-invent, you have one data point and reflexes that you’d need to deprogram.
Working at the company I most highly respect and would want to emulate (Stripe), I don’t think the skills would have been at all the right ones. (Admittedly I was in a highly toxic and political org.)
If this is what tips the scales for someone in deciding between being a founder and taking a 9-5 job, they don’t have the level of commitment needed to be a successful founder.
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.
I feel like being "the best and brightest" is quite orthogonal to having what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
I also feel like highly intelligent people might quite reasonably decide for themselves that they shouldn't have to take on that kind of risk to get what they want out of life.
This really is not true, basically every engineering job in the Bay Area will set you up with enough money to live extremely well.
YC startups are a bit above average, but still most startups fail.
If you care about building wealth, taking a stable engineering position straight out of college and working hard is a great path
This. There is a huge opportunity cost, even more so for the “best and brightest” (by whatever definition). The odds of striking it rich are really not in your favor. You may be better off working at big tech for a few years, save up, let the money work for you while you explore your entrepreneurial urge. You have a cushion and maybe that will let you take on bigger and bolder bets than what you could when you come out of college, and you maybe forced to take a “relatively safer” bet because you also have to make money soonish
No you want to take these bets when you are young, its the opposite, you go into stable careers when your appetite for risk and working around the clock has waned
Thought experiment: What group do you think will have the higher median total earnings over 10 years - the group that worked at BigTech or the group that worked at a YC startup?
You make your money first, let it make money for you and then do a startup.
There's an entire generation of FAANG millionaires that just spent a decade out of school working at one of those places and got fabulously wealthy off of it. In fact, it's probably the most likely career to get you rich instead of betting your time on startup equity that might be worth something in 6-10 years.
Yeah great they got into the fastest growing companies of all time at the perfect time
It’s not just the companies are growing. If you get an offer from BigTech with cash + RSUs and the stock stays stagnant, you will still be better off statistically than spending 5-7 years of your life at a startup.
YC is not really advocating you to become a worker at a startup. They want you to become a founder. As a founder you don't need to be a huge success for you to be well off. I'm one of 3 founders currently in a bootstrapped company that has done okay. We are approaching end of year 5. This year we will make 700k revenue, 240k profit and 50% yearly growth. Typically this kind of business is not something a VC would consider investing in, but it can still be profitable for the founders.
I'm not very liquid at the moment. My salary is a measly 60k a year. Most of 80k that is my share of the profit will stay in the company instead of go into my pocket, but the 33% ownership in the company is valuable. Very typical valuations for companies in general is 10x profit, which would mean my share of the company is worth 800k. Companies getting strategically acquired can be 20x revenue, which makes my share of the company worth 4.7million.
At FAANG I would have likely made a liquid 300k * 5 = 1.5million, which would allow me to spend more money and enjoy life right now. However, the next 5 years with my company will likely be a lot more valuable. If we manage to grow 30% a year then after 5 years profit will be 900k. That means 300k a year profit share, 3m valuation at 10x profit and 17m valuation at 20x revenue.
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. My comments should be treated as informing prior to an informed decision.
If you work for 10 years in big tech and save your money, you’d have enough for a lifetime of chasing startup ideas.
This is the part I think young people don't understand. My husband and I worked around 16 years combined in tech. We started pretty late, since we both have PhDs, and we're not engineers so we aren't making top of the market. We still had enough money after that time to buy a house, have 2 kids and go on a multi-year sabbatical. And most of this working period was not at FAANGs.
If you're young, talented, single and bringing home $200k a year including RSUs, you are on track to basically do whatever you want in a decade. Make it to senior manager / Staff level and you should be clearing $400k a year at least. And if you do it smartly you're working 9-5, not some 996 bullshit. That's a ridiculous amount of money.
It's not as sexy as building a startup. But at least for me the ROI has been incredible. And I'm not super smart- my whole college career I looked down at people who spent their lives in front of a computer. I completely missed the trend of tech and Silicon Valley, and I definitely don't work any harder than the next guy. But if you do good work I've found that it tends to pay off.
People really underestimate how much FAANG pays, all things considered.
If you spent the last 10-15 years as an engineer/manager in FAANG (and these past 5-10 years have been very far from what’s called the “golden age”), and were financially responsible, you’re a multi millionaire, most likely still in your 30s.
If you’re a couple that worked there, well damn you’re not just rich you are wealthy.
I can’t think of a better starting point for founding a startup. Or retiring.
Sacrificing 10 years seems a lot when you’re fresh out of college. But 1. it’s not really a sacrifice since your life is much more comfy than most 2. in the grand scheme of things 10 years is not a lot. You will most likely spend way more time on a failed startup while having the worst time.
I have a problem with the analogy “lottery ticket”. I think analogies are helpful as long as we are talking perhaps a singe order of magnitude difference between the two things.
The chance of winning most popular US lotteries is approximately 1 in 300,000,000. In comparison, the chance of IPO-ing a YC company is approximately 1 in 300. You can count how many orders of magnitude of difference that is.
I buy a lottery ticket for $1, in a moment, with no further effort. A YC startup founder grinds for years, if not a decade, to reach IPO with unknown opportunity costs. They are not the same. How many lottery tickets over how many lottery draws to equalize the odds is a fun thought experiment to quantify a dollar value for the option premium.
17 YC IPOs over how many total YC founder years (Lifetime YC companies * # of founders * years YC company active, roughly)?
(I’ve put a lot of thought into being a founder, from an aggressively data driven perspective about how to spend time, which is non renewable)
It's all about the opportunity cost. There are always assumptions that need to be made, but it will be hard to argue that lottery tickets are better than startups. I don't think they are.
A more useful comparison would be a serious statistical analysis between startups and other occupations.
I am not spending years of my life trading money for lottery tickets, startups are worse than lottery tickets
I said "serious".
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.
10% of 0.01% of people is probably closer. 0.01% is probably way to high even.
Having done this, and acknowledging the fuzzy definition of "rich" etc - going through YC after graduating is a great career move. You have to do everything yourself so you learn a lot. About business, about a specific industry, about programming, whatever. You make connections. But unless you walk an absolute golden path (hey it happens), > 90% chance you don't get rich. > 99.9% chance you won't get rich by 30.
Not denying you can fail, but one year spent on YC and failing puts you in a position to start another business
You can join a long tradition of serial entrepreneur failsons.
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
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
It seems like you would've mentioned your own success rather than those around you when talking about how feasible it is. It's a lot easier to say something is achievable when you've done it yourself.
And again, I think you would've simply responded "I have" rather than ask me what I think. Obviously I could be wrong.
You live in NYC.... there are a lot of "startup founders" who already come from generational family wealth
Are you trying to tell me those who take the most risk already have a safety net?!
> 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.
I am 30, I am rich by most measures of wealth and probably in the minds of most college grads. I worked in various big tech companies (incl stints in FAANG) after graduating with my BS in CS. A lot of my peers did do startups, and they had varying degrees of success. But almost everyone who went to big tech has set up their next generation for success at this point
By rich I mean like 25 million +, not 3 million
Okay buddy.
> 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.
Many will enter, few will win lmao
or you buy bitcoin
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.
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.
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
yeah and its amazing, that doesnt mean you dont have charlatans, hucksters, hustlers, opportunists etc. come for the gold rush. In fact, you should expect them to
Whose "we"?
there are open weight models which are SOTA.
not sure how you plan to monetize it.
Tell me how you can make a profit or if you even have a plan to make a profit..
or your plan is to sell it to a higher fool who believes that they can sell it to an even higher fool....
Oh. Sounds similar?
its still better than these people fighting over promotions in finance
What do you mean "turn out their other job offers"?
Whoops - I had a typo! Thank you; fixed.