Hi ericlin, I'm sorry to hear that you ran into fraudulent profiles. You can report them in the UI in cofounder matching, but since this seems like a broader profile, it would be great if you could email me some links to the profiles you uncovered so we can investigate: jared@ycombinator.com
Thanks for this! I'd like to drop a note of explanation here, for future readers:
Yes, anyone can "just create a LinkedIn account." However, quite a few people across the globe are trying to decrease their online surface area. While many of us (myself included) just have a password manager filled with thousands of entries and 32-character passwords, some folks are not comfortable living that way. I also find myself unsubscribing from or filtering emails from these services at least once a day, so I can appreciate why many folks are increasingly trying to simplify their lives by eliminating SaaS logins.
Even without creating a LinkedIn account, one could fill in a dummy URL to satisfy the JavaScript validation and submit the application. However, we chose not to do this because of how the YC application itself is structured. The submission requirements are intentionally strict (60 second founder video, <3mins demo, very specific questions, etc.) and subverting the application process feels antithetical.
Having the option to opt out of the LinkedIn field is greatly appreciated.
One of the interesting potential futures is one in which every software engineer can build awesome robotics systems.
What really unlocked ML was when you didn't need to have a deep academic background in ML to be able to use it. Now that the primitives exist, every software engineer can build a compelling ML app.
I'm not sure if robotics is there yet, but if not it probably will be.
That's true. But I don't think revenue multiple is the right metric to look at.
If you just look in terms of aggregate market cap, defense companies are some of the larger companies in the world - i.e., Lockheed Martin is valued over $100B. That's a good sign that it's possible to build a big company in the space, which is all you need.
Every single defence company today is the result of decades of mergers and decades of Cold War peak defence budgets. Not even SoftBanknhas that amount of dough to repeat that.
Lockheed Martin used to be Lockheed and Martin, MDD used to be McDonnel and Douglas, Northrop Gruman, well, you get it. Those companies were built, the were merged. And they are the first on the big defence budgets, and honestly also the only ones being able to deliver modern defence and weapon systems (regardless of delays and cost over runs).
Lockheed Martin was formed by the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta and Martin Marietta was formed by the merger of Martin and American-Marietta, and American-Marietta was formed by the merger of American Asphalt Paint Company and Marietta Paint and Color Company.
A lot of the comments in here are about the debate on whether companies should be remote or in-person.
That's an important debate but orthogonal to what I wrote. The YC batch is not a company. It doesn't really have a close analogue, but if you forced me to choose, I'd say that doing YC is more similar to going to college than working at a company. And as all we all know, while many companies are staying fully remote, hardly any university is.
Having now done this back-to-back, I can tell you exactly the ways in which in-person YC turned out to be better than remote YC.
1). Most founders in remote YC didn't make strong connections with their batchmates. When I ask founders from remote batches "how many founders in your batch are you still close with?", they typically give an answer that's 0-3. When I ask founders from in-person batches the same question, it's 10+.
2). When YC really works, it's because it not only conveys some factual advice, but changes the way founders think and behave.
When founders go through in-person batches, they're usually significantly different by the end of the batch - tougher, savvier, and more formidable. Whatever causes that did not translate well to zoom.
3). In-person YC is simply more fun. YC has always been in part about being fun experience, because startups need to be fun or they'd be too difficult and demoralizing. Zoom is very effective for communicating information, but no one has fun at Zoom parties.
> YC is more similar to going to college than working at a company.
The 3 ways you mentioned are also critical for a successful company.
1. Strong connections: you want to make strong connections in your company. That is what your network is and those connections help you in countless ways like referrals, job search or mentorships.
2. A company with "tougher, savvier, and more formidable" employees can wipe the competition against a company who doesn't have this kind of workforce. If zoom didn't work for YC to foster this, then why do you think it will do the trick for companies?
3. More fun - I really prefer a workplace which is fun than the one which is not. A fun workplace also helps with stronger connections with colleagues (#1).
My actual experience also aligns with these observations. In-person workplaces really produced stronger connections, more fun and better/stronger teams. Fully remote companies simply never had that level of camaraderie.
I've come to the same conclusion - having thoroughly enjoyed remote work for the first ~year of Covid, I realized it was a net negative on many long-term aspects I valued.
I do believe remote work can "work" - so can four day work weeks (probably even three day) and many other arrangements. Companies and individuals can do it and not go bankrupt.
But I think to reach your fullest potential as a team/company/unit, you simply need to spend a lot of time together. If you don't want to reach your full potential, then that's a choice you can make.
That's exactly right. When people see YC funding a lot of AI startups, a lot of them think it must be because YC has some thesis about AI.
Actually, it says something much deeper about the world than whatever YC's partners' opinions are. YC funds founders, not ideas, so the reason that so many companies in S23 are AI startups is that that's what founders want to work on right now. It's an emergent phenomenon, like stock prices in the market.
One thing that's interesting is that there have been many hype cycles between 2006 and now (chatbots, several waves of crypto, VR, online-to-offline, etc). YC funded a few companies in each of those hype cycles but never anything like the current %.
I would argue that just because they want to work on AI while it has a lot of hype, might not be a good thing. Folks should do what they are passionate about and interested in, not just raise money to turn a fume from the karat and greatest buzzword technology. Will they leave AI if the tides change?
I'm working on an idea that I'm submitting to YC this year. AI is revolutionizing the field I'm most passionate about, I feel like it would be a waste if I didn't even try to make a contribution at what's possibly the last time we get to make a significant contribution in this way.
I was hyped about Bitcoin when it came out, but the only truly revolutionary thing that happened after Bitcoin in that field was Ethereum, and there really wasn't anything to be hyped about besides that in the decade since even though people kept hyping it.
This hype is so different, it's as powerful as web 2.0 was. I felt like I missed out on building something epic then, and now I get another shot so I'm not gonna miss it. I bet there's thousands of people who feel this way.
I interviewed with Doug Lenat was I was a 17 year old high school student, and he hired me as a summer intern for Cycorp - my first actual programming job.
That internship was life-changing for me, and I'll always be grateful to him for taking a wild bet on a literally a kid.
Doug was a brilliant computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial intelligence. Though I was very junior at Cycorp, it was a small company so I sat in many meetings with him. It was obvious that he understood every detail of how the technology worked, and was extremely smart.
Cycorp was 30 years ahead of its time and never actually worked. For those who don't know, it was essentially the first OpenAI - the first large-scale commercial effort to create general artificial intelligence.
I learned a lot from Doug about how to be incredibly ambitious, and how to not give up. Doug worked on Cycorp for multiple decades. It never really took off, but he managed to keep funding it and keep hiring great people so he could keep plugging away at the problem. I know very few people who have stuck with an idea for so long.
That sounds awesome! Was coming back to Cycorp to permanently work ever in the works for you? Or did you think the intern was nice but you didn't want a career in the field?
Also - what exactly did you do in the internship as a 17 year old - what skills did you have?
I was certainly interested in working at Cycorp full-time. But after two summers there, I could tell that the technical approach they were taking was just not working.
My first summer, I was an ontologist, which was a unique role that only existed at Cycorp where they hired people to literally hand-enter facts like "A cat has four legs" into Cyc using formal logic. My second summer I programmed (poorly) in Lisp for them.
Perhaps other people with deeper AI knowledge can weigh in here too. But at the time, there were the two things that tipped me off.
1) Cyc's reasoning fundamentally did not feel "human". Cyc was created on the premise that you could build AGI on top of formal logic inference. But after seeing how Cyc performed on real-world problems, I became convinced that formal logic is a poor model for human thought.
The biggest tell is that formal logic systems are very brittle. If there is any fact that is even slightly off, the reasoning chain fails and the system can't do anything. Humans aren't like that; when their information is slightly off, their performance degrades gracefully.
2). Imagine a graph where time/money was on the x-axis, and Cyc's performance was on the y-axis. You could roughly plot this using benchmarks like SAT scores. It was clear if you extrapolated this that Cyc was never going to hit human-level performance; the curve was going to asymptotically approach something well below human-level performance.
As a side note, if you look at the performance of LLMs, I would argue that you get the opposite result for both criteria.
I once took down HN by submitting /topcolors. The moment it reached the front page, HN ground to a halt. I quickly fired off an email to sctb who cleared it up within a minute or two (by wiping it off the front page, not by fixing the caching, which is totally valid), otherwise it could have taken much longer to figure out what had happened.
Caching is a hard thing to get right. I try to use “vegeta attack” to load test pages as I make them, but the measurement is the problem. Unless you already have a profiling pipeline set up, it’s a bit hard to fix the issue quickly.
One trick is to comment out half the site in a binary fashion until it suddenly loads, then keep bisecting until it stops loading. It’s crude but only takes log(n) steps and can be done quickly. You’d have to do it in production, but it might be easier than guessing.
