let me try to explain this Scrappy college kids VC dynamic to you.
it's popularized on myths like Facebook where the founder
actually retained control and got a good deal but that's not the reality and it's not what VC are trying to create.
the reason it's all Scrappy college kids because you need slaves going to work crazy hours and do what they're told but also be crazy and naive enough to believe in it, and low maintenance and confident enough that they can take some direction on their own. and you just need a lot of these people.
because not all of them are going to work well and not all of the ideas are going to pan out but you don't know that and you can afford to fund some of these. you are basically funding an array of experiments and you don't need people who are grown up, in as in mature people who kind of go well I don't think I'm getting a good deal here you need as many bodies as you can. just like the military in war time. and for VCs in their hunger for money for their partners this is like a kind of wartime for them so they're just trying to throw as many bodies as they can at the problem.
all that talk about changing world and saving the world all mythologizing about Facebook etc is to get all those young slaves motivated.
is YC any different? a lot of early writings of Paul Graham on what founders need to know and what makes good startups can be easily read as just propaganda for this sort of program. the bottom line is it's not about what works for founders it's about what works for VCs. and I guess everyone justifies by saying well if vcs get a good outcome then founders do too, but those two Venn diagrams don't necessarily always intersect.
it's popularized on myths like Facebook where the founder actually retained control and got a good deal but that's not the reality and it's not what VC are trying to create.
the reason it's all Scrappy college kids because you need slaves going to work crazy hours and do what they're told but also be crazy and naive enough to believe in it, and low maintenance and confident enough that they can take some direction on their own. and you just need a lot of these people.
because not all of them are going to work well and not all of the ideas are going to pan out but you don't know that and you can afford to fund some of these. you are basically funding an array of experiments and you don't need people who are grown up, in as in mature people who kind of go well I don't think I'm getting a good deal here you need as many bodies as you can. just like the military in war time. and for VCs in their hunger for money for their partners this is like a kind of wartime for them so they're just trying to throw as many bodies as they can at the problem.
all that talk about changing world and saving the world all mythologizing about Facebook etc is to get all those young slaves motivated.
is YC any different? a lot of early writings of Paul Graham on what founders need to know and what makes good startups can be easily read as just propaganda for this sort of program. the bottom line is it's not about what works for founders it's about what works for VCs. and I guess everyone justifies by saying well if vcs get a good outcome then founders do too, but those two Venn diagrams don't necessarily always intersect.