I find it interesting that they have essentially migrated to the model that 500 startups pioneered.
YC has obviously been more successful and I'd chalk that up to it's early exclusivity - whereas 500 thought that the right approach was to spread the risk out.
With the early YC approach it's more akin to the power law of a venture fund and needs to hit just one or two home runs.
I'd be curious to look back in a decade to see if the returns plateau with this new approach.
I'm really interested in that as well. As an outsider looking in, what has been impressed most on me by reading HN is the value of the YC network, e.g. I recall stories from other founders in the AirBnB batch talking about how great the AirBnB founders were at helping people out and sharing their knowledge.
With 373 in the current batch, that is obviously well beyond the Dunbar number of a community where humans can get to know everyone. So I'm just curious how the community/network value of YC changes as a result. Of course, Covid threw a million pound wrench in this anyway, so it may kinda be a moot point with everyone remote, but I'm just curious as to how the "gestalt" of the YC community has changed as batch size has grown.
They seem to also be going for a more global approach, with technology to help finance in Southeast Asia or to assist with African diaspora manage business affairs.
It's still the power law, where you can throw small amounts of money at a large base of targets and hope that just one of them grows to that 1,000x return.
It does make YC less inclusive though and seems to dilute the "brand" power more when you see a launch that includes MacOS specific toolbar widgets or something like another "no-code" API builder.
>Sequin Financial Inc., San Francisco: This startup offers what it calls the first debit card that builds credit for women. It does this by tracking purchases and repayments to credit bureaus.
I really don't understand the thought process behind this. Do credit card companies actually factor in if you are a man or woman?
This is a meta comment but I think something is a bit squiffy with the timestamps on HN at the moment - your reply was apparently sent before the comment you are replying to and then the tooltip timestamp shows as you can see (and the reply page here says your comment was 17 hours ago).
Horribly off topic but did anyone notice how the big shoe players (e.g. Nike and Adidas) managed to brand themselves as technology companies, while it makes absolutely no sense to completely redesigning the shoe every couple years under that framework? If they were actually tech-focused, I would expect them to end up close to a local optimum where they would only incrementally improve their products every year, having a revolutionary redesign only every handful of decades (like with cars).
