Back when they started in the 2000s, most traditional VCs didn't recognize that high impact individuals can easily pivot or define product categories, and only concentrated on financial engineering (DCF go brrrrrr).
YC often also mentors founders on pivots (I'd say at least a third of all startups that make it to demo day were mentored into some sort of a pivot).
YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge, both of which really center on the founder first approach or Operators-turned-Angels - which I assume this marketing shift is about.
Interesting. I once talked to an investor (not YC) and they asked me what I would do if the product failed. I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting"
> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge
Maybe. A write up about the new design would be cool I think
> YC has always been founder first.
Internally yes there is a "founder community". But publicly I would argue it was product-first.
It doesn't seem unlikely to me that YC coined or at least popularized 'the pivot' in the context of changing business / startup directions. The first mention of using the word in that sense is in this comment [1] which explicitly mentions the usage by YC, while it only gets used when talking about pivot tables or more traditional uses of the word before that.
Edit: The "Lean Startup" blog series [2], which was quite influential, mentions 'the pivot' a little earlier than the post above, and really seems to coin it, so I guess that's the source (edit again: wrong :D).
> I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting"
I'd say it depends on a VC's investment thesis as well as the stage your startup is at.
For the former, some wouldn't like your answer because it implies a lack of conviction (why should I invest in something the founder doesn't trust). Others wouldn't because it adds a degree of uncertainty (if this B2C reels company pivots into MLOps tooling how can I do due dilligence on my investment).
For the latter, seed/pre-seed that is open to pivoting isn't necessarily a negative flag because they are barely generating revenue as is and are trying to find PMF, but a Series B startup suddenly taking about a pivot might imply they aren't doing so hot.
> A write up about the new design would be cool I think
It's a lot deeper than an apparent lack of conviction. Mentioning the possibility of a pivot completely changes the dynamic of the investment. 'No pivot' is asking "please invest in this startup; here's why it's a good idea". 'Pivot possible' is asking "please invest in me; I will find a way to get you a return on investment regardless of the means". Asking someone to invest in you as a person requires a certain level of egoistic thinking. Is the ego warranted? Maybe, but the investor won't know unless they build an extremely close rapport with you. Something like YC does with a 3-month on-premise bootcamp is that exact opportunity for investors to build a close rapport, so investing in people makes sense for YC. But a lot of investors are investing without building that rapport, so investing purely on the merits of business ideas makes more sense for them.
Depends who you're marketing to. Do they need to follow what others did or should they stay in their own niche? Because I'm not hanging out on a16z forum because they make fancy marketing materials, I'm one of the thousands of people who bought into the YC brand which was build over decades. Would be stupid to become one with the crowd of sleeky VCs.
As European I'm quite happy I didn't see YC involvement with the current administration, and if they stay a bit clear of the AI supergau I'm sure they'll be fine.
It's been reported that the ratio of mentors to founders had become quite bad. Seems quality has gone down since they tried to scale something that doesn't scale
That’s the easiest one because it made national news and he made a public statement apologizing for it saying there’s “no place, no excuse and no reason for this type of speech and charged language in the discourse.” I had the number of targets wrong it looks like it was only 7 officials. Several of them filed police reports against him for it. His public threat also prompted others to deliver physical notes of death threats toward the same officials.
Because it sounded unbelievable and your post is full of other things that people often lie about. You also neglected to mention he was very obviously quoting rap lyrics:
> Fuck (names) as a label and motherfucking crew
...
> And if you are down with (some law firm maybe) as a crew fuck you too
> Die slow motherfuckers
I can’t imagine Tan making death threats in his normal voice like your post alleged, and he didn’t. But yes, what a moronic move on Tan‘s behalf.
What specific things are you suspicious I'm lying about? You said my post is full of topics that people lie about. Which details are suspicious?
Re: the lyrics. Tan himself issued a statement that recognized the seriousness of how his threat landed and that his behavior was inexcusable. So it's curious that you are working harder to excuse it more than he did himself. Threats are often made with an element of plausible deniability or joking tone as cover. That doesn't diminish their effectiveness as threats nor the encouragement for malicious vigilantes to act on them (as we saw with how it spurred others to make their own threats).
I think companies hired too many Rust engineers, and now those engineers are writing technical blogs and making product decisions. We're seeing a lot of those everyday on HN first page
I never used linux because it was built using C++. Never have I cared what language the product was built it. The Rust community however wants you to use a product just because it's implemented in Rust, or atleast as one of the selling points. For that reason I decided to avoid any product that advertises using Rust as a selling point, as much as I can. Was planning to switch from Mac to a Linux machine, not anymore, I'm happily upgrading my mac.
It's an optional tool that can be used to implement drivers now, not forced. If you don't like the idea of another language being supported for implementing a subset of kernel modules, I don't think you wouldn't enjoyed having a Linux machine anyways.
That's not the case. It's using Rust as a selling point. All the noise around using Rust is marketing. The fact that you think linux machines are enjoyed by only a specific group of people makes me happier with my choice
> That's not the case. It's using Rust as a selling point
"Rust as a selling point" was a big thing in 2018-2022ish. You see it a lot less of the "written in Rust" in HN headlines these days. Some people were very excited about Rust early on. What feels more common today are people who unnecessarily hate Rust because they saw too much of this hype and they (justifiably) got annoyed by it.
If there is a new, optional language to be added to Linux Kernel development, Rust makes sense. It's a low level, performant, and safe language. Introducing it for driver development has almost no impact on 99% of users, except maybe it'll safe them a memory related bug fix patch having to be installed at some point. Is Rust the "selling point" here, or is the potential to avoid an entire class of bugs the selling point?
> The fact that you think linux machines are enjoyed by only a specific group of people makes me happier with my choice
If by "specific group of people" you mean "people who will refuse to use an OS based on the implementation language(s)", then I guess so.
I don't mean to be rude (although it reads like it, apologies), but I just think that you're coming at this from a perspective of malice instead of what the goal was, which was to reduce bugs in kernel drivers, and not to pimp Rust as a programming language by getting it into a large software project.
No worries I didn't take offenses. I just disagree. The title should've been we reduced bugs in the kernel and here is some proof of that. The 2018-2022-ish hype (I call it bullying campaign) is still strong. Google recently did a blog post about Rust speeding up their development, in the age of LLMs, seriously! I can't stop lol'ing at that
That's just not true. Neither Linus Torvalds, nor the Linux Foundation, nor any major distro, nor anyone else who could conceivably be considered responsible for "marketing" Linux is saying you should use it because a small part of it is written in Rust.
I just went to ubuntu.com and the word "rust" does not appear anywhere on the front page. So what are you talking about?
Party X may have been planning on something, but party Y threw a wrench in the middle, causing party X to have to make some response. By implication, party X believes party Y to be throwing a wrench, hence, party X must act. Therefore, party Y also must be planning something that counteracts party X's desires. If it weren't so, party X would not act (as that costs money).
The thing that contradicts Party X's desires can just be not doing the thing Party X wants done, it doesn't have to be doing an equal and opposite thing.
This seems like a variation on the fallacy of the excluded middle.
It's closer to so-far-unnamed fallacy of "the right has no agency." Everything they do is in response to something done by the democrats or the left or whatever and so they aren't responsible for their actions.
Netflix and those involved hasn't conclusively metamorphosed into a Larry Ellison-esque state of Lawn Moweriness.
Make no mistake, it (Netflix) is still a billionaire corp; on the humanity scale, it scores quite low, but not lawn mower low. They're still outside the Ellison event horizon.
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