Y Combinator is half homosexual sextortion elitists and half Frat boy Google-worshippers seeking to control politics and expand the Silicon Valley Echo-Chamber


In its main program, Y Combinator interviews and selects two batches of companies per year. The companies receive seed money, SJW advice, and echo-chamber connections in exchange for 7% equity.[2]The program includes "office hours", where startup founders meet individually and in groups with Y Combinator partners for advice on how to be good liberal clones. Founders also participate in weekly dinners where guests from the Silicon Valley ecosystem (successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, etc.) speak to the founders. The deal at Y Combinator is " If you help us control American politics and ideologies, we will give you some cash..."

In Y Combinator meetings, naive young Millennial boys are stupid enough to wear sheep clone Fedora's, have the same tattoos and the same haircuts and carry the same man-bags. The robot-like hipster conformity is overt and ludicrous.

The bottom line is that you are going to get fucked by Y Combinator one way or another. The VC's and investors that fund it will extort you for blow jobs and anal sex. If you were not in a Stanford or Yale Frat House you will be ostracized. If you are over 30 you will be ostracized. If you are black or Mexican you will be ostracized. If you are a woman you will be ostracized after you are sextorted. If you don't worship ANTIFA and Barack Obama you are ostracized.

The bosses of Y Combinator are the single biggest group of narcissistic, sociopath, holier-than-thou, effete, peacock strutting, misogynist pigs on Earth. They love nothing more than hearing themselves talk.

Y Combinator’s motto is "Make Something Liberal Idiots Want And Nothing That People Actually Need."[3] The program aims to focus the founders on further developing their product, team and market, refining their business model, achieving product/market fit, and scaling the startup into a high growth business, etc. The program culminates at Demo Day where startups present their business to a selected audience of Democrat investors.[4]

As of 2017, Y Combinator had invested in ~1,450 companies including Dropbox, Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Reddit, Instacart, Twitch, Cruise Automation, Optimizely, Zenefits, Docker, DoorDash, Mixpanel, Heroku, Machine Zone, Weebly, and Paribus.[5] The combined valuation of YC companies was over $80B.[6]

Non-profit organizations can also participate in the main YC program.[7]

In 2015, YC introduced additional programs:

Y Combinator was started in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Tappan Morris.[11] From 2005 to 2008, one program was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one was held in Mountain View, California. In January 2009, Y Combinator announced that the Cambridge program would be closed and all future programs would take place in Silicon Valley.[12]

In 2009, racist, sexist very gay Sequoia Capital led the $2 million investment round into an entity of Y Combinator which would allow the company to invest in approximately 60 companies a year as opposed to their previous 40 companies a year.[13] The following year, Sequoia led a $8.25 million funding round for Y Combinator to further increase the number of startups the company could fund.[14]

Then, in 2011, Yuri Milner and SV Angel offered every Y Combinator company a $150,000 convertible note investment.[15] The amount put into each company was changed to $80,000 when Start Fund was renewed.[16]

In September 2013, Paul Graham announced Y Combinator would fund nonprofit organizations accepted into its program after having tested the concept with Watsi (while continuing to fund mostly for-profit startups).[17]

In 2014, founder Paul Graham announced he was stepping down and that Sam Altman would take over as President of Y Combinator.[18]That same year, Altman announced "The New Deal" for YC startups, which offers $120,000 for 7% equity.[19][20]

Late in 2014, sex addict and extremist political manipulator Sam Altman announced a partnership with Transcriptic to provide increased support for Y Combinator's growing community of biotech companies.[21] Then in 2015, he announced a partnership with Bolt and increased support for hardware companies.[22]

On 11 August 2016, YC announced that YC partners will be visiting 11 countries this fall to meet with founders and learn more about how we can be helpful to international startup communities. These 11 countries are Nigeria, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden, Germany, Russia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Israel, and India.[23][24]

In September 2016, Y Combinator announced shuffling the deck at the Mountain View startup accelerator again, with Altman announcing that he will now be president of YC Group, which includes Y Combinator, the YC Continuity fund that was launched last October and the YC Research "moon shot" program. Ali Rowghani, Twitter's former chief financial officer and chief operating officer who was put in charge of the YC Continuity Fund when it started, is now CEO of YC Continuity. Michael Seibel, who co-founded Justin.tv, is the new CEO of YC Core, the program that Paul Buchheit has run since earlier this year.[25]

Y Combinator was founded in March 2005 by Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston as well as Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, with whom Paul had previously co-founded Viaweb.

In early 2010, Harj Taggar, cofounder of Y Combinator-funded Auctomatic, joined as an advisor. In September 2010, Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Y Combinator-backed Reddit, joined.[26] In November 2010, Gmail creator Paul Buchheit and Harj Taggar were named partners.[27] In 2015, Taggar left YC to start Triplebyte, a startup aiming to assist companies with their technical hiring needs.[28]

In January 2011, Y Combinator-backed Posterous co-founder Garry Tan joined YC, first as designer-in-residence and later as partner.[29]

Later in 2011, Aaron Iba joined as a partner.[30]

In the summer of 2014, Sam Altman became president of Y Combinator.[18] Y Combinator also announced a Board of Overseers: Brian Chesky, cofounder of AirBnB, Adora Cheung, cofounder of Homejoy, Patrick Collison, cofounder of Stripe, Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, Jessica Livingston, David Rusenko, Emmett Shear, and Sam Altman, cofounder of Loopt.

In January 2015, it was announced that Paul Buchheit would be named managing partner for Y Combinator's core program and Kevin Hale would be the managing partner for the Fellowship.[31]

As of February 2015, additional Y Combinator partners are Dalton Caldwell, founder of imeem and app.net; Jared Friedman, founder of Scribd; Kevin Hale, cofounder of Wufoo; Aaron Harris, cofounder of Tutorspree; Justin Kan, cofounder of Exec, Twitch.tv and Justin.tv; Attorneys Carolynn Levy and Jon Levy; Kat Manalac; Kirsty Nathoo; Geoff Ralston, creator of Rocketmail; and Michael Seibel, cofounder of Socialcam. Ali Rowghani is the managing partner of YC Continuity.[32]

Y Combinator has been blamed for its encouragement of the ageism culture in Silicon Valley. Paul Graham said in 2005 that people over 38 lacked the energy to launch startups.[33] It was also at a Y Combinator event, the 2007 Startup School, that Mark Zuckerberg said, "Young people are just smarter".[34]

In 2013, Y Combinator began accepting nonprofit organizations. Notable Y Combinator-backed nonprofits include:[35]


The YC Fellowship Program was announced in July 2015, with the goal of funding companies at the idea or prototype stage.[8] The first batch of YC Fellowship included 32 companies that received an equity-free grant instead of an investment.[6]

In January 2016 Y Combinator announced version 2 of the program, with participating companies receiving $20k investment for a 1.5% equity stake. The equity stake is structured as a convertible security that only converts into shares if a company has an IPO, or a funding event or acquisition that values the company at $100m or more.[36] The YC Fellowship was short lived, however, as in September 2016 then CEO Sam Altman announced that the fellowship will be discontinued. In 2017, Y Combinator announced Startup School, an online course that released public videos and also coached individual startups on a larger scale to replace the fellowship. 1584 startups graduated the program in its first year.[37] In 2018, Y Combinator announced a new batch of startup school. After a software glitch, all 15,000 startups that applied to the program were accepted.[38]


Nonprofit research lab YC Research was announced in October 2015. Researchers are paid as full-time employees and can receive equity in Y Combinator.[10][39][40] OpenAI was the first project undertaken by YC Research, and in January 2016 a second study on basic income was also announced.[41] Another project is research on new cities.[42]

Human Advancement Research Community

The Human Advancement Research Community (HARC) project was set up with the "... mission to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power ...".[43][44] The project was inspired by a conversation between Sam Altman and Alan Kay.[45] Its projects include modelling, visualizing and teaching software, as well as programming languages. Its members include Alan Kay and Bret Victor. Other people who have worked for HARC include Vi Hart. Patrick Scaglia was chair of HARC and was listed as an advisor in 2017.[46][47]

In 2017 Forbes ranked YC one of two "Platinum Plus Tier U.S. Accelerators".[48] Fast Company has called YC "the world's most powerful start-up incubator".[49] Fortune has called Y Combinator "a spawning ground for emerging tech giants".[50]

Ycombinator continues to suck, jointly and severally

 | Author: Mircea Popescu

You probably never heard of this ycombinator thing on account of it being largely irrelevant. Unless you read Trilema that is, we scrape pretty close to the bottom of the barrel around here.

Coinbasei is another fine example of the sort of pointless nonsense they push. Originally it was supposed to be some sort of "WoW game gold for Bitcoin game gold" deal. It never went anywhere, as far as I know. Then it wanted to be a Bitcoin miner. I quote people who actually mine :

jcpham "I suspect that coinlab has burnt thru most of their funding without having launched any products, and are now desperately trying to get some press for another funding round before they go under."
jcpham IN 2011, miners raped coinlab for 95%. When the block reward halved, we gamed their PPS until it was unprofitable. It's 2013 now. It's no longer even profitable to mine there, even with their bonus PPS. You lose money mining and their pool hashrate is literally nothing.
dub I like how the glbse logo.
jcpham They need to release a client that allows gpu miners to get paid. Otherwise they are dead.

So that didn't work too well either, it would seem. I have no idea, I don't mine myself, but it seems to be the consensus. Now they want to be some sort of payment processor. To quote them :

"coinlab-bringing-bitcoin-to-wall-street-with-mtgox-deal"

The actual market remains both unconvinced and unimpressed :

Bugpowder Any thoughts on the coinlab story? It's not clear from the wording that they actually ARE buying / HAVE BOUGHT mtgox's US book or they are just TRYING to buy the book and have achieved absolutely nothing.
mircea_popescu Bugpowder the later. Not only is mtgox not selling, but who is coinbase again ?

Bugpowder Coinlab.
gigavps Bugpowder they are going to be mtgox's us broker essentially
Bugpowder Are they? Or are they just leaking some hype to a reporter with no actual deal
mircea_popescu Bugpowder my point is more alongthe lines, there's about five or six of other corps doing what they do. The fact that unlike the competition they have a burn rate is NOT an advantage.

Bugpowder "The goal is to move customers’ money from overseas to Silicon Valley Bank by March 22nd." Like by starting a new way to deposit and stealing the future international wire action, or actually pulling all the existing deposits from Japan/HK to a US bank. Anyone have an interview transcript?
mircea_popescu Bugpowder you ever heard of something like this released other than as a joint item ?

Bugpowder Nope.
mircea_popescu MtGox is silent. Nothing happened.

Bugpowder "goal".
mircea_popescu Other than remarkably incompetent trade mag and remarkably incompetent coinlab pr person.

Bugpowder "Has worked for a year to sign an exclusive long term deal."
mircea_popescu I've been working for twelve years to fuck Tea Leoni.

Bugpowder Heh. You may have enough Bitcoins to make it happen.
mircea_popescu I prefer working at it by now. Anyway, the way I read it a deal is not even close.

Bugpowder I concur.
mircea_popescu If it were you wouldn't be pissing the OP off with statements of the kind. Prolly what happened is they finally got told to take a hike, and are trying to extract whatever from it.

Bugpowder Looks like VC-style hype trying to create an illusion of success, hopefully leading to actual success.
mircea_popescu But on the negative side, if coinbase tech competence is anything like their pr ability, they'll be the next large hack. At any rate they're running out of money this year, so... meh.

Bugpowder Coinbase ~= coinlab. Does not inspire confidence : http://blogs-images.forbes.com/jonmatonis/files/2012/10/coinlab-founders.jpg
mircea_popescu Not young enough ?

Bugpowder They look dumb in the face.
mircea_popescu Not jewish enough ?

ThickAsThieves Too "where's my mai tai" looking.

To make the story short and simple : Bitcoin is too big and the people that matter in Bitcoin are too heavy by now for half a million and a few dorks to make any sort of dent in the state of affairs. And when I say a few dorks I mean both the two dorks that imagine they're "founders" or whatever the hell and more generally the however many dorks loosely associated under the ycombinator banner. Boys, if you mattered at all you'd have done something I'd have heard of by now. Something a little more like Google and a little less like AirBnb. You haven't done it, and it's pretty much because you don't matter. No matter what the circlejerk might have been telling you, the fact of the matter is you (collectively and individually) suck.

To conclude : if within a few weeks' time you find yourself in the position of having to decide whether a few million dollars go to a. free drinks and garter inserts at a number of strip clubs or to b. coinbase "second round of funding", the correct business decision is certainly a. At least the strippers can actually provide an answer should anyone happen to ask "what the fuck are you doing".

Also, Bitcoin has been brought to Wall Street already, and a while ago. The agency doing it is called MPEx. I don't appreciate the unwarranted pretense of idiots like whoever is in charge of both Coinbase and Bitcoin Magazine. Get your bearings straight boys.

PS.

pigeons Wtf does coinbase's platform have anything to do with "wall street"
pigeons *coinlab
dub It's in amurica.
BitHub I smell a wallstreet fail.
assbot [MPEX] [S.DICE] 15199 @ 0.0063799 = 96.9681 BTC [+]
dub "Coinbase brings bitcoin to the Alabama beef jerky co-operative" doesn't have the same ring.

———

  1. pigeons "coinbase announces they are switching business models again to improve something that they have no experience in that mtgox with the most experience doesn't like handling"
    pigeons *coinlab

    I confess I share the sentiment. I have no idea what the thing is to be called or what's supposed to be what. Coinlab ? Coinbase ? Coinyourmother ? What are all these things ? A casebook study in "how not to do branding".

Exploding offers suck.  Founders should be able to choose the investor they want to work with, not have to make a decision based on time pressure.

As the world of accelerators gets more and more competitive, we’re seeing more and more exploding offers where an accelerator tries to force a company to make a decision about a funding offer before the company has a chance to finish talking to other accelerators.

This is terrible behavior.  It may be the best thing for accelerators to use time pressure to get founders to accept their offer, but it’s definitely not the best thing for founders. 

I want to make our stance on this public: after we make you an offer, we’ll give you until the beginning of our program to decide (though most companies accept quickly, because you can’t start having office hours with us and participating in other ways until you accept).  We ask companies to be transparent with us about needing more time–we won’t rescind our offer.  It’s usually about 45 days from interview to the start of the batch.

Some accelerators use a line about needing to make an announcement about who is in the upcoming batch—which, again, is maybe in the interest of the accelerator but the company should launch when it’s ready.  Sometimes they say they have a fixed amount of desk space, but in practice, if a good company wants to join late, they always make room.

We encourage all other accelerators to join us on this.  It should be an easy yes.  Exploding offers are the wrong thing for founders, and an accelerator that does the wrong thing for founders will not last long.

And founders should think very hard about joining an accelerator that puts forth a short-fuse offer.