This is mostly AI companies needing a large investment (maybe larger than YC's standard 500k) to get off the ground, and so YC now starts acting as market maker (more than it already is), by literally getting people that are primed to buy (filling out the form where minimum amount is 500k, talking about their last funded pilot, company size, etc), so YC can now say this is the size of validated opportunities, so their (potentially higher) seed is now derisked, but also they don't have to wait for their startups to 10x in 3 years, they can 20x in 12 months.
The startup however, will do the thing they advised them not to do, which is tailor their roadmap to a large customer.
But yes, this is early exit/rugpull planning. If it weren't, it would not be AI exclusive and I don't think companies are that excited to know the latest and brightest AI companies. They can simply wait for the market. But they create FOMO, and now they open a small window, make calls to know how much you'll commit and all the FOMO execs will fly in. I'll be fun.
It is actually no correct. A record by definition is an unsurpassed accomplishment or statistic. It needs to be an accomplishment before it can be called a record. The passage of time does not qualify as a record. Also, a statistical certainty cannot be called a record.
The year 2025 progressed to 2026. Never in the history of the Gregorian calendar have we EVER made it to 2026. That is an accomplishment. That is a record.
We do consider the oldest person alive and the oldest recorded person ever, to be records of a sort. So if that counts, why wouldn't a personal best count?
There is a semantic difference between capturing data (recording) and putting somethng on record (capturing/recording an achievement). One is the process of documenting and the other is the documented result that acts as a benchmark.
When you record an achievement, there is no need to record another one until you surpass it. You can record attempts, but they are now just data that makes the actual record more meaningful the longer it exists without being surpassed.
When that happens, OpenAI will own 100% of your life. I’d rather they keep spinning their wheels long enough for these problems to be solved elsewhere.
I think people very much should care about who ends up owning these solutions. The person or entity that controls things like that just has more power, which isn’t necessarily a good thing
I haven’t used desktop Linux in ages, but I’m a Linux server user as I think maybe everyone here. Is the solution to desktop that some well funded company just needs to fork Debian, build the common application deites like word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, messaging apps, etc, and then build a proper App Store?
Or is the underlying system still bad, as in drivers, compatibilities, audio and video codecs, networking, etc. I know on servers when some of these break they take a bit of mucking around. But it seems many companies are trying, why are they failing?
Yet my mom does not have a Ubuntu desktop. And if I set one up for her, I woudl have to split my time between my job and tech support for her. So well funded, but not sure they are the right company.
It's actually not really that bad. If you have to split your job likev you said, then you have to do it when she's using Windows too.
Linux has made a lot of progress since 2010.
If low tech ppl in family get phones, I want them to be apple, less work for me (not an Apple user). If they get a PC, I want them to use Ubuntu. Less work for me.
And if there's some work, I'd rather ssh into their PC and fix it using a shell with bash, then get annoyed with Windows and it's quirks.
Which is basically what Google did with ChromeOS and Android, except that they have little to nothing to do with GNU/Linux experience.
Rather a Java/Kotlin/C/C++ userspace with the Linux kernel as implementation detail, or Web/WebAssembly, equally with Linux kernel as implementation detail (Crostini runs in a VM similar to WSL, and lacks several features).
I bet Googlebooks might achieve more sales on regular consumer shops than any proper GNU/Linux distro, and it is basically Android on laptops as per what we know about them.
I think vendors will do what vendors will do, and you can choose to buy into that or not. Containers fullfilled their promise. You can today host anything yourself easily, with a single command.
The problem comes when developers start building things without this in mind. I see simple site analytics apps in github, where the docker compose file is a web os services and the repo itself is full of init scripts and the sort. You have redis, mongo, an RDBMS container, an analytics db, kafka, all the kafka tooling like bookkeeper, then you have outsourced auth liek clerk or supabase (when the whole thing is not just some supabase chimera with edge functions and whatever else supabase is supposed to run outside your infra).
And the repo description is: simple, anonymous wesbite analytics.
The entire thing is more complex than the thin you want to do analytics for.
So you bring that into a cloud, and instead of a container, you are now advised, but both AWS and your HN peers that you need to replace each component with it's cloud version, such as elasticache, AKS, cognito, firebase, whatever.
All of these services as you set up, trap you into overprovisioning. Your DB needs to have 3 replicas or you have no guarantees, your auth needs an entire instance of something running somewhere or unicorns start dying.
By the time you come out for sunlight your bill could pay your rent. So you don't self host, you signup for google analytics.
Everytime I find a project on GitHub, the first thing that makes me close it immediately is whether it has a docker-compose.yaml and if it's a single, sane/dumb, low footprint deployment or a chimera.
So self hosting is alive and well, whether your app is easy to self host, and whether you know how to use just what you need from cloud vendors are different questions.
This happens when people are gripping their phones waiting for the next clever post to write. Anything they disagree with is an opportunity to sting someone else. You succeed 100 times, 1000 if you have FU money. Then you stop checking yourself.
We can argue whether the term DEI has been misused, but...what does it take for someone to come to the conclusion that country first is DEI?
I don't know how a university could package this, or package "experience" or. "building", etc. I went to college, did engineering and also did economics and did "entrepreneurship". The last 2 were useful not in a sense that they unlocked anything, but I was already starting a business by my second or third year, that I run to this day. I took the courses because I felt I needed them as I bootstrapped. Went on to build multiple startups since. Never went to YC though.
So something was already brewing in me much earlier, and idk what advice to give, honestly not sure how a university can inject this into students. But I think the useful part of the advice is to get universities to stop packaging "entrepreneurship" courses as the path to actual entrepreneurship.
What percentage of students in those classes actually go on to become founders? Willing to bet the numbers aren't encouraging.
Right but what percentage of people doing any given class end up specialising in it?
It's not their job to "inject" it but universities are going to have to grapple with the notion that if they want to keep admitting students, then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
So some truly functional support for self-employment, startups, small business working generally seems inevitable. If you're going to persuade students to step out of the job market for up to four years and take on vast debt to hand over then I think pastoral care includes providing the framework to teach them to fend for themselves when the jobs in the brochure don't turn up.
Concrete support, rather than "make yourself ready for something like YC".
(Beyond that I actually think prospectuses should be more closely regulated for what they can and cannot suggest is a likely employment outcome. Because at the moment, prospectuses are aimed at kids and are full of misleading content about how likely they are to get a job.)
> then there aren't enough jobs in any market for the students on their courses.
That has always been the case, because the purpose of universities is not feeding the market with workers or founders, it's feeding society with educated people. Which is incidentally an excellent basis for both founder and worker roles.
That is the aspirational purpose, not the functional purpose. Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments- I recall a lawsuit against a university I was going to by alumni with the allegation that the numbers were artificially padded to the point of false marketing (I don't recall the outcome, though).
Even if we were to accept the premise that universities exist to feed society with educated people, we should then question the value of the education students are getting, given the significant grade inflation over the last 20 or so years.
"Universities have long advertised job placement rates for the majors in their departments" - they shouldn't have, this was actually never their purpose but it was easy to make that promise when jobs were easier for college graduates, so they used it to sell more seats. No one can give you a formula to get a job. You're competing with everyone for a scarce resource. That formula is self defeating. Let's enroll 10000 students and promise all of them that if they are on the top 500 they will be employed at one of the 100 available jobs?
And really, if universities wanted to feed the entrepreneurship engine, they should use their endowments to create funds within their programs, so innovative students could apply for, get some seed funding that is required to actually become a real business and generate a return on the fund.
Then you not only create actual founders, you grow your endowment and you actually evaluate the university on their fund's performance.
You democratize the YC model. I wonder why they haven't tried. Maybe bc they can't actually create founders?
Right but the tenor of it is different. In the 90s if you went more than a fortnight of job search after you graduated and didn’t get to being offered an interview, either you only had a third class degree or there was something very wrong with your CV.
These days every job has hundreds of applicants. In the AI era, thousands.
A University education is priced as though as it has near-term ROI. The government has subsidized it on the basis that it's opening an investment with strong near-term ROI to its citizens.
I don't think you can claim that this ROI is not its purpose.
A few observations. I consider myself smart, but far from smartest.
tldr: intelligence lets you control some variables for happiness, but it is not the entire happiness function.
1. We're social and emotional beings beings. Emotions are more powerful than intelligence. We gladly choose something that we enjoy over something that will make us happier long term. All humans do this, mental fortitude is in short supply.
2. Life, and society move the definition of happiness constantly. Either through manipulation, new discoveries, new laws, new constraints. So even smart people need to adapt. If yo were happy last year, maybe today you have to pay higher taxes, or your country gets into a war, or you get a new president, or you're just competing with other smart people in an endless game of chess.
3. We move our own goalposts. Think the rich who thought wealth was the source of happiness, then they get there are are miserable. Or simply spend their time looking for new challenges, infinite growth, etc.
4. Living in a society means your happiness is always, always dependent on the state of that society, and therefore the happiness of others. It's like fluids. You can't be the one drop of water in a bottle that is red. It will dilute, and vice-versa. Maintaining a state of happiness in an unhappy society means building barriers and constantly fighting "them".
5. I have a theory that live is like a wave of ups and downs. The sum of all your highs will equal the sum of your your lows by the time you die. You have some control of when, how much and for how long to be happy/unhappy (unhappiness also means hardship, work, selling time for money, etc, the things we use to pay for happiness), and that controls how the quotas get distributed throughout your life. I have absolutely not tested this, I am still experimenting with my life. Counter examples may exist, I have a sample size of 1.
The startup however, will do the thing they advised them not to do, which is tailor their roadmap to a large customer.
But yes, this is early exit/rugpull planning. If it weren't, it would not be AI exclusive and I don't think companies are that excited to know the latest and brightest AI companies. They can simply wait for the market. But they create FOMO, and now they open a small window, make calls to know how much you'll commit and all the FOMO execs will fly in. I'll be fun.
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