105/13000 is a very small number to focus on. This data doesn't really mean anything.
For all the hubris and arrogance of the tech scene, and especially the Bay Area's, founders at least pretended to pursue a greater calling than money by leaving cushy gigs to pursue a new venture they were passionate about. Sure, that only lasted a handful of years before it became a gold rush to move to the Bay for YC and pursue the startup-to-acquisition pipeline, but they at least pretended to care.
The naked pursuit of wealth at the cost of potentially tearing apart society is mildly alarming because the scale it's happening at is so big.
Sam Altman was the president of YC, so it's not particularly suprising that he has hired lots of talent from YC - these are people that are pre-qualified because he has seen their work before outside of a job interview (better the devil you know than the devil you don't).
This happens everywhere - person leaves company A to company B and then poaches the best talent from company A. Obviously in this case the talent are founders rather than staff members, but still.
Jensen Huang himself says nobody in their right mind should start a company https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/11/jensen-huang-i-didnt-kno...
Not that I disagree, but it doesn't refute the original argument. It could even support it, class protecting their own from more people figuring out there's no clothes on the emperor.
Sounds to me as inability to delegate. Or implicit in the [acquire VC, aim for high growth] mindset as if that were the only path to success.
Companies can grow organically. With a positive cash-flow early on & reasonable work/life balance for founders & employees alike. Heck, there's even non-profits.
Yes they can, but unless you strike luck, they take many years, often decades of work to grow to a level where you can retire and enjoy the money.
With FIRE and similar concepts being pushed around everywhere, and the plight of the masses to keep their jobs and homes, I see where that desire for "make money fast" comes from. And from a game theory mindset - it's not wrong.
> Heck, there's even non-profits.
Non-profits often enough run on conditions bordering on (self-)exploitation.
YC has funded over 5,000 companies. If you assume 2-3 co-founders per company, that's more than 10,000 to 15,000 people. The vast majority of these founders aren't producing "generational wealth" outcomes. There's no glamorization of the companies that shut down, the ones that are scraping by, and the ones that get their founders a normal job, but those are the far more likely outcomes, especially in the more recent spray-and-pray batches.
Point being: don't start a startup if your goal is to get a job. Just get a job.
[1] Note that I'm not arguing about experience -- you can gain a lot of experience as a startup founder, but that experience is rarely directly marketable. Also, most startup founders are completely clueless when they start, so "a lot of experience" is a relative term.
Edit : and money. I guess most founders follow the money here.
Would be curious what some of the VP+ people are building inside Anthropic if they joined as engineers
After 20 or so years of YC, with multiple catches per year, and the insanely high failure rate of start ups, there must be a lot of former or floundering founders.
I guess you can extrapolate that and say a trillion dollar company is made of a bunch of people who could have started a billion dollar company.
Where are YC founders now who went to openai and anthropic ? OpenAI and Anthropic, mostly
I still can’t put a finger on it. I’ve seen real people use these fonts and layouts yet theirs look original.
Whoever finds an explanation for this solves AGI (/s)
So you're saying the site screams "Claude's style!" to you. Not too different from "I know a WordPress site when I see one".
- Orange/beige-ish colors - Rounded corners - Cards with a thin border - A thicker colored border on the left of cards - Serif font for headings - Monospace fonts for small text - Headings that often have an unnecessary subheading / pre-heading - Little badges, often with a "status indicator" dot on the left - Obviously LLM-generated text / language
I'm sure I'm missing many but the above are dead giveaways!
The copy is usually a bit of a giveaway too, ”explore your future path to greatness and experience the defining divider between those who can and those who can’t” or as most humans would write the header ”plans”.