Odd, I thought this was pretty clear and I was even non-plussed by the article as a whole. I do believe that startups are on balance a good thing.

If you're a highly educated yet junior cog at BigCo you will be decently to well paid but unproductive. Buddy of mine was a superstar at Cal and worked on HR software at Google. He's now a well thought of co-founder at a well thought of startup. He is more productive. His talents are put to better use. Buddy of my brother went to Moscow State (Stanford if you speak Russian). Fixed bugs at JavaSoft. Maintenance. Her talents were wasted.

BigCo can do big things which requires a large pool of talented folks. But for the individual that might be a waste of that talent.

If you mostly believe in capitalism, then the link is basically: people being productive = more stuff gets done, and if they're earning money for it, that means people are happy to pay for it. So basically, productivity is a good thing in general.

I'd wager most economists would say that productivity is the single most important thing to improve in general, though they'd be talking about the economy in general, and YC is interested in taking specific people and making them more productive. The same principle applies though - more stuff is done, and if someone is paying for it, it must in genearl be good.

(There are obviously exceptions to this - cheating/scamming/doing illegal things, etc).

How about the legal, but net-negatives like Juicero or insecurely networked teledildonics?

> One way you could make this clearer is replacing the phrase "can be much more productive" with a more specific goal that's more obviously good.

I think that specifying a metric would dilute the message; replace it with whatever your goal is. Working at a startup may help you be more productive in achieving it simply because there are fewer people/processes to hinder you. Not everyone has the same goal, but being able to point to something useful and say "I did that" is meaningful to me.

"I get more done in a week here than I did in a month at [BigCo]"

^ That's a direct quote from someone who recently came to us from a large established company. They really liked seeing the noticeable impact of their personal contributions. I didn't ask them to compare the two work environments; they were just blown away by how much they could accomplish when they weren't being held back.

But that seems to be entirely driven by the current small size of the company, which is fundamentally anathema to YC's conception of a startup, which is a company that is growing as fast as it can.

If you want to work at a small company because you feel like you'll have a greater impact, picking a startup is a great way to ensure you'll be dissatisfied with your job every couple years. Pick a genuine SMB instead.

"Y Combinator’s goal is to cause there to be more startups, by helping founders to start them."

Also interesting that they goal doesn't include helping startups be more of a good thing.

To be clear, I generally believe that YC will help there be more good startups, but it is kind of weird phrasing.

I think that would come too much in conflict with another principle:

"We must remember that we’re investors, not bosses. We can advise and persuade, but not command."

As I understand it, YC is pretty hands off. It's mostly an (usually amazing) advisor you come to with questions when you have them, plus alumni network, plus dinners/demo day. I don't think they can really make people be good instead of bad.

I think if anything, they simply won't fund people that they believe will not do good.

> I think if anything, they simply won't fund people that they believe will not do good

There have been some pretty visible counter-examples to that, fortunately not in the last two batches.