Don't judge Lucas Carlson too harshly for something he wrote almost three years ago, in the throes of dealing with his own YC rejection. Take a look at his credits at http://rufy.com/ and I think it's clear he's an accomplished developer, author of multiple Ruby gems and the Ruby Cookbook (O'Reilly, July 2006). I don't know Lucas, so I can't speak from experience, but anyone with his hacking credits (and a physics degree from Reed College to boot) has to fall into the "smart and gets things done" category.
YC's been iterating on this model for 3 years now and are getting even better at identifying promising ideas and entrepreneurs. I suspect its going to take one or two more cycles to absolutely nail the model.
In terms if lessons learnt, YC has the most experience of any micro seed fund.
That first batch was actually great. It had both Reddit and Loopt in it, plus Firecrawl, which morphed into Textpayme, plus Justin and Emmett, who went on to do Justin.TV after selling Kiko.
Reddit was a merger of 2 startups from that batch, so if you count Loopt as a success (a fairly safe bet), 4/8 succeeded: Reddit, Infogami, Textpayme, and Loopt. I'd be delighted if we managed to achieve a 50% success rate ongoing.
"During my summer, I created Print Promotion, worked on a top secret project with Adaptive Path that will soon change the way you feel about blogging, and am now working with O’Reilly on an amazingly innovative project. Quite productive for 3 months."
This is what happens when you confuse technical complexity with product success. A complex product, or one that takes "more than a weekend to build" will not necessarily be successful, and a simple product will similarly not necessarily be successful.
It has much more to do with demand. The wheel isn't terribly complex, nor is it original. Yet, if I came out today and started selling wheels, I could probably sell a few thousand. There's a demand for wheels, and so it makes sense to sell them. I think that in this age we forget this part of the equation way too often.
this guy wrote the post when most people did not know about the YC program. Give it up to him for knowing about the first funding cycle. I think a few 150 applicants knew about it.Most of people here did not hear about YC or PG until after their first demo day.
The author's opinion was the result of a rejection. If you read thoroughly,you will see that he is not dissing YC or PG. He felt that his idea was better than those funded, and frankly any entrepreneur who truly believes in his idea would think the same. Ask any YC rejects and they would show you at least 5 YC funded who they believe have an idea less creative/profitable than theirs.
That is their mistake. Most investors ideas do not mean as much as the team ability to execute against them, and YC is not different as far as that.
I am certain if you contact the author today, he would laugh and simply say "I thought I knew it all back then"
I think it's pretty clear that Reddit started development before digg was well known. So it's hardly a rip off though perhaps not the winner in that battle.
This was pretty light and fluffy when it was written in 2005. How is this relevant now? His main example is how reddit is a failure. Say what you want about reddit (I don't like it), but it sold for money. Of the stuff that came out of 2005, it's the one everyone remembers (although I imagine Loopt will be a household name soon enough with the Verizon deal).
I haven't noticed, but I think in this particular case the link was posted in irony, and not to bash YC. After all, Reddit became one of YC's best acquisition.
