YC didn’t fund installmonetizer! They funded the next venture from the people behind installmonetizer, who then proceeded to say “we’re funded by YC” on their about us page.
Maybe the brand is a little bit hyped to begin with? I suspect there are only two companies these VCs have ever funded that are known to turn a profit. It seems like they've trained a generation of young smart people on how to get rich by losing money.
What a strange thing to hear. Even I can tell you that many more than "two" YC companies have become profitable, and I'm pretty removed from the business side of YC.
Which ones? There are only two public companies that currently make a profit that I'm aware of: dropbox and coinbase. I don't really pay much attention, but that's all I can think of at the moment.
Well, here's one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2021/03/08/zapier-bo.... Sorry I don't have a list for you, but HN seems to have warped my memory in strange ways. I'm sure that YC has funded at least dozens, probably hundreds of profitable companies, including many that people wouldn't remember, because they found a lucrative niche for the founders and a small team (or maybe even just the one or two founders), and opted out of the fundraising track and are happily making a good living. That's not the preferred outcome from a venture investor's point of view, of course, but YC has always supported what founders want to do. Also, Zapier's an outlier - there are others that have followed a more conventional fundraising path.
Seems like a deeply tedious topic, but it sounds like the argument is that the small number of (claimed) profitable companies have basically ignored whatever it is you tell them to do. That's a great pitch.
In my YC batch (I was in the same one as dang and Airbnb), the issue of revenue/profit was what the partners talked about the most. Growth too, but profitable growth. Like, it was talked about all the time in the batch. That was particularly important in our 2009 batch due to the financial crisis, but it remained important later in the good times - see PG’s post “Default Alive or Default Dead?”.
Though it took us a while due to engineering challenges, our company survived and became profitable by minimizing spend and focusing on revenue/profit, just as YC advised.
This notion that YC backs/encourages companies to flush money down the drain is a mistakenly applied stereotype spawned from a combination of different eras, different companies and different investors. Notably, YC has never been involved with companies like Uber, WeWork or Theranos, or any other company that SoftBank has tried to artificially pump up by pouring billions of dollars into.
> "investing in something that is so obviously a scam"
None of us has any idea what was presented in the application form and interviews, but given YC prizes its reputation above anything else, we can reasonably presume it wasn't obviously a scam.
Most of these companies are obviously a scam in one way or another. It just depends on your definition of what a scam is. Is it a scam to insert a middle-man to profit off a transaction that already occurs, or is it a brilliant hack? Is it a scam to use huge amounts of veture funding to undercut prices in an existing market to grab market share and claim "disruption?" These are called business models, but some of us call them scams. They seem particularly scammy when they never ultimately turn a profit and begin to look suspiciously pyramid shaped.
This is the moment in an online discussion where we all lose 50 IQ points, so thanks for that.
"Scam" has a well understood meaning in modern legal and economic systems, and that's obviously what I'm addressing, not some other ideologically-charged alternative definition that you're now invoking as a debating move that amounts to little more than trolling.
(As for middlemen - for as long as commerce has existed, middlemen have been derided for inserting themselves into transactions that were already happening, by people blithely handwaving away the fact that those transactions were not, in fact, already happening.)
Your insinuation was that YC trains the founders it invests in to deliberately build long-term money-losing companies, which is demonstrably false and also highly implausible.
Philosophical discussions about the deeper nature of things are also of great interest to me, but not like this.
I'd like to see a postmortem on how these _blatant_ con artists got through.