I always find it interesting though YC leaders are extremely against cancel culture, but when it comes to business, its okay to threaten that someone will never work in the valley again if they don’t accede to their demands.
"They're against cancel culture... so why didn't they invite me to their house party? What hypocrites!"
Good reads/resources about this? I started reading "What's Our Problem" [1] but find it difficult to find "non-partisan" resources nowadays.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102146148-what-s-our-pro...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=late-stage+cap...
You can see from Google Ngram Viewer that there's almost no usage before the year 2000, and the vast majority of usage is post-2015. My guess would be that recent usage has only a tenuous connection, at best, to scholarly usage from 50+ years ago.
In other words, capitalism is a necessary transition between feudalism and feudalism.
[0] Insamuch as the term even has meaning. Medievalists and historical researchers will correctly call this out as an overloaded term.
Different technologies and world economy but same underlying issue: concentration of capital being leveraged to artificially protect profit from competition.
It's not necessarily a bad thing to change your mind, either.
My guess is that if you carefully read PG's criticisms of woke culture, they are narrow enough that they wouldn't apply to what YC does against misbehaving VCs. For example, if you read between the lines, this essay does a good job of explaining some problems with woke culture: https://paulgraham.com/conformism.html But it doesn't really apply to misbehaving VCs as much.
What's the specific critique of cancel culture PG made, that he's being hypocritical with? Can you give a verbatim quote that displays the supposed hypocrisy, to ensure that you're not misrepresenting his position?
Elon Musk can be easily dismissed as someone who seems to be constantly changing his mind, but is actually deeply unwell, addicted to drugs, and surrounded by sycophants. His mind is about as interesting as his friends Kanye West and Donald Trump: he was very good at one thing, it made him extremely successful, it entirely broke his brain. Graham and his cadre of Silicon Valley pseudo-philosophers are more like Moses: I don't trust them to have enough contact with life outside a rarified bubble to be able to speak to issues that concern normal people.
Cancel culture applies to discussions of policy in the public square. The idea is that certain views should be silenced. You can be a believer in free speech, and disagree that those views should be silenced. And then you can work to punish malicious actors in Silicon Valley who violate important investing norms. I just don't think there's a contradiction!
Defaulting to public debate on the matter isn't as stark a difference from this behavior as we want to believe, especially when the community in which you engage these points is so heavily biased in one direction. Discussions around "cancel culture" rarely take into account that the conversations being had are happening within a particular cultural context, one that depends on the venue in which it takes place. Too often I see public shaming framed as reasoned debate on this forum when the intention is otherwise abundantly clear.
An amusing corrollary to this is that cancel culture as normally defined is implied to be the majority opinion. I don't think that's true, though, the nature of news media definitely amplifies certain voices over others, getting back to the point about venues above.
That's a pretty generous way of framing it. It's not like this was a concerted effort to protect all small start ups or change employment law to protect founders from legal action from former employers. The article pretty clearly posits that it was a retaliatory exercise of power that was executed to serve the interests of YC. I would argue that the kinds of anticompetitive tactics described in this article are not economically healthy and are thus ethically, if not legally wrong.
>It's not like this was a concerted effort to protect all small start ups or change employment law to protect founders from legal action from former employers.
Imagine you volunteer at a local soup kitchen feeding homeless people. My response: "It's not like this was a concerted effort to feed all homeless people or end the problem of homelessness."
From the article:
> PG shared his anti-Adchemy game plan. In a nutshell: YC would anathematize Adchemy’s VCs, and declare that they’d never do business with YC again unless they straightened this out. Knowing PG, not only would they be disinvited from Demo Day, but PG would probably also steer companies to take money from other funds instead. Given that many if not most YC funding rounds were oversubscribed with investors, an excommunicated investor could be excluded without damaging the fund-raising company at all.
In other words, yes, YC was engaging in what the US Government would call "secondary sanctions": actions taken to cut the sanctioned individual or group off from support.
This and the other things you mentioned have both happened and not happened in various instances of cancellation. I think you might have some motivated reasoning going on here. It sounds like you are trying to make a distinction between sanctions imposed by people you agree with and people you don't. This is a distinction without a difference. Secondary sanctions are the most effective form of sanctions[0]. Everyone imposes secondary sanctions if they feel they can get away with it, because sanctions without secondary sanctions have no teeth.
[0] Why? Simple: they force everyone in the room to not only make a choice between the intolerant and the sanctioned, but if they choose the intolerant, to also enforce that same decision upon others. In other words, they're "GPL viral".
Suppose, hypothetically, that any lawyer who's found guilty of "defending a criminal" receives the same sentence as that criminal. So if you're a public defender, and you defend someone accused of murder, and that person is found guilty and serves a life sentence -- then you yourself are also required to serve a life sentence.
In this hypothetical, the justice system breaks down very rapidly. No one wants to defend the accused anymore -- even if you're fairly sure they're innocent. The risk of being forced to serve the same sentence is just way too high. This has second-order effects. Accusations are now much more likely to be successful, since the accused lack representation. If you're having a beef with someone, you'll want to be sure to accuse them before they accuse you. Etc. Society collapses into chaos.
This isn't just a hypothetical, note. A dean at Harvard was dismissed for representing Harvey Weinstein. Even the ACLU can explain why that was wrong: https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/harvard-was-wrong-dism...
Reputational punishments are serious punishments. There's an urban legend that public speaking is a more common fear than death. Obviously, public shaming is even scarier than public speaking -- public shaming is basically the worst-case scenario for public speaking.
If I choose to defend someone whose reputation is under attack, and my reputation gets attacked in response, that's isomorphic to the situation where a public defender gets sentenced for defending a criminal. This helps explain the chaotic, dysfunctional nature of modern cancel culture.
>you are trying to make a distinction between sanctions imposed by people you agree with and people you don't. This is a distinction without a difference.
Consider: "You are trying to make a distinction between punishment administered by the state, and punishment administered by private individuals." There's a huge difference between a judge sentencing a prisoner to 10 lashes with a whip, and a private individual randomly lashing another private individual because they're having a bad day.
There's nothing inconsistent about me trusting PG as an authority in enforcing SV good behavior norms, and me not trusting random vigilantes on social media to correctly diagnose racism/sexism/etc.
If you want to argue that I shouldn't trust PG, the best way to do that would be to mention an example of miscarriage of justice that he's responsible for. If your complaint is just: "but he's acting as an authority!" -- well, it would appear that he's doing a good job, since the Valley seems to be thriving.
What X is, is material though. So as much as we want to be able to simplify and not get lost in the weeds of interpersonal drama, we can't just say any behavior in that vague direction is toxic. If X is "he is a bad person and is going to make false claims and lie and cheat and steal from you, has repeatedly done this, and there is legally admissible evidence of this", that's a totally different thing from X is "he looked at me funny and, I dunno, I just feel a bad energy coming from him" amplified by the social media megaphone.
That's not interesting. That's not understanding capitalism. It's all about Incentives.
The idea that business leaders can be ever considered genuine political or cultural voice or actor is the problem. Silicon Valley and hacker culture has created an atmosphere of business politicians and for some reason hackers take them seriously and don't laugh at their faces.
The talk is just empty PR. Somehow smart people working for OpenAI, Google, keep eating it.
Traditionally business people don't get into discussions of culture or politics directly. They might work in the background, but never directly. There is a good reason for that.
Traditionally business people have always done that:
This was about propaganda of painting it as being somehow pro-social and criticism of those who believe it.
> Traditionally business people don't get into discussions of culture or politics directly. They might work in the background, but never directly. There is a good reason for that.
What is "traditional" for you? East India Company and the VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) conquering lands and colonising people, and directing foreign and military policy for centuries traditional enough?
Stabdard Oil's Rockefeller influenced politics aplently. William Randolph Hearst was the son of a Senator, businessman, newspaper publisher and politician who was among the main causes for a war for colonies. The Dole Company, United Fruit company, Standard Fruit company literally toppled governments and operated death squads, and often had enough influence to get the US marines involved ("War is a Racket" by a Marine general who took part in the banana wars describes this nicely). JFK's father was a businessman who got into politics for his and his family's interests.
In Russia, oligarchs are the ruling class and are politics, and have been for the past 30 years. In the US, you have multiple businesspeople and very rich people in the upcomming cabinet.
South Korea is sometimes jokingly referred to as the Republic of Samsung due to the outsized influence Samsung have on their GDP (22%), with ramifications such as their high level execs getting pardoned of crimes such as bribery of public officials due to the impact it would have on the company and country.
Business has always tried to influence politics in its favour, which often escalated into branching put into politics, often directly.
This was about propaganda and criticism of those who believe it.
Smedley D. Butler, who a year prior was paid off by J. P. Morgan to coup the US government and immediately went to Congress to blow the lid on the plot.
The Wikipedia article lists a lot of people who think the plot was more of a joke than a reality, but I suspect had it been kept secret it would have eventually been executed.
This also affects the dynamics of the regular business, it's not right, nor fair, and outright disgusting, though sadly happening.
Will the administration go to the point that they will investigate such ? I doubt it, it's too risky for the economy.
Consequently, if anyone does have skeletons in their closet, they'll just suddenly decide to do things more favorable to those who could have power over them.
Socially agnostic ideals for firms is relatively recent, and entirely good for business. Perhaps from the “greed is good” days of laissez faire policy.
The limits of those policies were found and society has learned a new tool to make its desires known - by being vocal customers.
Related: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey
> If by [noun], you mean [negative descriptors of noun], then of course [statement of lack of support/belief]. If, however, by [noun], you mean [positive descriptors of noun], then [statement of support/belief].
The attitude that all business / political people are no good can be counterproductive as it can lead to not differentiating between the helpful and iffy ones.
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, but care to cite some examples of them literally doing that?
That would probably result in *never working in the valley again...*, so I wouldn't be surprised if GP would skip citing.
I feel like this timeline is off. I lived in San Francisco in the first half of the 2010s and the big turning point wasn't Google's IPO but Facebook's. Cost of living was already inflated by then ($2-3k/mo for a SoMa studio) but after end of the lockout period, the property prices started to really grow out of control and the number of luxury cars driving around SF exploded. Angel groups that invested collectively as a mini-VC firm also became much more popular at that point.
Googlers were plenty involved at the time but the FB IPO is when the character of the whole Bay Area seemed to change.
Do we have to be careful what we say on HN?
There's one case I'm thinking of now where someone was as critical of YC (both the org and individual leaders) as anyone could possibly be, in a highly public and sustained way, and their startup later got funded by YC.
The article is about how YC defended one of its funded companies against a legal attack. It doesn’t say anything about YC refusing to fund someone who criticized it.
If you said something unflattering about YC once and got uninvited from demo day, that's on you. But being black listed from ever investing in any YC-backed startup even if you reach out to founders directly is taking things too far. And potentially an antitrust issue. Cabals are illegal, after all.
The only cases I know of where an investor was banished from Demo Day/YC’s network was for acting in bad faith towards founders. If YC banished investors who had a track record of being great to founders, they would be doing a disservice to founders, and therefore acting against YC’s own interests.
That aside, my original comment doesn’t contradict anything in the article (I can’t speak for the entire book - honestly when I tried reading it I couldn’t get past the first few pages).
But I would encourage folks to consider their approach, in general, whenever we are in a professional context (and, despite the casual nature of HN, this is very much a “professional context”).
I think that some few people here, are able to post in a truly anonymous fashion, but most folks could be doxxed fairly easily, if they piss off the wrong people (not always movers and shakers; we have some truly amazing talent, hereabouts).
In my case, I just make it clear who I am, and post carefully (I know it may not seem so, but look closer). I learned, long ago, that I’m not actually able to maintain true anonymity, so I don’t even try.
It was fairly obvious, that I would not be considered, if I didn't have one.
Turned out that I didn't really feel like working with companies that require HN handles, and they didn't feel like working with past-their-prime engineers, so it's all good.
I stuck around, and folks generally seem to feel I'm a decent member, here. A few curmudgeons don't like me, but, when you're "on the spectrum," you get pretty used to folks not liking you, for no discernible reason. I've found that being true to myself, means that it doesn't really matter, all that much. I've had really dangerous people not like me, IRL, so this joint is Amateur Hour.
I try to be a decent member here, and not bring darkness (I'm quite capable of it). Some folks think that makes me "stuffy," or "snobby."
Whatever creams your Twinkie. I'm actually a pretty decent person, and it's probably worth it, to get to know me. I won't make you rich, but I'm also no threat to anyone (and have no desire to be). I believe in helping folks, and trying to keep humanity first and foremost. HN handles are people, not NPCs (for the most part -Ed.), and I try to keep that in mind, when I post, here.
That's kind of shitty. I'm writing this down as in the last 2-3 years I've started to care less and less about any perceived veil (or hypocrisy, to be more honest) on websites like this one but it's still interesting to see that companies filter out potential employees based on that manifested hypocrisy. That explains a lot of how come SV is in the slump that it is right now (ignoring the AI bubble), but that's matter for a different discussion.
We all have to be well-behaved hackers and painters, or else. That's not how it worked in the past, and it will never work like that.
All of us, and I mean ALL OF US have dark fantasy lives. Freud called it our "Id."
It's not meant to be worn outside our heads.
One of the common refrains that you'll hear from fans of "hatemongers," like Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, is "They're just saying what everyone is thinking!".
There's a reason that we don't say everything that we think.
That's not hypocrisy. That's being a good member of society.
I have good friends -like, actually really good friends, who hold beliefs that I disagree with -sometimes, quite strongly.
We don't talk about that stuff, when we're together.
That's not hypocrisy, either. That's being friends. We find that there are a lot more values that we hold in common, than in opposition.
Modern social media has made it fashionable to use society as a public toilet for our Ids. I don't think that it has improved things.
The Freud/id stuff I can understand (and I agree with), but that’s related to a person’s inner “psychological” life, not to the polis as a whole.
Also, even in the political arena, there's often a need for personal restraint. My family has been in international diplomacy for decades (I'm the redneck engineer).
My father[0] used to constantly pop my "Simple wrong answer" balloons, on a regular, by explaining that nothing that involves humans, is ever actually simple, and that there are always dozens of competing forces at work; much of it sloppy emotions, pride, poverty, insecurity, tribalism, ignorance, religion, greed, and whatnot.
I have other family that has worked for decades, trying to get different faiths to work together, to address issues like poverty, lack of education, etc.
Talk about "herding cats."
Someone (I think Will Rogers) used to say "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie,' while reaching for a rock."
The Adchemy’s investors were funding a lawsuit against a startup. I imagine from YC’s perspective, that kind of thing was considered bad for the ecosystem.
By which I mean nobody involved was going to make money. There’s no blood in a stone. The lawsuit was not in anyone’s business interest. The article states it was even contrary to an unwritten rule of the startup culture.
If you happen to be in YC’s good graces, they will reward you in ways described in the article. If you’re not, they won’t take the time.
I was in YC in 2012 (2 yrs after the founder writing this article, and one of the last years PG was directly involved). By that time it was clear that YC had turned into a “spray and pray” accelerator, meaning they started favoring volume of investments over everything else.
When they did that, it also required that they split their attention between more companies, which inevitably meant that the sort of anecdotes described in the article still happen, but only for companies YC likes and believes in post-accelerator. YC definitely discriminates from that perspective- they choose which startups they think have the most promise during any given batch, and they give those founders preferential treatment.
Which is to be expected. How else can you scale an accelerator?
I mean, you could delegate the scaling to the startups you're investing in.
If I'm gambling at the horse races, should I bet $100 on every horse to make my gambling scalable and diversified, because I don't feel I can pick winners with any reliability?
In the economy as a whole how many people are even business owners? Most people go to work and price take at their job without negotiating, without even moving area, without even studying, etc.
You also have multi-company-monopoly effects for lack of a better term, e.g. if there are 10 competitors that make semiconductors - _everyone_ needs semiconductors, then if you pick the appropriate balance and don't buy in at an overvalued time you can invest in all ten and still make money because there is a net flow of funds into the system from outside of it.
Using your logic, if it was so easy why didn’t Google stop OpenAI? Meta? Perplexity?
Very unlikely
Because hubris.
One glaring flaw of well-capitalized large tech (perhaps the only one) is thinking they can build something better internally, when they have enough cash to simply buy best of breed off the market.
At times Google understood this: Android 2005, YouTube 2006, Writely/GoogleDocs 2006, DoubleClick 2007, Motorola Mobility 2012, Waze 2013, DeepMind 2014
e.g. Microsoft circa 2000 didn't think they could build a better internet. They just thought that the internet didn't really matter that much. Google in 2022 knew that LLMs mattered, and had spent a ton of money, but OpenAI just got a better product to market faster.
YC did do the right thing (investing in super early stage startups) at the right time (ZIRP environment), but now with the proliferation of too many startups and applicants, I'm not so certain on how much of a future it has with getting the next best thing. Already seeing quite a few startups that either bootstrapped or raised without YC, while a number of YC companies are stuck in pivot loops.
The real killer here is the Bay Area housing market. You need those RSUs to pay for a place to stay.
Especially as SF real estate relies on NIMBYism that might change whereas FAANG relies on an enormous brain trust, branding and monopolies.
Based on what I’ve read, this seems backwards, I think YC chooses founders with the most promise and gives their companies preferential treatment because promise is only the ability to do things.
But I could be wrong and probably am.
Yes YC acts in its interests but in my experience they live by good principles and that makes all the difference. The Chaos Monkeys anecdote is an example of that. So I don’t agree with the article’s framing that they throw their weight around to simply exercise whatever power they have over others for financial gain.
The Peter Principle is pointing out that if you keep getting promoted by doing an exceptional job, and you stop getting promoted when you stop, that you have ended up leaving a job you were exceptional at, and landing in a job you are not good at. In a certain sense it's saying "you should be demoted back to your last job that you were exceptional at"; it's not suggesting that, it's suggesting a sort of snarky "this whole system is set up to fail" because it's from a "isn't capitalism grubby" perspective.
None of this flavor is in the general YC scaling case, though you may be able to find it in various places within that.
Keep in mind, YC is very early stage. Asking them to pick only winners based on an application and short interview process would be a fool's errand. I believe their acceptance rates tend to be around 2%, so it's not like they aren't being selective up front—it just takes time to really get signal on who is executing and finding traction. Startup investment is high risk and justified by the outliers, so they have every incentive to find them early, it only makes sense that they would give more support to their winners as they emerge.
If you don’t eat the pie, someone else will. If someone else eats more pie than you, they will be stronger than you and eat your pie.
Switching analogies, unless you have a defensible niche with a wide moat, your position of power is an unstable equilibrium; in the open market only a monopoly is a stable attractor state.
Because they don't actually have the ability to pick high-quality companies.
And knowing which companies are high quality is almost impossible at the early stages.
I don’t think there’s any chance he saw any economic value in us, he took that time because he cared about startups and well-meaning failures like us
It’s a small thing, yes, but I’ve always thought it said a lot about him
The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.
But in the passive-aggressive popularity contest that is Silicon Valley, someone actually going to bat for you—really going to bat, like telling important people to go fuck themselves—that’s rarer and more short-lived than a snowflake in a bonfire.
Does YC do this consistently though. Even they have to choose battles.
There’s norms, case history, and the actual written law.
This reads like a violation of social norms where a smaller startup faced retaliation ( repercussions? ), and then had the ability to counter the pressure.
AI solutions nowadays are working to automate all sorts of services, partly using adversarial interoperability tools built by open source developers to extract functionality from services that have insanely worded TOS/T&Cs. Some of these megacorps are going after the maintainers and not the (potentially funded/protected) consumers with legal threats.
In this case the two parties are within 10's of millions of dollars of net worth, yet still it's not a fair fight when an incumbent tries to strangle a newborn in it's cott. Now think about the insane situation of megacorp vs maintainer with a delta of a few trillion dollars of net worth. I don't know if even a few phone calls would save a yc startup in that case.
Their plan was to win by exhausting the funds of the smaller company, not to win on the merits of the case (which was obviously dead in the water in California). But the smaller company was able to prevail because its investor was larger than the company suing them and decided to in turn bully them into dropping the lawsuit. Both startups, to nobody's surprise, ended up failing and the founders of both companies, also to no one's surprise, felt bitter about the whole episode.
Sounds to me like the good guys won here (to the extent that a company with "Ad" in the name can be considered a good guy). Not really sure what I'm supposed to take away from this. Just a typical ego driven business spat where the only winners are the lawyers.
Hopefully they never used this power to ruin people's businesses with a phone call for anything less noble than * checks notes * protecting their investment in a rival business.
It's interesting to me how Moses, per Caro, moved from being idealistic to being pragmatic in ways that look like corruption to those outside the 'bubble' but look like appropriate means and measures for accomplishing one's goals if you're inside the bubble.
He came to be in possession of a great many opportunities to build, and so, to spend money, and he, using these opportunities and the money flow, over time, built a political machine for doing so in a way that benefited those who helped him, and punished those who didn't.
Because Moses never had to run for office (and the one time he did, he failed spectacularly), he pioneered a purely bureaucratic form of corruption that conspired to extract as much money from the federal and state governments as possible and pour all of it into this ever turning hamster wheel of massive public works that weren't really for the public and didn't work, but did enrich the powerful people who took part in it.
But of course you know all this already, because you read the book. Which means you also know, damn, what a good book. It's very hard not to just talk about it all the time, and drive other people crazy.
I've been there too. Named personally. I think most people don't realize how stressful and damaging this is. In most cases it's because there's some kind of well-intentioned but vaguely formulated law or act that, if real events are twisted by just the right amounts, would apply and imply personal liability.
From that point on the game that the litigators play is to try and shoehorn each and every of your past statements or actions to fit the law in question and your job is to find as much evidence to the contrary, which might go many years back. In records that you almost certainly no longer have. While running a company.
This practice of putting founders personally in a lawsuit is an absolute disgrace and it needs to stop. The damage done by vague laws and litigators who ruthlessly exploit them are a very large multiple higher than any of the benefits that could possibly be derived from them. The only winners in this game are the law firms.