The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 231 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Calacanis: Y Combinator teaches startup founders to be 'bullshit artists'
“What's happened now is the YC companies have a reputation of kind of being bullshit artists and that the program kind of teaches them to be bullshit artists, right?”
Stebbings: Altman Offered $2M in OpenAI Tokens to Every YC Startup
“Sam Altman just offered two million dollars In open AI tokens to every YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity.”
Lemkin: California wealth tax will turn Silicon Valley into Detroit
“And so, I do think if this goes as far as the folks that have Backing at want, you could have a Detroit in the Silicon Valley. Like, when it becomes a meme to do YC, or to do South Park Common, but then build, you know, get your money, build your team, and the…”
Lemkin: YC advising founders to run tight fundraising processes is terrible advice
“I think it's some of the worst advice founders get. And I love Y Combinator, but I think it's some of the worst advice Y Combinator gives their founders too, which is run a tight process.”
Rotman: YC encourages artificial growth for Demo Day, causing VCs to overpay
“A lot of the growth trajectory was in unscalable things in order to get the up and to the right, 45 degree chart so that you can package it for demo day. You know, so there are a lot of artificial things done in order to package it, like you know, to Sam's poi…”
Lessin: Slow Ventures avoids Y Combinator deals because they lack signal
“As an investor, you know, we've stayed away from it for a long time, partially because there's no signal in it because everything comes off the factory line looking exactly the same, packaged properly.”
Communities degrade as they scale, as seen with Y Combinator
“With scale, you have community denigration. We see this with Y Combinator, for example.”
Hsu claims 95% of Y Combinator advice is in Paul Graham essays
“Almost everything YC tells you is available online. If you just go read every PG essay, you know, you could probably become a YC partner, basically, if you read every essay, and just maybe that's being a little bit uncharitable, but, you know, I think you coul…”
Hsu argues Y Combinator adds no value after product-market fit
“Once you have product pocket fit, you don't really need to be talking to anybody who's just kind of heads down, just executing, just writing code, talking to customers, you know, for as many hours a day as you can, really. And so once that does happen, You kno…”
YC advisors told Webflow founders to hide having kids from investors
“We went into VC meetings and even at YC, we sort of got the advice of like, just don't mention anything about kids or Because it signals that you're not into your startup or like not going to dedicate everything”
Altman: Y Combinator Forced Seed Investors to Stop Exploiting Founders
“I think before YC came along, a lot of seed investors way overplayed their leverage over founders and would break term sheets, renegotiate deals, weak confidential information. And then YC was a powerful enough force to say, you can't do this or there will be …”
Calacanis: YC partners fully fund top 10 batch companies before Demo Day
“People who are part of their inner circle invest in the companies long before the schmucks who come to Demo Day get a chance to invest in them. So pretty much if you're in the audience at Demo Day, you're kind of the sucker at the table. The best 10 companies …”
VCs rely on simplistic thinking by backing YC and Harvard dropouts
“This is where I do think people and in my industry can be simplistic in their thinking. And they, in some ways it's like being safe. No one's going to look at you funny for investing in a company. That's a young guy out of YC with a hoodie that dropped out of …”
Hannah: Y Combinator gives bad advice by prioritizing traction over idea quality
“One element I don't like is this rejection of the notion that Ideas are valuable. You know, they, there's sort of this feeling that says, come in here and build some, build anything, build something you would use, build anything you can get traction on in your…”
Sam Altman's advice to wait for YC is selfish and poor
“I think that's kind of laughable and actually probably really poor advice for entrepreneurs. Usually I think Sam and YC in general is an amazing program, and they offer lots of benefits and advice. In this particular case, I think they were being a little bit …”
Scaleups acqui-hiring failing YC startups for AI talent is no longer viable
“When rippling is hoovered up 30, and owners hoovered up 20, and Revolut's hoovered up 10, you just, that strategy worked three years ago. Like, it's too late. Like, everyone is just sitting there hitting refresh, hoping these smart YC companies fail so they ca…”
Stebbings: Y Combinator charges unprecedented carried interest premiums up to 50%
“The carry premiums that they charge are incredible too. People don't know or discuss that enough. Unprecedented. 40, 50% in cases.”
Laqua: Blaming Y Combinator for portfolio startup fraud is directionally incorrect
“I think that people blaming like, you know, YC or whatever for some of their companies being frauds is probably not like directionally correct because like internally it's not like any venture fund really wants to like invest in a fraud and people that are lik…”
Lemkin: Mid-cap tech buyers cannot afford $1B YC startup valuations
“Google can buy them, but HubSpot, what's HubSpot's valuation as we record this? In the teens of billions? They just can't afford a billion dollar for every YC startup. They don't have the money.”
Lemkin: Current Startup Fundraising Market Is the Most Binary in Our Lifetimes
“It's the most binary fundraising environment in our lifetimes, isn't it? You're either, you know, you're either YC, Neo, South Park Commons, got something, get funded, or who the hell's gonna find you in your pre-seed round, right? You either got, you know, yo…”
Lemkin: YC Advises Founders to Sell Max 10% Equity Around Demo Day
“Y Combinator's advice for most companies is to raise a maximum of 10% before, during, and after demo day.”
O'Driscoll: Y Combinator is the only firm with a mass-production seed model
“The only people on the planet who have a structural business where they can de-emphasize picking because they can write checks, option checks at scale is Y Combinator because they have a structured advantage in terms of their economics. They are the only peopl…”
Stebbings claims Silicon Valley elites protect and anoint Rippling
“Rippling have the Silicon Valley Illuminati around them, and in the same way for me, like, there are some media companies, which I'm not going to name because they'll hate me for it, but, like, they just have the Silicon Valley, the Collison's, and the YC's ar…”
Jason Lemkin: Benchmark is no longer in top VC conversations on X
“If you look on social media, benchmark isn't listed the way Andreessen and Sequoia was like it was a generation ago. It's just not, does it matter? Harry, Harry's built a big brand. He's concerned. It matters. You could argue both sides, but when the industry …”
O'Driscoll: Seed investing is 30-35% harder than ten years ago
“His point is the combination of those two players means at best the seed game is 30, 35% harder than it was 1008, 10 years ago. He's entirely correct.”
O'Driscoll: Y Combinator is one of the greatest equity businesses ever
“I think your absolute assumption has to be YC has won. Look, it's one of the greatest equity businesses ever.”
O'Driscoll: Y Combinator has a 2x return advantage over seed funds
“How much better is the YC locked in return than a seed fund at the same stage? They basically have roughly a two X advantage. If you say to yourself, you know, if I look at the deals they do, if you, and then if you extrapolate based on the published hit rates…”
Wilk: Backing Second-Time Exited YC Founders Yields Top VC Returns
“If you were to have a blank check VC fund, and you just wrote a check blank, not looking at the idea, uncapped convertible note into every successful exited YC founder for their second company, you'd have probably one of the best VC funds on the planet.”
Osika: Lovable rejected Y Combinator due to equity dilution and distraction
“We felt that at best YC would be a lot of dilution and some acceleration with a lot of dilution and some acceleration. And at worst it would be a distraction to go through SF and go through all of these, like, fun things that happen when you go to YC. And we j…”
Lemkin: YC's batch fundraising model only works for Y Combinator
“They have a very effective, it's just, it only works for them. It doesn't work for anybody else. It doesn't even work for EF or certainly anybody else. It only works for them.”
Blomfield: Standard Oxford-to-McKinsey career paths are 'boring' for YC candidates
“That's the kind of exceptionalism that we're looking for in some area of their life. And it might come out through the application, it might be the interview video, or the interview itself, but we're looking for that spark that they are not average, like they'…”
Blomfield: AI B2B SaaS startups should target mid-market, not other startups
“Big companies are now more willing to spend money on this stuff than they ever were. So the previous advice of, like, go and sell to other startups, I think is actually not good for very, and maybe a dev tool startup, go and sell to other startups, but in gene…”
Blomfield: Complacency is the single biggest threat to Y Combinator
“Complacency, I think. We could coast on our laurel, rest on our laurels, I guess, not to mix metaphors, for quite a long time without realizing it. Yeah, and then we just recruit bad partners who give bad advice, but continue to recruit reasonable companies, a…”
Blomfield: YC maintains an internal database rating 10,000 venture investors
“So YC has an investor database, which has 10,000 people in. I'm sure you're in there. We can perhaps look it up. And it has reviews from all of the YC founders that have taken investment from them, both on their process and what they would like to work with af…”
Blomfield: YC partners gather enough evaluation data in 3 to 4 minutes
“Get enough in three or four minutes, but it seems rude to finish the interview so quickly.”
Blomfield: YC tracks VC meeting conversion rates and expected meeting value
“This is what I'm doing right now with another of our partners, Brad, We have data on how many meetings each VC takes, how many investments they actually make, and what the checker size is, and so we can tell our founders what is the percentage chance of conver…”
Blomfield: Shutting down Continuity improved YC's relationships with multi-stage VCs
“Shutting down continuity, our growth fund, has enabled to have a, enabled WIC to have a much more collaborative relationship with multi-stage VCs.”
Akkina: MITIMCo Passed on an Early Opportunity to Invest in OpenAI
“I mentioned we're investors in YC, and when Sam left YC, around then we also had an opportunity to invest in OpenAI, and we didn't do it. So that's definitely an error of omission that I think about a lot.”
Maples: Zenefits Was YC's Only Startup With PMF That Failed
“The only one he could name was Zenefits, and they broke the law.”
Lemkin: I am giving up on investing in Y Combinator startups
“I kind of have to give up on YC, not because I won't pay or don't love the signal, If there's 84 people in the round, there's no point in me putting a hundred grand in a 20 post.”
Lebrun: Healthcare startups must identify who pays before defining the problem
“In healthcare, even starting with a problem is not enough. Start with who is paying, and then How you do frame the problem for this person to pay, and then what is the solution for this problem eventually?”
Stebbings: Y Combinator cutting batch sizes signals renewed long-term strength
“I think this is like the biggest sign of strength from YC, and I was worried about them for a while. Now I'm like, fucking buy YC long hold.”
Stanton: Female-led YC startups valued under $15M, male-led up to $37M
“What I found was that the female-led companies at YC that I met with were valued less than fifteen million. The male-led companies were valued much higher, as high as thirty-seven million.”
Kan: Y Combinator is so stable you "can't fuck it up"
“And the time at YC was nice because YC is very stable as an organization. It's a brand. People want to go there. You know, you kind of like can't fuck it up really. And so the kind of mental burden was like way off by comparison to startups.”
Ralston: Y Combinator Weighs Founding Teams Far Above Ideas
“Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because my weighting is far more on the team at the stage in which I choose companies for angel investments, in which YC chooses companies to fund. I will always Pick a great team. Assume they'll figure it out, or…”
Tan: Founders who ask investors if they are failing succeed more often
“That was actually one of the big secrets of Y Combinator that if a founder frequently comes to their investors and asks, am I failing? That's almost always correlated and found in the founders who succeed because, you know, at that point you're actually asking…”
Gross: Airbnb likely would not exist without Michael Seibel and YC
“It is less likely that Airbnb would have been created had Michael Seibel not recruited the founders to Y Combinator, introduced them to Paul Graham, the program had been set up in place, the investment been available, demo day being available”
Y Combinator is the exact opposite of proprietary deal flow
“So, YC, in a lot of ways, exact opposite of proprietary deal flow. Everybody talks about proprietary deal flow like having something unique, and YC is a public demo day where everybody in the Valley is invited, and so, in a lot of ways, it's antithesis to a lo…”