Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ?
Everyone wants the exclusive network that YC founders get access to. The doors that YC stamp can open. The obvious corollary to that is for not YC company it is harder to open those doors and build those connections.
This is central to the model for any exclusive network, tech companies (FAANG) education institutions (Yale/Harvard/Stanford etc) or even schools like Eton all do the same to someone's(or company)'s profile.
It is lot more likely that you will get funding (not just YC) if you studied in best schools, worked at top company or a hot startup all else being same.
It is true of the ex-founder badge as well, second time founders get better chance at fund raise than a first time founder for the same idea.
VCs would say there is strong correlation between such attributes and success, but it really hard to prove (or disprove ) causation for this.
It is quite hard to know how much is such experiences or education a factor of merit or is it only because of the network effect and brand recognition more opportunities open up rather than any real merit to those brands alone.
> Striped of the hyperbole, the underlying premise is why accelerators exist ? YC is just the best at it and more visible ?
Yes, but it would be nice to dispense with the mythology that what is going on is the best technology is winning. YC might as well be the alumni association at Harvard.
The whole culture in SV / YC / HN / FAANG (and I understand the differences between those) is a value capture mechanism. It simply could not exist without extreme VC funding and pushing market entrants out via capitalization and size. Additionally, 20 years of this has proved that only certain types of low-hanging fruit can succeed with that model: (1) low cost-of-capital software industries, with (2) relatively known risks and favorable governance (see SF politics), and (3) an endless supply of knowledge workers who don't need domain experience.
Make the technology physical, requiring real science or engineering experience, have to pay the taxes that every other company in America pays, and not be able to push out market entrants from capitalization, and this whole world would collapse. Personally, I think it's obvious it's collapsing right now.
I have no dog in the Stripe vs Bolt fight, but the idea that this forum and the VC network culture of the Bay Area are talented underdogs as opposed to the extremely privileged is a deliberately concocted fiction.
I wouldn't call it fiction , it depends on which lens you see it from.
For a team without the education /experience background in a developing economies or more traditional smb/micro saas product they are privileged.
However no matter how much resources/help stripe got taking on PayPal still means underdog.
Taking on trillion dollar companies like Amazon, Apple Google , MS or even Facebook, with enormous platforms and userbases even with couple of billions in the bank still feels like underdog.
Tesla was and still is some extent an underdog in the automotive industry. The amount of money and support they could leverage from "paypal mafia" and other VCs while enormous doesn't make it an equal fight when taking on Volkswagen, toyata or GM.
They are more likely to see from who is bigger than them rather than who is less privileged.
They're not taking on trillion dollar companies though. They're taking on small software players in their space and racing to see who can grow fastest. This, if anything, is the biggest failure in the Bolt CEO's argument. YC and VCs intentionally fund huge amounts of identical players in the same space all the time. It's like the adage with outrunning the bear: "I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you." Throwing money at problems is how Bay Area VCs outrun other companies and American/international companies as a whole.
Later though, disproportionate amounts of their returns are made on sector consolidation, and this applies equally to down-market dominance with the FAANGs.
> Tesla was and still is some extent an underdog in the automotive industry.
Tesla is a perfect example of just how silly the Bay Area VC complex is. Its history is almost in complete opposition to the software-first model promoted for a long time, and it still required massive government subsidies.
And there's only one Tesla. For two decades the Bay Area (generously) has produced only one huge non-software tech company, and it left. There is no Bay Area VC tech future outside of software, and that low hanging fruit is gone.
Everyone wants the exclusive network that YC founders get access to. The doors that YC stamp can open. The obvious corollary to that is for not YC company it is harder to open those doors and build those connections.
This is central to the model for any exclusive network, tech companies (FAANG) education institutions (Yale/Harvard/Stanford etc) or even schools like Eton all do the same to someone's(or company)'s profile.
It is lot more likely that you will get funding (not just YC) if you studied in best schools, worked at top company or a hot startup all else being same.
It is true of the ex-founder badge as well, second time founders get better chance at fund raise than a first time founder for the same idea.
VCs would say there is strong correlation between such attributes and success, but it really hard to prove (or disprove ) causation for this.
It is quite hard to know how much is such experiences or education a factor of merit or is it only because of the network effect and brand recognition more opportunities open up rather than any real merit to those brands alone.