Technically, that's a correct statement. Even if you could get into YC, nobody is forcing you to take the YC tail winds, and instead you're free to throw yourself into the head winds.
That was never up for debate. The real question is would those great teams have raised at better terms and from higher quality investors if they went through YC (obviously also accounting for the 7% YC tax)? From what I can tell by looking at the YC valuations, the answer is a no with one caveat: if they had a previous exit, their previous investors will give them a sweet deal with or without YC.
> It’s kinda known for pumping out low quality startups anyway. Most YC companies are not Dropbox.
It would be nice to see how you arrived at this conclusion. The YC portfolio is valued at over $300B [0], so I would say the investment community certainly disagrees with you (with or without Dropbox). In fact, that 300B figure was published before Stripe and Coinbase announced their IPO pricing, which has now likely added another $50B or so to the bottom line.
Just like every other VC, YC's successes are a small fraction of the investments they make. You can scroll through HN every day and see tons of YC startups no one has ever heard of/will hear of looking for engineers, launching...
> It would be nice to see how you arrived at this conclusion.
Demo days.
If a great team is skipping YC, it's safe to assume they know what they are doing.
> Just like every other VC, YC's successes are a small fraction of the investments they make.
You said "just like every other VC." So, if it's a global phenomenon that's true in every segment of the VC landscape, why bring it up as an argument against YC? This entire thread is about venture capital, so I doubt you're trying to make a point about bootstrapping or something along those lines.
I think what you're trying to say is that getting into YC is not a guarantee for success, but nobody ever claimed that. The odds are stacked against you either way, but the YC cohort's odds are way better than those of comparable startups that either didn't get admitted or never even applied to YC. If you want to debate this point, then let's see a substantive argument. Here's mine: YC's estimated IRR is 155% [0] (and this is an outdated number that doesn't include the recent IPOs). In comparison, the top ‘quartile’ of funds since Web 1.0 have returned about 20% IRR [1].
> Demo days.
I can't really do much with this response, but thank you nonetheless.
For everyone else, if you're contemplating applying to YC, I would refer you to one of the many discussions on HN where people presented actual math on when YC pays off and when it doesn't. For example, in this thread [2], the top comment links to a spreadsheet [3] that says if you want to raise $1m without YC, you should be able to get a seed valuation of $6.5m or higher, otherwise it's less dilutive to go through YC. Naturally, if you want to raise a higher amount, the threshold gets higher (eg: for $3m, the crossover valuation is $9m). Not to mention other value-added benefits, such as access to the Series A program, thousands of potential customers, etc.
All your metric says is that YC has had some very large successes. It says nothing about how likely a given startup is to succeed. Just because YC can get their hands on some good deals, it doesn't mean that most YC startups aren't crap that flame out. You have cause and effect reversed.
If you can get into YC then you can raise from any number of firms on equal footing.
Sure, I'll take that bet, as long as we can bring it back to your original premise, which is that S20 sucks and that smart founders are better off skipping YC. For that point to be validated, we need to establish that a comparable cohort of non-YC companies will fare less well. So here's my proposal:
We take all companies indexed on AngelList and isolate for those started in 2021. Then we separate them into YC and non-YC cohorts. In January of 2026, we will see which cohort has a higher rate of shut downs.
