The 20-year-old Plague Y combination has released the world in the past 20 years
Today marks the 20th anniversary of Y Combinator, an entrepreneurial accelerator that promotes the world-changing company. YC brings us innovations like “Make All Apps” and we all have to work with such horror founders as “Sam Altman.”
Founded in 2005, Y Combinator has helped to establish thousands of companies. Its existence only undermines venture capital-backed technology companies conduct business. We all suffer the consequences. Here are some of them.
doordash
Tacos Taxi. That's the court. The company was founded in 2013 and promises to improve food delivery for everyone. In an era, anyone can deliver goods from any restaurant at any time.
To achieve this, it cruelly made delivery drivers, stripped the restaurants and raised the prices of customers. This is a bad deal for everyone involved, except Doordash. All of this is cold food that can be obtained from a chain of restaurants, what you will pay if you just left and eat there.
Airbnb
Airbnb's disruption to the hospitality industry is so profound that it spawned a new horror novel. Airbnb fits a Silicon Valley template that will be repeated throughout the entire Y combination history. Take the problem and break it so you can do a mint rental.
For thousands of years, humanity has developed customs, laws and systems that provide safe accommodation for travelers and tourists. “What if you could make your home a timeshare and skip all the nasty norms and laws?” Airbnb said?
result? Tiktok video corrosiveness hits the U.S. real estate market, hosts live on Airbnb's walls, movie barbarian.
twitch
What if you can play video games with friends but it can be used as a job? Say hello to Twitch, a place where some of the worst characters on the internet end up gathering and building parasitic relationships and wage wars with the reality around them.
It's hard to make money on twitches. Only a small number of people broke through. But if you do, you can expect to be 10 consecutive hours without using the bathroom, banned by a capricious Amazon-owned company, with viewers to capture and destroy your physical health.
Sam Altman
Openai founder and AI missionary worked at YC from 2011 to 2019, before he left full-time Openai. Altman has been president of YC since 2014, and his tenure has exploded in the company.
Now, whenever we open a news story about AI, we see his little face and live in a world where large language models like Chatgpt are helping kids cheat and write down their boss’ PowerPoint slides.
We haven't even started to do with Sam Altman and his consequences for humanity.
Application of life itself
In 2011, Marc Andreeseen announced that “software is eating the world.” He is right. We live in a world filled with unnecessary practices between us and the basic tasks. It seems that today, you can’t buy basic goods and services these days without downloading apps to support them.
Have you purchased a new light on Amazon? They run on the application. Want to buy a new car? You will have to get an application to run. Want to grab brunch on Sunday? It is best to book a table using the restaurant app. Want to browse the menu before you set off? app.
Why does this happen? In a way, because the world has seen the success of companies like Instacart, Doordash and other YC-backed businesses. Software and applications are a great way to create new middlemen. Some of them offer new services, but many of them just come up with a way to think of something that was once simple and cheap (if not free).
9.
If your friend sent you a meme that wasn't interesting for 10 years and there was no “Ifunny.co” watermark on it, it might be from 9gag. The site is where jokes, memes and videos died last year from Reddit Threads. The Y combinationist funded it.
Speaking of reddit…
Look, we all love reddit. Yes, this is the birthplace of something terrible. But this is also one of the only places where you can get a real answer to your burning question. Adding “reddit” at the end of a Google search query is now one of the only ways to find content on the Internet.
But Reddit has nurtured weird cultural trends that we all have to fight against. The worst of them…
Couple meeting on reddit
If Y Combinator never supported Reddit, then we wouldn't have Malcolm and Simone Collins, the real wife weirdo that gets virus every few years. (Recently in New Yorkers) Where do they start? reddit. Malcolm recommends using the “Consulting Animal” meme to do Simone on Reddit. He then wrote about it for the Huffington Post.
Many people have malcoms and simones in real life. Too many people online spend a lot of time on reddit and they won't have conversations without bringing up disappointing content from bacon, a single ring or an old safe.
Technology hype cycle
Selling Silicon Valley to the rest of the world requires keen marketing. It takes a good story to get people to buy new apps, new software, or new “innovation”. It needs hype. YC is a machine that builds hype. Incubation by startup machines is a story itself, and the YC selection is enough to attract audiences while the market pays attention.
Of course, most of these adventures failed. The bubbles burst. However, many people make a lot of money when inflating. See: YC alumnus Sam Altman.
“Founder” Culture
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. Founder. Mythical figures who stride to the world in American consciousness. YC not only incubated the company, but also incubated the founder. If you are the CEO of YC pick and are smart enough, you can become a celebrity yourself and use it to put it into the next thing when the company fails.
It may fail.
YC has a complete “founder directory” that will allow you to organize the famous faces passing through the door. Of course, a company is a cooperative enterprise and requires a large number of talented and hardworking people to cooperate to succeed. But in today’s social media and celebrity-driven world, it’s the company’s “faces” that matter. Over the past 20 years, YC has helped the founder become that face.
Last year, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham became a hit with his article titled “Founder Model,” which details the power of founders rather than listening to the Beaurocrats around them and going with their guts.
These founders now consider them the center of the universe. Supported by VC Money, provided by temporary online relations and a large army of Yes-Men, the founder is doing the worst job in America today.
Anti-Principal sentiment in technology
Some people think that tech publishers are too technically easy. “Founder” and YC think it's too difficult. Beef between the founder community and journalists supported by YC has been cumbersome and complicated for a long time. YC founder Paul Graham signed a petition, The New York Times 2020.
When the Wall Street Journal regarded Theranos as a fraud, then YC President Altman rushed to her defense on Twitter. “The Grand Slam's work tells one side of the story. I do think Theranos should be more transparent, but PPL should not pray for failure.”
Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan gave a speech at the 2013 YC event, making the reporter's feathers wrinkle. Later, Srinivasan sent an email to Peter Thiel Court Yarvan, a guide to harasse journalists as a role model. “If things get hot, it might be fun to figure out the dark enlightenment audience in a fragile hostile journalist.
YC and its founder culture cultivate the ideology we live with now, but this is hostile to journalists. A technology – where the doctors ravaged the federal government.
Common cases
When Bitcoin was launched in 2009, all your worst tech-brained friends saw the possibility of cryptocurrency. The problem is making it easy for the norms to incorporate their funds into the system. Enter Coinbase, a YC-backed company that helps people trade various types of cryptocurrencies in just a few minutes.
Opensea
Do you still remember NFTS? A few years ago, blockchain-powered JPG was all the rage among some kind of ultimate online crowd. The bottom fell off when Paris Hilton told Jimmy Fallon she bought a boring ape.
YC-backed Opensea is where people can buy, sell and trade all their favorite ugly JPGs and help make the specification available for trends. Then, the entire market collapsed.
Assembly of HOA
No one likes their homeowners association. Hoa is a severe nightmare, they get sick to people who don't mow the lawn. They charge fees and punish people in communities that do not meet any standard.
What if you add AI in the process? Say hello to Assembly HOA, a YC-backed startup that promises to make HOA transparent and efficient.
omgpop
Now, it's largely forgotten that OMGPOP is a Flash Game Studio that was swallowed by Zynga in 2013. The big companies ate the game and then shut down OMGPOP just a few months after buying it.
OMGPOP is a pioneer in glitzy, fun and addictive fast and simple games that will dominate the mobile video game market. Six years after the shutdown, hackers discovered millions of plaintext passwords and email addresses related to OMGPOP in Zynga database and made them public online, proving that your favorite game might disappear, but the personal data it contains will always exist in an unsafe corporate database.
Ubiome
Ubiome is the show time for Theranos'HBO. Elizabeth Holmes promises a fast and safe blood test. Ubiome promises safe and fast stool testing. The commitment to extracting data from fecal samples was enough to get YC and other investors to invest $83 million.
But the founder of Ubiome is lying that the FBI raided the lab in 2019. Two years later, the SEC accused its co-founder of deceiving investors.
cruise
Tesla and Uber's ultimate goal is self-driving cars. Silicon Valley dreams of a world where automated cars sail on American highways. Cruise, backed by YC, is one of the first companies to realize this dream for the world.
Not yet resolved. There are many accidents in self-driving car, and it is difficult to know whether the technology will be safe and widely available to the public. Tesla, Uber and others have been hoping and pushing us to let go and let the technology go with the steering wheel.
General Motors swallowed Cruise in 2016. It begins the process of closing in 2025.
The horror of the future
The Y combination has not completed innovation. Tomorrow's Twitch.com, Doordash, or OMGPOP are waiting somewhere on the list of companies it supports. Let's look at some of the upcoming competitors.
Great Technique Finds Jesus
The United States has a long and strange history in the Christian Revival movement. This country likes to shape the Lord's Word into its own purpose. Last year, billionaire ghoul Peter Thiel gave a “sermon” at a nonprofit conference called Acts 17. Y Combinator's latest CEO Garry Tan was there to lead the discussion. The group is investing millions of people to spread the technological gospel throughout San Francisco. The spiritual and religious revival of the Bay Area? These things have never happened.
Ares Industries – Cruise Missile
What impact will the Y combination make in the future? missile. In the summer of 2024, the startup accelerator supports its first defense company. Ares plans to build low-cost cruise missiles for the Department of Defense.
optify.ai – Follow factory workers
Another new type of enterprise Y Combinator trains is Optify.ai, which will “monitor AI performance for factory workers.” The bold new company will use AI and surveillance to watch factory workers and let the boss yell at them from the comfort of the interior department.
