(Y Combinator is one of the best of the VC bunch. These essays are to help me articulate the conflict hackers have with suits, and how we could go about having a healthier relationship. I haven’t made up my mind yet if that’s even possible, but these salvos are written to help me think it through. If you find them amusing, great. If you think they’re trollish, feed me.)
YC is a cult resulted in a lot of traffic and many comments:
| Source | pageviews | comments |
| 12,757 | 150 | |
| Hacker News | 3,010 | 115 |
| total | 17,990 | 285+ |
Wow, did I ever piss off the Hacker News crowd!
Some interesting blog posts followed, including New hire cannon fodder which itself resulted in Dare’s critique of “Built to Flip” companies.
Michael Parkatti, whose diary triggered all this also clarified what he means by working 18 hours a day in A Note on Cults & Productivity.
The original entry resulted from a draft about group-think in the VC ecosystem. Reading about 18 hour days reminded me of sleep deprivation used in cults, and the resemblance was too strong to ignore. I deleted the last part of the draft, slapped “YC is a cult” in the title field, pressed publish and went home to sleep knowing the devotees would be writing apologetics the next day.
It would be tempting to reserve the word “cult” for the JW or the scientologists. As some of the commenters pointed out, many intense pursuits would fall under the heading of cult if we accepted the mainstream definition. Rather than re-define cult until only the people we don’t like fit it, we can ask if we’re being slightly cultish in some of our pursuits.
This isn’t a YC thing. This is a startup thing. Startups work a lot of hours, it’s the nature of the beast. By being as accusatory as you’ve been, you’ve highlighted your inexperience with startups in general. icey on HN
Definitions again - what is a startup? I bet we can’t get a good definition either, no more than specialists can agree on something that’s called a cult. Well, that is, if we could agree on who we don’t like, we can’t find a definition that doesn’t have false positives. One suggested definition is whether it involves sex with minors. This is outrageous, as it would also apply to the Catholic Church. The humanity!
The discussion is absurd. Without anything resembling a commonly accepted definition circular reasoning is harder to find. It’s spaghetti reasoning you can’t debug or unit test.
While YC is doing interesting things and generally advancing the field, it’s still broken. If Paul Graham would suck as an evil cult leader, YC borders on paternalism. His sycophant groupies vote up every little thing he says on Hacker News and create mostly forgettable web-apps. Most are young and enamoured of their brave leader, ready to move wherever he wants them.
For all their claims of being outsiders and having dangerous ideas, their values aren’t so different from mainstream corporate America to shock. Many a lawyer has started a partnership with similar financial payoffs and identical work ethics. Doctors, accountants, bankers - the only difference is you get a higher signing bonus if you win the YC lottery.
Paul Graham see these kids as social outcasts (see the first chapter of Hackers and Painters). Is he toiling as a good social worker, merely helping them fit in to the corporate world? That seems like the most common ’successful’ exit: an early acquisition by a corporation.
You’re successful and well-adjusted now.
Money alone doesn’t define wealth. Control matters. Values matter. Changing the world matters.
Maybe it’s a French thing (and a resulting genetic predisposition to commie and anarchist ideas), but the idea of working for a corporation for a year or two while options vest strikes me as abhorrent. The only thing that would make me want to go work there is having a great resignation letter in mind.
