I like your comments @throwaway2018i. I’m the founder of Atlas (atlasdex dot org). If you want, shoot me a msg to compare if our picks overlap, that’d Be neat
As someone who went through YCombinator (my company failed), an Ivy-League and one of the tech giants——I can certainly say they're screwing up. To invoke Dyson, should you be investing in the frog or the bird? Let's see:
Every single company in YCombinator's portfolio these days, with rare exception seems visionless, they're single product businesses, that's why they always exit (how many went to IPO?); which is inherent with the 'people they invest in'. What is the intersection of characters of the founders of Microsoft and Apple, of Bill Gates and Paul Allen compared to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak? One was an idea man, whose credentials or lack there of allowed him to be, and partly the predisposition for the former to be the case, a subversive generalist; the other was a technical specialist who spent much time focusing on the intricacies of engineering. Who do you think will have a better idea? The individual who did everything right because he was told it was right or the man who didn't do everything right because he tried to trust himself? The latter's neglecting of extreme specialization along with making his own choices, which forbid him from certain credentials of supposed proof of success, gave him the time to explore more areas than the exhausted specialist. As a specialist I can tell you my ideas suck, I haven't been able to understand the big picture yet because I've spent all my time thinking in terms of these small technical details that don't allow for creativity. I'm a frog, that's why my company failed.
The specialist chose problems because he was told to do so, he never had time to exercise this broad judgement, while it's the opposite for the apparently less successful generalist. Who would be more likely to correctly identify a market niche in an overall anthropological system, the frog or the bird respectively?
Regardless, given that this is controversial, should a VC really be investing in people over the quality of the business? Whatever happened to finding people who work smart not hard? Are VC's so inept that they can't trust themselves on potential businesses and instead are forced to trust institutional credentials which signal the exact opposite of a capability for original rigorous, creatively destructive, thought?
The portfolio of YCombinator actually sucks. They invest in products that almost always exit and get bought for their single product, they all sell because they have no vision. Those products are almost always shut down eventually too: they're just bought for insurance purposes of potential disruption from the same VC delusion. Who doesn't sell? The people who have vision, the people who don't have the credentials like the founders of Stripe.
Whatever happened to investing in the Goddards, the Newtons, the Wrights, the Pitts, the Edisons's, the Jobs, the Rockfellers, the Jack Mas, and the Cubans of the world? And let me tell you, you'll reject these people, everyone will, but they're use to it——that's why they become so great. They'll find a way to make the next Fortune 500 company without you.
Just imagine if public equities were invested with this VC/YC approach. Our economy would be dead—imagine Blankfein boasting, "who cares about potential for future revenue, the CEO and his minions went to Harvard". Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet, et al. all invest without a single care for the credentials of the education of the top 10 executives. Buffet invested in the Korean stock market without understanding a lick of Korean.
The list feels like they're going more for microlending and less for the real one-winner-carries-twenty-losers VC. Maybe they estimate that there aren't going to be a lot of major IPOs in the coming years...
