The great suspicion with YC is what proportion of YC companies have all their customers being a mix of other YC companies and those with shared investors?
There is a real danger with current era Bay Area tech that it is just a game of musical chairs played with money, with remarkably little external value being generated.
> There is a real danger with current era Bay Area tech that it is just a game of musical chairs played with money, with remarkably little external value being generated.
It was nothing like as bad as this 10 years ago, no.
Just look at the state of successful exits - it is awful. This is not the same as an ecosystem producing Sun, HP, Apple or even Google, which all had enormous positive externalities.
Ten years ago was 2014 - Sun, HP, Apple and Google were all very much "old hat" and entrenched. Hell, HP was in the process of significantly cutting back it's business and eliminating jobs[1] (34,000 lost jobs in 2013 and ~16,000 in 2014 is an interesting "positive externality" lol). There was no ecosystem producing them, they were the people who were either running SV, or realizing that their time in the sun was coming to an end.
Yes it was like this for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. The difference is that at that time the genius youngster (which is just the son of some already successful people) creating startups were cool. Now nobody wants to make or watch a movie about Sam Altman and OpenAI.
This can be a good thing. One of the hardest things about building new software products is getting initial customers to discover your bugs, missed requirements etc and also add credibility.
As an enterprises SaaS buyer, I'd much rather use a code documentation tool that'd been circle jerked around a YC batch a few times compared to one with no prior customers.
