If your response to these questions is to make an angry 4-minute video ranting about how these questions indicate a "lust for Mammon", perhaps consider if you are the intended audience.
I'm sorry, but I have zero association with Silicon Valley or Y Combinator and I find this video completely absurd.
Bryan is clearly passionate about his beliefs, which probably works great for people who share them. Sometimes I wonder if 2013 Bryan (https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Ben-Noordhuis-decide-to-leave-...) would have fired 1996 Bryan (https://web.archive.org/web/20170328074611/http://www.cryptn...)
I think we all deserve the benefit of the doubt, and it has made me angry when I've seen Bryan judge others so harshly and unfairly, just as it made me angry when I saw the way he treated David Miller in 1996. For what it's worth I didn't "dig up" anything, I remember these incidents from around the time they happened.
It's particularly disheartening for me because I have huge respect for his engineering skills. DTrace is extremely impressive work.
Some of us are able to learn from failures and regrets through trial and error, the consequences and being more aware we could be hurting others. Unfortunately, past blunders are easily referenced, overly embellished + manipulated and quickly judged in the present, as if it were a representation to the entirety of that persons true character. Which is wrong.
Is it possible that the making of this video is one of those instances where a person could be hurting others?
Do you think that this video was extending charity to the people at YC?
> Anyway, your request is entirely fair, and let me be clear that I (obviously?) regret the have-you-ever-kissed-a-girl response (which was actually an obscure Saturday Night Live reference). I was young, and it was stupid -- and I regretted it shortly thereafter, for whatever it's worth. I have never actually met David in person, but if I did, the first thing I would do would be to look him in the eye and apologize.
Startups and VCs tend to bang on about community values a whole lot more than they actually care, if at all, in contrast, big corps at least don't pretend as much, though it seems like that is changing with recent shift of marketing trends.
Such people can already launch startups, receive mentorship, raise funding, apply to YC, etc.
As I understand it, YC120 is specifically looking for people who aren’t already connected to groups/networks who can help them thrive, and the program is wholly designed to connect them to others so new teams of capable people can form.
As for the obituary question: isn’t it obvious that the whole point of this question is to establish that the applicant has noble, benevolent ambitions?
His talk on companies principles is a must-watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=9QMGAtxUlAc
I have never worked with Bryan. What's the general opinion about Valerie's statements about working with him.
https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2016/10/22/why-i-wont-be-atte...
https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2018/07/01/bryan-cantrill-has...
I think people in silicon valley often forget how privileged they are. The application question is basically asking
What have you personally done in your life? Why should we give you a chance? I think Bryan Cantrill suffers from a lack of perspective. Like if you ask Taylor Swift about how to be a successful artist and she says just follow your dreams and everything will fall into place, I imagine Bryan hasn't had to justify his personal contributions anywhere in a long time likely because they are just obvious and do easy to see. Now compare that to someone like me who has only worked on line of business applications. I try to be honest which in my mind sounds like I'm being humble but from the other side it just sounds like I'm unaccomplished and have poor listening/comprehension skills.
In any case, I think this thread needs to be less about Bryan Cantrill and more about YC.
Bryan Cantrill's Wikipedia page says he asked a kernel developer if he had ever kissed a girl as a one line reply to a technical discussion. My instinct whenever I hear accusations like those by Valerie is to say maybe there's a different perspective but I don't think there is one in this case. Regardless of all this (and his association with a company that stupidly offers lifetime hosting to paying members and later yanks it which is essentially fraud), I think the arguments he makes stand on their own. These aren't arguments I could make because I'm a nobody but I'm glad someone is making regardless of how flawed they are.
That I know, the rest I can't speak on. I wasn't asked to work with him or be his friend, I find his talks valuable, very lucid and much surprisingly easy to follow even with subjects I don't know much about, and in that way they feel much more respectful to me as "the" audience than a lot of the material out there.
Most people don't have the luxury of being brilliant or well-known enough to be able to be unapologetically blunt all of the time.
Especially when dealing with customers and/or investors.
Allowing passionate people outside of Silicon Valley the opportunity to meet others who might share their passion and have complementary skills, form connections, and possibly find matching teammates to work on challenging projects together is a good reason for supporting YC120.
I especially appreciate how there is no talk of innovation or ideas, which in my mind, is what YC stands for. Instead (interpreted as an outsider), a rant on unfamiliar, incumbent (sf?) issues/frustrations. Somewhat obvious that YC is looking for new blood.
Definitely, and it should, otherwise it won't outlast the next (looming) market correction. And I don't mind YC trying a new tack; I mind that they still don't get it. Bryan is right. True innovators care only about the problem and their ideas. Few who are concerned about what their obit will say will ever do anything great.
You can fund innovation or you can make money off of previous innovation. Silicon Valley has been doing the latter for so long that it has forgotten that the former is even possible.
I would still consider accepting him on the strength of this video because he seems like he'd be an interesting guy to throw in the mixing pot. And perhaps that's the intention of this video.
> kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers and changed computing forever
Is this really one of the questions?
So, it's funny, I tell people there's usually two kinds of people. Those that want to be a <X> and those who want to have been an <X>. The former enjoys the journey. The latter wants to skip to the end. This question seems like it is targeting the latter group. Shouldn't YC be trying to target the former?
I mean, if you want to invent a flying car, if successful you'll be the inventor of the flying car, and your obituary will say so.
The question just seems like a roundabout way of asking "Tell us how your startup idea is going get huge and stay huge for ages"
> "Tell us how your startup idea is going get huge and stay huge for ages"
Then ask that question.
But perhaps the questions are intended to raise some people’s hackles.
I get temporarily disappointed every time I’m declined by YC, but I appreciate what they are trying to do in a number of ways:
Sharing everything(well, most things) they have learned with complete transparency.
Constantly talking down Seed/Series A valuations in aggregate because they see the crazy.
Experimenting with universal basic income(UBI) using their own money in what appears to me as an attempt to apply the scientific method to public policy lobbying.
So I can excuse YC for some application questions that might come across as pretentious or more likely to appeal to the self aggrandizing.
Two thins I’d like to see with YC120 are:
1) livestream the weekend as it could help with building attendees networks
2) Use YC120 applicant/application pool(with applicants permission) with data anonymised as an experiment on applicants/applications.
The "adjusted for privilege" bit seems to be trying to discourage people from talking about where they went to college. It is definitely an awkward question and I think Bryan was right to skewer it.
"The implication here is that my obituary should say I was at the YC 120".
I see no reason to think this. Does he assume YCers are a bunch of heartless workaholics who value professional accomplishment above all else, things like family and community be damned? This is a "get to know you" type question. They want to know what's important to you. That's all.
I also find the grandiloquence about his heroism in "standing up for Silicon Valley" pretty ironic after he put so much effort into showing how humble he was in the first question.
I don't know what was going through this guy's head, but the sole function of this video seems to be as a soapbox to talk about what a man of integrity he is.
The range of valid people for a job or a task is always very wide, and they with they could somehow purge the bottom of the applicant pools. The truth is that they have no idea because even the less innovative person, with some apparent red flags, given the right circumstances, could surpass the people who apparently qualified better.
It's true that attitude is very important, but even people working only for a salary can innovate, alone or in team, and accidentally ending up doing something greater than expected. In the other hand, why is this obsession of linking innovation with business success? Steve Jobs damaged the IT culture way too much, and he even wasn't the mythological creature commonly believed.
P.D. Diversity of thought, personality and attitude... does this diversity matter as well?
The former. This is a guy who already has a lot of accomplishments under his belt, he seems more of a peer of YC than someone who's ever needed to seek it's approval.
If YC's goal here is to try and bring together great (or potentially great) individuals, that's fine, but perhaps there are better approaches.[0] Perhaps it's a bad approach having the second and third questions as they are when they're going to filter out great people like Bryan. The second question's qualifier for "life circumstances" is such a cop-out too... Yes it's "great" if you came up from nothing and somehow managed to go to college and get a nice well-paying stable job, surpassing the achievements of at least your ancestors in living memory, but that isn't actually greatness.
On the other hand maybe the two bad questions are by design, Google interview style, trying to weed out false positives for whatever their goal is no matter the (potentially counterfactual) false negatives. It trivially filters me out correctly; I have no potential for greatness, and in the best case I don't plan on dying so there'd be no obituary.
[0] Might I suggest a method that would probably be more effective, at least for collecting potentially great scientists, Asimov's Sword. (http://www.gwern.net/docs/culture/1963-asimov) Target 10-to-15-year-olds already reading good sci-fi.
Edit: a reply highlighted some ambiguity in my usage of "like Bryan" but they deleted it before I replied back.. here's clearing it up anyway.
YC120's phrasing is a problem in filtering out literally Bryan from the 20 if they had plans to ask him, but I was more aiming to describe filtering out people like Bryan from the 100 based on having similar responses.
I knew a guy in high school with a good supply of "intelligence, drive and vision" who had started working with a local university team around something to do with MEMS fabrication. Let's assume YC120 if it was around then would have been interested to have him as part of the 100, and that it'd be useful to him to expand his network beyond that university or academia in general for the grand possibility of getting a group together in the future to do for MEMS what Fairchild Semiconductor did for semiconductors. That sort of vision is all pointless if he were to have a similar reaction to Bryan's or other commenters here, either due to the second question giving off vibes of joining a group of narcissists or the example interests on the page (gene editing, solving physics, etc.) pointing exclusively at a particular subset of SV's fashions. Either he'd filter himself or maybe the reactions are on to something and an earnest application would be filtered by YC for insufficient alignment on greatness potential or SV-compatible interests.
https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2018/07/01/bryan-cantrill-has...
Also, why does he deserve a Wikipedia page? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill
Primary contributors to projects smaller than DTrace have wiki pages, and I bet at least a few of them are dicks. I suppose wipe those out too.
