No! They were too busy hacking phones and building things people wanted to waste time to go through the application process of YC. Money was chasing them.
This is true for most runaway successes, they were all true hackers that broke things: Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Not the "hackers" who are asking for $125k salary...
They didn't care about the money, they didn't care about the allure, they didn't care about the status. They just wanted to break things and make them work better, legality aside.
But the landscape has changed, and Steve & Steve are not just starting Apple and YC would not be around if Apple wasn't started when it was, so it's a silly question be it a fun thought experiment.
I think YC supports the companies that shoot for the moon, but people aren't willing to take the risk and say no to acquisitions of $20-$100m because that is the short term business model of today and people just want to take their $5m and show off.
"The approach of remaining independent, and investing profits back into to the company followed by technology zealots such as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs is unattractive to an investor."
They only way to counter this is to build a great product with little to no money and have it grow like a weed, then negotiate like a mob boss to keep the majority of the voting rights of the company.
That's enough for now, time for focus...
First off, YC is NOT looking for companies that take $20M exits. They certainly happen, but it's not great for YC. 95% of the money made in the valley from liquidity events in the valley are from 10 companies-- YC is trying to be part of those 10. The smaller exits just keep the lights on (don't believe me? Do the math on what YC gets from a $20M exit after being diluted thru a funding round or two).
Second, to say "The approach of remaining independent, and investing profits back into to the company followed by technology zealots such as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs is unattractive to an investor," is just flat out wrong. There are certainly long-game consumer plays (like Facebook) where revenue is eschewed. But Heroku? Parse? Dropbox? AirBnB? Monster cash flow businesses.
As to whether Jobs would do YC-- he might not have when Apple was already growing. What about when he was selling blue box hardware? What about when he came back from India and got a job at Atari?
While your statement is true about Wozniak from what I know it's not true about Jobs. He was a business person and he knew how to make a buck in addition to wanting to "change the world". Same with Gates for that matter.
I'm sure he would be very bothered if he didn't have money to take Apple to a fair, or to get the needed parts.
(of course, if you're starving you care about money)
A more charitable take: A founder with a few grand in the bank is doing a high wire act without a safety net. A respected repeat founder who's already banked a few million can let go of most concerns for safety and family and focus on changing the world or self-actualization or whatever you want to call it.
A founder with a few grand in the bank who can create something great is the founder who doesn't depend on money to make them great! They don't need to look for investors to support them and give them an allowance.
Look at Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, etc... Money is not the dependent factor, they hack the system for the simple fact that they want to hack the system! Free phone calls, driving a van records across boarders, etc.
Isn't that a romantization? How do we know they didn't love tech AND wanted to become rich at the same time?
How did you draw that conclusion?
As for "changing the world", this is an expression that's as meaningless as it gets. Of course everybody wants to change the world, why wouldn't you? And since everybody lives in their own world anyway, in a way, everybody changes the world. For example, I personally find Facebook to be one of the most useless product I've ever used. I genuinely wouldn't notice if Facebook disappeared tomorrow. On the other side, for my deaf teenage cousin, Facebook literally changed his world. He went from being the weirdo disabled boy in the corner of the room that nobody would talk to to being a perfectly normal teenager communicating on Facebook like any other teenager.
So the YC startups you're talking about might not have changed your world but you can be sure that they've changed quite a few other people's world. Arguably, Steve Jobs, who you cite in example, has hardly changed the world for most people. Had he not be there, computers and smartphone would have been there anyway and would have more or less done what they do today (and I'm saying this as a big admirer of Apple who has discovered computing on a Mac SE and is typing this post on a MacBook Pro).
When it comes to bigger goals like ending wars or poverty, fixing the global warming problem or space exploration, it would be incredibly naive to believe that you can tackle the problem as a nobody (i.e. as a young, first time entrepreneur with no cash and no network).
Elon Musk didn't start with a crazy-big-truly-change-the-world project. He, you know, did Paypal first. Just like what the Stripe guys (a YC startup) are doing. Bill Gates didn't start by tackling the issue of poverty, illnesses and illiteracy in Africa. He started by writing an interpreter. You have to start somewhere and this somewhere is generally relatively small but gives you what yo need (knowledge, experience, network, cash) to follow up with something bigger afterwards. That's my understanding of what YC is all about.
If you're doing what you love, you'd feel right. Passions take play here, but there is a catch here: everyone have passion, or have discovered them. So, if you are from the part who have, just follow them.
One key difference its revenue: Allen often mentions how any piece of code brought money to the company, simple apps that are 100% free today would have been sold for tens of millions back then. Same with hardware, which is why Apple could get roughly 1 million (in today's dollars) to leave the garage.
Basically both companies were in the right place at the right time: right before the PC revolution began. A YC-equivalent at that time would've appeared around 1982, after IBM launched the "official" PC with DOS and the ball was already rolling.
That was the time when a lot of other startups appeared, like Amiga, Adobe, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, etc...
Note that none of those companies were as successful as Apple and Microsoft were, in fact some went chapter 11 and disappeared.
When looking back on a very successful company, it seems they were all in the right place at the right time. Adding to Microsoft and Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter
Much of what we have today wouldn't be possible w/o broadband. Instagram wouldn't exist unless digital camera technology was developed to the point it had. Facebook became immensely popular because of digital photos. Wouldn't happen if people had to scan photos to get them on Facebook.
Obviously these companies lasted while others disappeared due to bad management, competition etc... It's hard to say that without Apple and Microsoft, the micro-computer revolution would not still have occurred.
This isn't the model preached by YCombinator at all. It actually literally runs counter to the model preached by YCombinator. YC is 7 years old, and has approached building companies with pragmatism; it's definitely the case that many startups will fail, a some will exit quickly, and a select few will last long enough and be strong enough to be IPOs, and then even fewer will last long enough as public, independent companies (Google is 13, Microsoft and Apple are both older than 20 years) to try doing things in house like building autonomous, self driving cars, or space rockets.YC is well aware of this dynamic, but the key thing this post misses is: creating a company that lasts, or being a founder well resourced enough to fight again, is a crucial part of being able to build space rockets. You have to be there. So with that in mind the model YC ACTUALLY preaches is more like:
"Talk to users, write code, build a great product, that makes money, and you wont need investors. If you do this, you just might last long enough and be strong enough to build space rockets."
YCombinator never tells founders to "exit as quickly as possible". In fact, they and most other technology investors get 90+% of their returns from the home runs and encourage founders to go big if things are working. You can do the math yourself: how many talent acquisitions would it take to add up to one Dropbox ($4B valuation)?
While a lot of companies coming out of YCombinator (and Silicon Valley in general) are focused on the internet, there are exceptions. For example, there was a 3D scanning company in the most recent batch: http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/27/matterport-3d-scanner/
If one wanted to buy you three months in (August 2007), what's the lowest offer you'd take?
Well, to really pursue that argument, you'd also want to look at how many "deceptively small things" stayed small and never amounted to much of anything.
After all, you're dealing with a college dropout who didn't study anything related to computer science and had personality issues. I suspect that the HR guys at Apple would drop Steve's resume in the waste bin if he applied today.
I'm pretty sure I've heard the first point mentioned before by the partners of YC, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence of the others. Is there actually evidence of YC telling its classes to exit as quickly as possible? My guess is any quick exits are more likely as a result of founders being offered a chance at a payout rather than YC pushing them to exit.
edit: here's a link where he says as much http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=265623
Everything is "just another xyz" until its not.
What YC gets is that it asks it's founders to solve a problem. Maybe a real pain point, or a problem you don't know even exists until someone points it out to you, but whatever it is -- solve it well. At that points your minor pivots are leveraged until, before you know it, you're moving a mountain, when you started just intending to move a pebble.
And BTW, didn't Dropbox pass on an acquisition from Apple near $1B?
YC can reproduce the career arc of Steve Jobs, but not Bill Gates. Until the IPO Microsoft didn't sell stock to outside investors in significant quantities. By essentially bootstrapping, Gates and Allen were able to bring Ballmer on board with 8% equity at a point when outside investors would be eyeing exit in a VC backed company.
This is in contrast with Jobs, who lost control of Apple by accepting outside money. On the other hand, having grown up in Silicon Valley, Jobs would not have needed the sort of guidance through the startup landscape that YC provides relative to a hacker from Topeka - i.e. Jobs was sophisticated enough to raise money for Apple based upon his social connections within Silicon Valley.
Even without Apple Jobs would have accomplished many things. That's just the kind of person he was. So, luck has nothing to do with this.
Clickpass? Really? I could think of a better list containing just YC companies.
And how do Dropbox, AirBnB, Heroku, Weebly, Justin.tv, etc. lack vision?
This seems like a misinterpretation of what YCs investment/mentorship philosophy.
What is different between most web 2.0 startups and Apple, though, is that Apple expanded an existing enterprise market to the general public. Cloud computing is having similar effects, but otherwise I don't see many similarities.
I think the point of the OP boils down to: Steve (like Zuck now) wanted to build a company that changed the world, not build a company that he could flip.
To me it's a practical replacement for college, with a similar atmosphere. Steve dropped out, so maybe this would have appealed to him more.
On the other hand, he didn't have to deal with the much more complicated legal environment that we have now, which includes patent suits left and right whenever there's big stakes involved. But on the other other hand, perhaps there's no good way to navigate these new problems anyway.