This makes sense in a dynamic environment with sensitive local conditions and "network lag" in the chain of command. But in more static or settled market environments it may be wiser (for investors) to focus elsewhere and restrict founder autonomy. We see this pretty commonly with successful founders who get "phased out" and replaced with more experienced managers.
I wonder how much this sort of "distributed decision-making" has been formalized and studied.
This was eye-opening. I used to think militaries were completely centralized and top-down, but a friend who was an officer explained this to me and pointed me to the literature. It was fascinating and educating to understand the principles behind Mission Command being successful as a method (competence, mutual trust, shared understanding, etc).
Not sure this was followed very recently.
It is my understanding that the Russians do it that way, which does not seem to work out great for them.
> In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey an order. He ought to have gone on, had he the slightest Nelsonic temperament in him.
That’s an interesting point but I have to imagine all the worst founders know it too so the filtering may not have gotten easier. I’d be curious to hear from them.
There's also another way in that circumvents all the other filters - being a founder at an existing startup that has really good traction already. You can have a resume of no-name companies, no degree, and never have founded a company before, but if your business is growing, making money, and looks wildly scalable with YC's support then you can get in that way.
About 99% of the work you do on a game will wind up in the trashcan. Doesn't matter what kind of work it is. Code, audio, textures, models, map layouts, multiplayer balancing work, etc. are all susceptible in the same way. No one is safe from the chaos. It takes a lot of human energy and persistence to produce sufficient 1% content to fill up a player experience.
I'd estimate for a B2B SaaS product, the ratio is approximately the same, however you don't need such a broad range of talent to proceed. One developer with a desire to do the hard things constantly can be all you need to make it to profitability. Going from one employee to N employees in a creative venture is where things go bananas. If you absolutely must do an indie game and you need it to succeed or your internet will get cut off, you will want to strongly consider doing it by yourself. Figuring out how to split revenue and IP with other humans when you can't get the customer on the phone is a nightmare.
I'm not an indie dev, but if I was I would happily give up a chunk of my potential profit to be listed on there, knowing the size of the market that says "oh yeah... a Devolver title, I would blind-buy this, it's probably pretty good."
Gaming is pure B2C: hit driven, capital intensive, and unforgiving
There are clever gaming platforms out there and the best games seem to turn into platforms effectively.
Also I know of many successful indie games, some of which were built by one person.
I can think of so many exceptions to your point on both sides that I question your thesis as a rule.
Dunkey is building a game incubator of sorts and there are some interesting titles coming out of it.
Video games are a subset of entertainment which is capped in TAM by the population the game reaches, the amount of money they're willing to spend per hour on average, and average number of hours they can devote to entertainment.
In other words, every dollar you make off a game is a dollar that wasn't spent on another game, or trip to the movies, or vacation. And every hour someone plays your game is an hour they didn't spend working, studying, sleeping, eating, or doing anything else in the attention economy.
What makes this different from other markets is that there is no value creation or new market you can create from the aether to generate 10x/100x/1000x growth. And there's no rising tide to lift your boat and your competitors - if you fall behind, you sink.
The only way to grow entertainment businesses by significant multiples is by increasing discretionary income, decreasing working hours, or growing population with discretionary time and money. But those are societal-level problems that take governments and policy, and certainly not venture capital.
One recent concern I have is (anecdotally) how poor a deal YC startups I've seen are offering for founding engineers.
Before YC started, early hires who helped make a startup successful could get rich on stock.
YC may have changed the investment scene for the better in some ways, such that founders are less likely to screwed by investors. But today, early hires are the ones who seem to be getting screwed.
In cases I've seen recently, even if the startup has a nice exit for founders and investors, employees would have been better off as a worker drone at a FAANG-like.
Do we need PG to write an essay (or the richest managing partners to make a video), about the value of incentivizing early hires?
Or, don't even talk about the value of it (since some aspiring founders are aggressively confident now, that they know how all the ducks are lined up), but talk about new criteria: YC looks for a respectable pool to incentivize early hires as positive signal, when determining who to fund.
Now its just a way to sell these companies to those OGs.
I wonder who thinks that a practice of combining sub-market salary with miniscule ISO grants (not even real equity) for early hires is a good idea for startups that want to win big.
Pickle is one of the most egregious examples, but I've noticed a trend of these fly-by-night operations with YC backing getting found out as frauds over the last handful of years. I don't know if it's happening more or if I just wasn't aware of them or if the rate was the same but people started talking about them more.
What Pickle is doing is essentially they're falling on the wrong line of "fake it to you make it", it would be totally fine to do what they're doing (allowing pre-orders with a $200 deposit for a Q4 '26 product) if they just weren't lying about the specs. It's pretty clear they aren't going to deliver anything like what they've promised, but that is just ambition. The whole point of YC is that 1 out of 1000 of these companies are going to deliver something revolutionary and you don't get that without 1000 of them trying to do something revolutionary.
Having said that, you only need to watch the launch video to realise the CEO is total moron ("If everyone wore the same pair of glasses, what would they look like?"). But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do. YC are going to lose their investment on that company.
But the whole supposed point of YC is investing in people not founders. If that's the pitch and you invest in a moron, that makes you look bad too. YC should be good at telling if people are morons - that's kind of their entire job.
> But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do.
They get 7% of your company. They do actually have some power.
Ah, now I know why the vibe of Humble Bundle changed.
The first ones were truly fun packages with soul. Now they're churned out without feelings, it feels all algorithms.
PG does say he actually looks for “naughty” founders as one of the key filtering traits. I link this essay in my post.
But you still have to be ethical and do what you say or it won’t be possible to grow your business long term.
The gamer in me wonders if the “ideal founder” can be described as “chaotic good”?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437148
> This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.
VC’s raised easy money (ZIRP era) and they wanted to deploy fast. Founders told VC’s what they wanted to hear to secure capital.
(I raised, with friends, in 1999, and was senior at a VC-funded startup prior to that).
Most people who comment on Hacker News would not have preferred the status quo ante of YC.
Namely, small, clever teams will be able to do big and entertaining things that were not possible before.
(But yes there will also be tons of slop.)
I don't feel bad for Paul Graham and his partners, I'm sure he's got his bag and then some, but from the outside it looks like it (the YC-adjacent thing, that is) lost big(-ish) when it came to riding the AI hype train.
