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Strait of Hormuz: A CitriniResearch Field Trip The Field Report from Analyst #3 is live. citriniresearch.com/p/strait-of-ho…

YC is run by completely malevolent, highly unaccomplished neerdowells. Tan started a failed blogging site. Who cares? I too did that, at about age 10. Paul Graham is a repugnant antisemite and anti-American who fled to failed state of England. All of their purported wins, like AirBNB, were successful despite their involvement with these cretins. Not because of it. Just so they can pump and dump in formal secondaries, tender offers, and even more mendacious off-books schemes. I know a founder from one of these purported big win companies that they take credit for very well. He tells me this, but can’t be public about it, because they are still on the cap table until they IPO here soon. Yes, there are a few exceptional companies that have managed to produce decent products. They are few and far between. Vanishingly rare. A great many other promising young people had their massively huge potential careers ruined by getting involved with these cretins. People who would have been partners at Kirkland & Ellis by now, but are instead now trapped in the permanent San Francisco, LinkedIn slop, startup-mixer, fake “#building” startup loser underclass, even in their late 30s or early 40s. Lives and careers totally squandered. For the most part, YC is flooding the private capital markets with confabulated scam companies run by total stooge “founders” who they recruit, often from “parts unknown”, who are, in many cases, dependent on YC to solve for their questionable visa situations. Often, these companies don’t even have products that actually exist at all. Just a NextJS slop landing page and perhaps a launch video (whatever that is). It’s gotten so bad that a logo bar on a website, which used to be a strong signal of traction and credibility, is now contra-indicated. In other cases, the products are vibecoded garbage that fail to work at all (see the recent technical breakdown of Gary’s latest weird blogging platform). Their customers tend to just be other YC companies. The cash is shuffled around back and forth to create totally phony “ARR” (not a real accounting metric, btw) and “momentum”. When the founders are actual founders and not recruited third world immigrant striver freaks, the situation can be even worse. They tend to be promising young, but broke and inexperienced, kids who are set to have very meaningful and remunerative careers. Until they are sold the *false* dream of sending in a humiliation “audition” video, begging for $250K to turn their idea into reality. Why do they even need $250K when they can code a product in record time these days? Because they’re broke. As in too broke to even afford the Claude tokens and Vercel hosting fee. Much less actual prod AWS infra. Should broke people be launching tech startups? Of course not. You probably shouldn’t be launching a tech startup if you don’t have about $1M of your very own money laying around to live on. If you don’t have at least a little bit of money, you can’t even think clearly about what’s an opportunity and what is just you being exploited or wasting your time. (Btw: Bezos, Gates, Zuckerberg, et al had some money of their own before founding) But this makes them primed for exploitation. And so totally broke, naive, 20-24 year olds are preferred. The whole thing takes on a very “Harvey Weinstein” vibe. YC does not perform even the most basic due diligence throughout their involvement. Because this could only hamper their efforts to pump these companies to the Series A/Seed++ crowd. The companies are pressured to produce numbers and visible signs of “product market fit”. And inevitably, in so many cases, as founders face the prospect of early major failure, immediate financial hardship, and possible deportation, fraud ensues. Whether it be against investors, customers or the even more naive young people who sign up to be early employees. YC is a degenerate, maladapted scheme that should be shuttered sooner than later.

OpenAI acquires TBPN wsj.com/cmo-today/open…