Amol Pant

I have great respect for YC, but need to say what many are surely thinking: Startup School in a stadium feels antithetical to the YC brand and to what makes startups work. The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers. The bare Mountain View office. The utilitarian design of Hacker News. Everything about YC said: if you’re a curious hacker, we’re your people. If you’re looking for other kinds of prestige or excitement, we’re not for you. Great early stage startups are designed the same way: they’re for the people that get a thrill from the work itself, not surrounding fanfare. If it were just the arena I wouldn’t comment, but you can feel the gravity of a status vortex slowly tearing down what made YC special. You can feel the herd rushing into an overflowing barn. A stadium sized barn. You see how YC is now more prestigious than most college degrees. How prestige seekers name drop YC partners. How many YC founders now quit in the early innings—because they didn’t really love the work. Maybe it’s inevitable. It happens to startups too. Eventually the underestimated, curious, hard working teams become the winning teams. And then the status chasers flock to them. If YC is not strong enough to fend it off, maybe no one is.