YC: Requests for Startups

I am building a company that falls under two categories (commercial Open Source and developer tools based on internal tools), but I would never take YC money for it.

Because of that stake, they want an "exit" in some form, and the drive to that exit will pave the road to user-hostile software and make it the path of least resistance.

I'll just put my two cents as a YC alum here — I never felt pressured to "do an exit", and YC is probably one of the least pushing investors in that field by a margin.

Though, a lot of advice given to YC companies is on how to build big companies that scale (unicorn+), so if you don't plan on doing that, you may not get very much out of the program.