My open source project was relicensed by a YC company [license updated]

To a casual outside observer the quality of the companies YC invests in seems to have absolutely cratered. Have they just given up on vetting and switched to a throw money at everything approach?

My feeling is that they are investing in founders who they find impressive who are working in AI. Not so much in the uniqueness of their ideas.

Yeah, this is the vibe I have been getting for some time - investing in the person and not the idea.

This sort of thing reflects poorly precisely on the people doing it, not on "ideas".

Isn't that a very outspoken objective of YC, to fund people, not ideas? Long time ago I caught up to what YC is doing, but even when I first joined HN back in like 2013 I think the whole "Fund people, not ideas" shtick was already explicitly what they were doing, unless I remember wrong.

Isn't "fund people" just hiring without the extra steps?

They expect you to come up with an idea or a business and explain it to them and show your progress. Of course one may say that those things reflect you as a person but so does stealing and relicensing code.

YC invests in founders that have more odds to make it through a series A. Everything else is secondary.

> Have they just given up on vetting and switched to a throw money at everything approach?

this is exactly their business model. almost word for word.

Isn't that what VCs in general are doing? Hiring for more money, with more expected gains from you, with a different kind of legal arrangement, but still hiring nevertheless.

I'd say they have historically aspired to active informed selection and then accepting that out of that portfolio many will fail cause that's how VC goes. That's not quite the same as buy everything.

No, words have meaning.

If i order fast food im not hiring the worker because i pay them.

Hiring means one thing, investing means something else.

If you're constraining them to work on specific things, then yes. Otherwise no :)

Right now YC really only has one bet, an all-in on AI.

Any company that props up their AI bet is the most valuable to them now, even if it provides no real value for users...

Funding people means you trust the people are so good they will push any idea to success. Funding an idea means you trust the idea is so good it will push any people to success.

Funding people means having a lot of trust in them. What's unsaid is if the investor believes coloring outside of the lines to make everyone more money is a breach of that trust, or just the normal cost/risk of business.

So why are they so insistent that they want AI ideas? I felt sick when I read the list of things they say they want to invest in and every single thing was framed as, "build some service, but for AI".

Also in this AI era I've learned something else: it isn't intelligence that builds institutions. It's philosophy, and it's faith. The AI industry is full of smart people, but If you lack a set of beliefs you won't know why you're working or what you're working towards or how to put one foot in front of the other day after day to make steady progress towards helping people over the longest time scales.

In the AI era our industry has found itself with one of the more bizarre problems I could imagine: in accepting that it builds products for AIs and not for humans, it has become philosophically bankrupt

Dreamworld (YC W21) is relevant here:

https://www.pcgamer.com/dreamworld-infinite-world-mmo-kickst...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27319457

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26898266

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dreamworld

To be sure, there's nothing wrong with the idea that modern computers and distributed computing techniques can handle streaming updates for a significantly higher scale of concurrent same-world users than prior-generation MMOs. But clearly something unexpected happened here, and while I completely understand the lack of a public post-mortem, I hope that YC has examined why its mentorship model and community were unable to set up this team for, if not success, at least having greater integrity in its relations with its userbase.

> So why are they so insistent that they want AI ideas? I felt sick when I read the list of things they say they want to invest in and every single thing was framed as, "build some service, but for AI".

If I tried to enter the mindset of a VC, I could potentially see that as a "Is this person at the 'edge of progress' currently" flag, although I wouldn't trust it more than a "Is this person chasing hype" warning personally. Maybe it's a good way of getting some specific type of person to apply, in some other way?

Nothing has changed, as far as I'm aware.

Funding means investing in their company. Hiring means paying them to work for your company.

Wait. Were you were investing in that burger?

VC's can force the company to pivot or double down on things not (yet) working. You don't tell the fast food worker to build houses.