> Bookface is YC’s knowledge base, and it answers 80% of the questions a founder can have about building and selling a product, be it to clients, candidates or investors. It’s the most valuable content I’ve ever read.
Something tells me this information isn’t so scientifically based and cited as it could be. I wonder just how much of this contributes to the business monoculture we see today.
The advice on Bookface certainly isn't scientifically based in the strict sense of having been compiled through double-blinded, controlled studies. But the writer and publisher of this content (the YC team) has both 1) intimate access to the largest single dataset of startups that has ever existed; and 2) an extraordinarily strong financial incentive to give consistently excellent advice to its portfolio companies.
That doesn't mean their advice is always right, but it does mean they have both the capability to quickly discover when they're wrong, and a powerful motivation to quickly correct their mistakes. So at any given time, we should expect the advice YC gives its portfolio companies to be pretty good.
Given that, it's worth considering whether what's perceived as "business monoculture" might actually be better described as "set of business practices that have been shown to actually work pretty well in the real world".
From what I've seen, YC will always advise going for a high-growth, high-risk strategy, and their advice and knowledge base will always push in that direction because that's what is best for YC.
That might be what's best for a given founder or company, but it may very well might not be. You will have to be proactive and assertive in what works for you to avoid being bullied into the standard YC/Silicon Valley gamblers' playground point of view.
That's not quite accurate. YC's approach has always been to encourage founders to do what's best for them. This was actually something that sharply distinguished YC from the rest of the investment world in the beginning. Industry insiders couldn't believe that YC would leave money on the table when the founders wanted to do something else. I remember one person talking about puzzling over the paperwork going "why would they do this?" Even today, when things have shifted in a founder-friendly direction (thanks in part to YC), it still stands out that way.
You're right that YC's business depends on high-growth wins. But YC knows that only a few of the startups it funds will reach that state. Where the two outcomes—high-growth win vs. what the founders want—end up conflicting, YC has always advised the latter.
If you think about it, there isn't a conflict anyhow, because no startup is going to become a high-growth win if the founders feel it doesn't work for them. What works for founders is what's best for YC, generally speaking, and the company has been organized around that principle from the beginning. Founders that want to be a high-growth win, and show progress, get a lot of help with that, but people aren't pushed to do that if they don't want to. The optimization is global, not local.
(Btw, although I work for YC, I refer to it in the third person when describing the investment business because I'm not really part of the investment business and have mostly just observed it as an outsider - albeit inside the wall, if that makes sense.)
One thing that's bothered me is that YC doesn't actively help its founders pursue early exits. YC will support your decision to take an early exit if you find one, but they rarely help you find your way to one.
There's a whole world of PE that will acquire business for 5-15x EBITDA, but you won't hear anyone at YC talking about that even though those sort of outcomes are life changing for first-time founders.
> YC will always advise going for a high-growth, high-risk strategy
I agree that this is indeed YC's bias, but it's incorrect that they will always advise founders in this direction. That claim is inconsistent both with my direct personal experience as a YC founder, and also with the experiences of other YC founders who I know intimately and have spoken to about these sorts of questions.
The fundamental reason claims of "being bullied" and similar are incorrect is that there's another major component to YC's incentives. Namely, YC loses out on an enormous number of great startups if there's even the slightest justified perception that they do anything close to bullying their founders.
YC's time horizon is naturally long: their biggest investments pay off over a 7-12 year time scale and almost all of their portfolio is extremely illiquid at any given time. That means they're especially culturally sensitive to actions that carry the risk of long-term negative effects, even if those actions also have positive short-term effects. Bullying founders into risking it all is just such an action, so they'd default to avoiding it even if it worked (which, by and large, it does not).
I would love to see where you've seen that. Ramen profitability is one of the most often quoted principles at YC. It's easy to make assumptions and pad them with "from what I've seen," but it's not helpful to other founders.
Are there instances where it makes sense to step on the gas? Of course. Are YC valuations high, leading to large rounds and plenty of liquidity? Yes. And yet, nobody at YC will tell you to scale before you find your PMF.
That's fair, since I am not a founder and have no direct personal experience with YC (nor interest in gaining such). My "from what I've seen" is based on reading HN, talking to a friend who was accepted into YC but turned it down, and pg's essays. As such, I will confess that this is a bit of an uninformed cheap shot -- but given the confirmation bias of current and "successful" founders and the political/social pressure on all founders, I'm not sure this viewpoint would be exposed if it existed.
I furthermore admit that my opinion is heavily influenced particularly by that last component; I find pg's seemingly rational exhortations of "how to be successful" to be slanted and self-serving. They are excellent logical argumentative essays that assume a limited definition of success and guide the reader inexorably to the best way to achieve that particular flavor of success while ignoring (and subtly implying the nonexistence of) others. I may be inferring too much about YC's actual behavior from what I glean from those (otherwise excellent) essays.
If it works, it's science. If it doesn't work, it's not science. That's not the part I'm concerned about -- it seems much less important whether a given practice will net you money, than whether said practice is actually a good thing to do. The business types have difficulty distinguishing "good advice" and "advice that makes you rich right now" as it is.
If it works, it's science. If it doesn't work, it's not science.
That's the worst criteria that I've ever seen for science. Placebos work, but aren't science. And even if you do science perfectly, you aren't guaranteed of success. And most advice that you encounter will work for some people but not others. Does that make whether or not it is science depend on the audience?
No, science is a particular process and methodology supported by a set of norms that enable us to continue building a fact based picture of reality. Doing science gets good results. But science is not defined by the quality of its results.
This is obviously a matter of deep and extensive philosophical debate, and I'll admit my definition isn't perfect, but to address your comment:
> And most advice that you encounter will work for some people but not others. Does that make whether or not it is science depend on the audience?
The question is whether or not it works in aggregate, i.e. for most people to whom the advice could apply. If it doesn't, then we would say it's not scientifically sound advice.
> science is a particular process and methodology supported by a set of norms that enable us to continue building a fact based picture of reality.
Science is not one process or methodology; there is the scientific method, but not all science uses it. For example, paleontologists cannot form an experiment to test a hypothesis of what killed the dinosaurs. But science can still give us a fairly accurate picture of what probably killed them.
I think there is a spectrum of how “science-y” a claim is, based on how much or how rigorous use of the scientific method is used to come to the conclusion.
> If it works, it's science. If it doesn't work, it's not science.
I would suggest that "science" is loosely based around the idea that objective truth can be derived through collection of empirical evidence by attempting to reject null hypotheses.
Of course it is incredibly limited and we ascribe credit to "science" for a lot of things which are not "science".
Social things are inherently hard to study "scientifically."
Business is an inherently social phenomenon. Going to people who know something about business because they have firsthand experience with business seems to be an industry gold standard for how you pass on useful knowledge.
When you are accepted at YC you are already a team which is autonomous and capable. With or without Bookface information things will not change much. Maybe you can save an afternoon because the information is easier to access and already curated. But nothing life changing for sure.
What really is important is connection to other people, when you are starting a B2B saas companies for example the people you are talking with on BookFace, are all potential customers, and can make your first customers easier to find.
The ultimate skill of the CEO is looking at what is and isn't working and adapting. If you read an article A about how Air BnB worked out by visiting every customer and taking photos, you have to decide whether that translates to your business as a way to fix your troubles or not.
I think the use-case is more based on company X struggling with a particular problem (e.g. how do you please the mass market) and finding someone who has faced the same problem and learned some stuff along the way.
If the advice at YC was the same as what you get at HBS, we would have plenty of people who know how to scale but not how to start. And no, the art of starting something is neither well researched nor well understood, beyond of what you'll learn at YC. They really have formulated that field better than anyone else, however scientifically (or not) that knowledge was created.
I would argue that this is a bit like suggesting that "having bricks complying with [some safety standard] is a reasonable-enough proxy for being 'actually structurally sound' as opposed to liable to collapse and kill you in the middle of the night"
Something tells me this information isn’t so scientifically based and cited as it could be. I wonder just how much of this contributes to the business monoculture we see today.