[HN Gopher] Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator
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Happy 20th Birthday, Y Combinator
Author : btilly
Score : 733 points
Date : 2025-03-11 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| kamikazeturtles wrote:
| It seems the first few batches of YC were VERY successful. But,
| the number of successful YC companies I can think of from the
| last 10 years of batches is very minimal despite them investing
| in thousands of companies.
|
| Makes you wonder, does the funding landscape need a new YC level
| disruption because YC seems to have peeked, return wise (not hype
| wise).
|
| Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
| Invictus0 wrote:
| You might find this blogpost eye opening:
| https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pulling-back-the-curtain-...
| ant6n wrote:
| Wow, there's so few solo founders, and so few non-US
| companies. I bet nowadays, there's very few non-AI companies.
| So if you aren't a US-based AI-startup with multiple
| founders, perhaps ycombinator is not for you.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| If you have a cofounder it forces you to get in the habit
| of delegating really early on. Prolific solo founders like
| pieter levels just do everything themselves, which is great
| for their ego but not enough to build a venture scale
| business.
| ant6n wrote:
| Solo founders can have employees.
| fragmede wrote:
| They have a disproven ability to find people and rally
| them around a common cause though. Whether it's due to
| their personality or the idea or some other thing like
| timing, the inability to find a co-founder could be
| considered signal, for some.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| These are two well-known biases of YC. I believe the
| reasons are the following:
|
| * YC founders are usually very young, and young people can
| be capricious. They don't want a solo founder just deciding
| to do something without a second founder having some
| leverage to protect YC.
|
| * YC is in the US and has a very pro-US perspective, so
| they invest in what they know and like.
| briandear wrote:
| Non US companies -- but many non-US founders. It's much
| better to be a U.S. startup than in most other places.
|
| https://capbase.com/why-european-startups-register-in-us/
| robocat wrote:
| YC has a known bias towards multiple founders. They accept
| solo founders, but solos have to stand out more or maybe
| already started their business. YC even provides a co-
| founder matching system (of unknown efficacy).
|
| PG said "Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup
| with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two
| or three. And the relationship between the founders has to
| be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work
| well together. Startups do to the relationship between the
| founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled
| apart, it will be."
|
| Also see: Does YC fund solo founders:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/library/7P-does-yc-fund-solo-
| fou...
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I do think YC has become chasers of the latest trend rather
| than creating the trend. That is why most of the successes are
| skewed early like Reddit and a bunch of other companies which
| defined the internet.
|
| Now they have gone from crypto grifting companies and AI hyped
| companies and it really seems that the a-level players are
| missing.
|
| Or maybe it's just a matter of smaller teams and focus and
| care.
|
| I think now I see YC more like a job for the partners than a
| passion.
|
| I might be wrong but there is definitely something to it that
| YC has not had a success for a very long time.
|
| It's really sad because YC is one of the best things to happen
| to the tech industry.
| Isamu wrote:
| Well it's a function of those that apply and are accepted,
| and pitches are going to reflect the current hype. YC
| occasionally puts out a call for applications in areas they
| think are interesting but perhaps they haven't seen many
| compelling pitches for. Have they recently put out a call for
| specific areas of interest?
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Yeah I think they do it every batch or at least every year.
| https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
| Isamu wrote:
| Thanks, I see that one is full of AI, but I notice they
| are guiding toward specific areas, probably so they don't
| get a thousand vague AI pitches
| astonex wrote:
| Except now their call for startups are focusing on tech
| solutions (use LLMS to do x), instead of focusing on
| problems that need solving. They're now doing exactly what
| they've railed against, solutions in search of problems
| huang_chung wrote:
| > That is why most of the successes are skewed early like
| Reddit and a bunch of other companies which defined the
| internet.
|
| Reddit rode the wave with zero innovation. Really what is
| Reddit? Message boards predated Reddit, which was predated by
| Usenet, predated by BBS. Somewhere in there were Yahoo! chat
| forums.
|
| All they did was colocate message boards in one place, and
| allowed freewheeling moderation. That's it. They got lucky,
| made millions with zero new ideas. People connected the same
| way on AOL 15 years before.
|
| Like most Silicon Valley innovations, you just reuse an
| existing idea or resell polished turds as new.
| fragmede wrote:
| and before that, there were literal community message
| boards. corkboard at the grocery store. people gossiped
| before there was Facebook. the only real innovation was
| going from verbal communication to the written word, but
| now with TikTok, we're back at verbal communication, just
| with a lot of extra steps. there's no other innovation
| that's happened in the world since writing, isn't there?
| bbor wrote:
| A) Very true!
|
| B) peaked* :)
|
| C) Can you think of any _tech_ companies from the last 10 years
| that were successful? The answer is ultimately "they exist,
| but the victory condition is to be bought by MANGA, so you
| don't remember them even if you heard about them in the first
| place."
|
| EDIT: to add more context, this is a great post:
| https://jaredheyman.medium.com/on-the-176-annual-return-of-a...
| The TL;DR is that Stripe & AirBnB (and to a lesser extent
| DropBox, DoorDash, and Instacart) were absolutely _massive_
| wins that they have yet to (and shouldn 't expect to!)
| replicate; otherwise, they're doing just fine in terms of ROI.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Yeah it's a good question to ask:
|
| Was the startup success rate in 2005 overall higher or was it
| actually due to YC selecting so well.
|
| Also, success is relatively defined. A $50m exit might be
| something that gets washed away after a TechCrunch article
| and a few social media posts.
|
| But that's still life-changing money for the founders. It's
| not changing the world writ large, but changes the world for
| a few people.
|
| = Besides, there are many successes we never talk about. Wiz
| is worth $32B (at least Google was willing to pay that), but
| rarely talked about because they're a "boring" cybersecurity
| infrastructure company.
| fragmede wrote:
| yeah. That YC hasn't produced another Google or made a
| Facebook should in no way mean it's an utter failure.
| tyre wrote:
| > Can you think of any tech companies from the last 10 years
| that were successful?
|
| OpenAI and Anthropic come to mind
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| 10 years, not weeks.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Neither are profitable.
| bbor wrote:
| That's... fair, I guess. Both are majority controlled by
| MANGA, but they are indeed new companies. That's kinda
| illuminating: it takes the breakthrough of the century to
| establish a new name these days, and even then you'll
| probably end up selling slices of yourself to the giants.
| fragmede wrote:
| > tech companies from the last 10 years that were successful?
|
| Discord, Anduril, CoreWeave, Veho, MoneyBox, Peak,
| Marshmallow.
| bbor wrote:
| Discord is cool! Anduril is both evil and overvalued. The
| rest... I mean, I think the names speak for themselves ;)
| fragmede wrote:
| what do their names say to you?
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| There are many factors (YC needs to allocate more capital, not
| founder-led anymore, needs to fill more batches...) etc.
|
| But another one is that the first batch has had 20 years to
| grow and compound while the rest has had less time to become
| massive.
|
| I'm not saying YC is perfect now (though it's still great). But
| I think a simple factor could just be time for many portcos.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Or that most of the largest opportunities have been filled
| and newer companies are aiming at much smaller niches, or to
| be alternatives to well-established competitors.
| FinnLobsien wrote:
| Also, in 2005 there wasn't that much of an acquisition
| ecosystem. I feel like fewer founders back then actually
| thought about getting acquired and instead shot for
| building big companies.
|
| You had to go big or your thing would fail, whereas
| nowadays you can fill a tiny niche and get rich by being
| acquired by the incumbent you're a complement to.
|
| The era of "any promising startup gets swallowed by big
| tech" seems over with antitrust, but M&A is still
| happening.
| Isamu wrote:
| Agreed, to compare you would have to not just look at current
| magnitude but rather compare the historical trajectories of
| growth
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| The alternative is that it takes x > 10 years to become very
| successful. But that seems somewhat doubtful.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Well Dropbox (ycs first big success?) was founded in 2007 and
| only went public in 2018
|
| Reddit (yc 2005) only went public last year
|
| I know "going public" doesn't define success, but it does
| show that companies can still be growing after 10+ years
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's because every market inefficiency eventually disappears as
| entrepreneurs capitalize on it. It's like there's an optimal
| architecture for the economy at a given technology level, and
| the job of the entrepreneur is to find that architecture and
| refactor the economy, piece by piece. And if they're
| successful, they get to take everything of value in the old,
| obsolete parts of the economy that get destroyed.
|
| When YC was formed the Internet was young; it had just
| dramatically changed the equilibrium point for the economy, but
| people didn't know it yet. YC's investment thesis was that many
| more startups could be founded than were being founded, so they
| set about funding them. And they were right, and so their early
| investments found fertile new markets that were ripe for
| disruption.
|
| Now founding a startup is mainstream, so wannabe entrepreneurs
| have picked clean most of the big profitable market niches. And
| that's why all the later YC startups tend to be smaller and
| less successful. The big successes already happened. I could
| see AI spawning a few more successful startups - it is a
| technological change, after all - but not to the scale of the
| Internet. (Honestly, I see solar and genetic engineering as
| spawning more. Freeman Dyson wrote a prophetic book in 1999
| entitled "The sun, the genome, and the Internet" about the 3
| technologies that would define the 21st century, and IMHO he
| was totally on point.)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm always surprised people just seem to discount timing.
|
| The mid/late 00s came with the rise of "Web 2.0" and mobile
| that was a gigantic technological shakeup, and YC was
| definitely in "the right place at the right time", and their
| Web 1.0 pedigree and expertise transitioned perfectly to these
| new technologies. Importantly, these technologies required
| relatively little capital for new startups because all the
| infrastructure in terms on the Internet, GPS, mobile, etc. had
| already been built.
|
| I'd just argue that in the past 10 years there simply hasn't
| been nearly the "greenfield" tech landscape that existed in the
| mid 00s. AI obviously has been a tech sea change, but so far
| the contours of that change just look much harder to monetize.
| The frontier models are becoming more and more commoditized,
| and everyone else is just trying to figure out how not to get
| shoehorned as "just an OpenAI/Anthropic wrapper". Looks like
| there may be some winners that are really putting all pieces
| together in an attractive package (Cursor and Glean come to
| mind), and it's fair to wonder why YC doesn't have one of these
| "AI app winners" (and maybe they do, or will, I don't know),
| but in general, I think there is just nothing like the
| opportunity there was in the late 00s/early 10s to gobble up a
| big part of the new tech landscape.
| astonex wrote:
| I think all the recent AI slop dominated batches will be their
| downfall in 2-3 years time when they all become junk and the
| AI-hype is over.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Ya that is my fear. Just like the whole crypto dominated
| batches. My fear is Garry Tan is leading YC and he falls for
| every single "the current thing" in the book. I remember when
| he was pushing for so much of the crypto stuff and all of
| that evaporated to nothing.
| astonex wrote:
| Yep, since Garry took over YC has fallen off drastically in
| my opinion
| anthomtb wrote:
| > he falls for every single "the current thing" in the
| book. I remember when he was pushing for so much of the
| crypto stuff and all of that evaporated to nothing
|
| Isn't this what an early-stage VC firm is supposed to be
| doing? Lots of investments in companies working in whatever
| the hot new tech may be. Most companies lose, some break
| even, one wins so big you forget about the rest.
|
| High risk, high reward, high volume is always how I thought
| of a firm like YC. And one expects a lot of investments to
| evaporate to nothing for such an industry.
| jarsin wrote:
| > Maybe AI might be their saving grace if everything works out
|
| Most of their recent communication is going all in on AI.
| Saying stuff like this batch prefers hiring devs that use AI,
| and 95% of their codebases are all AI generated.
| tasn wrote:
| Companies take time to become successful, so the verdict is
| still out on most of the companies that started in the last 10
| years. Time will tell.
|
| Though there are already quite a few successrul YC companies
| from the last few years. Full list of top YC companies:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies (filter by "top
| companies")
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I believe median time to unicorn status is now about 7 years,
| so this is not as uncertain as you think. In other words, 50%
| of YC's 7-year old unicorns have already showed up. The
| number is higher for older companies.
| pyb wrote:
| Dropbox and Airbnb were superhot companies within 2 or 3
| years after YC. My first Airbnb booking was in 2013, and
| that I felt like a late adopter.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yes, but average time to unicorn status has been
| increasing since the time of Dropbox and Airbnb. I assume
| you can draw more inferences from companies that are
| earlier-stage, too.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Just looking at how most have done since going public , most
| VC backed companies including YC are just exiting and finding
| the "bigger fool". YC has done phenomenal for itself. For the
| public that bought at IPO - not so much.
|
| https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report
|
| _If you invested equally in all YC companies on their IPO
| day, you would now be down 49% compared to the +58% return of
| the S &P500! 14 of the 17 companies lost money for the
| investor, and 3 companies lost more than 99% of their IPO
| value. Only one company ended up beating the S&P 500
| benchmark_
| flaque wrote:
| Of course? On average, companies that are still standing after
| ~15 to 20 years are going to be a lot larger than the companies
| who started more recently.
| Diederich wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 is always fun to look at,
| 18.5 years ago.
| jessekv wrote:
| Huh. I upvoted it.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Fun there's enough posts in HN you could type your DOB (no
| leading zero) and find a submission for it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=52590
| Arubis wrote:
| It took me a moment to think through what a leading zero on a
| DOB meant and that it wasn't a Long Now foundation thing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| 52950
|
| What format of DOB is that? M/DD/YY?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Or possibly a Julian date for a first-millennial.
| btilly wrote:
| There are actually enough that you can type your DOB in the
| format YYYYMMDD and find a submission for it!
|
| This has been true since
| https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=20190615 was posted on
| June 15, 2019.
| matsemann wrote:
| 1 indexed?
|
| Edit: HN is apparently written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp.
| redox99 wrote:
| Almost all DBs have a default starting ID of 1.
| arjunaaqa wrote:
| Jessica is my hero. Paul is a guiding force.
|
| Every effort has some defect but it's intention and effort which
| matters.
|
| World would be a very different place without YC.
|
| Thank you all !
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| >> but it's intention and effort which matters.
|
| I think I understand what you're saying, but this is a very
| dangerous generality. I think the HOW matters more than the
| intent.
| nine_k wrote:
| The idea here, AFAICT, is that the right intention matters
| even if the implementation is lacking and imperfect. If the
| intention is there, the implementation will improve.
|
| The dangerous line of thinking would be that a good intention
| somehow justifies doing evil things, and not by mistake but
| knowingly, for an ulterior greater and noble goal. But then
| the intentions _would_ include doing an evil thing as an
| intermediate step, and, as the comment says, the intention
| does matter.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Did Stilgar write this
| EGreg wrote:
| Haha wow, good one
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Looks like the Dune show even introduces a YC:
|
| https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Ynez_Corrino
|
| Incidentally, querying "YC Dune" on DuckDuckGo / Bing
| yields that link in the results, but Google does not, which
| seems rather troubling for the modern state of that search
| engine.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| On Twitter, with all that's going on?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Garry Tan and the rest of YC leadership are 100% aligned with
| Musk's goal of crashing the American economy so they can
| subjugate labor and buy assets cheap. It can't be a surprise
| they post on X.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Ultimately that will be the legacy of YC.
| briandear wrote:
| What's going on?
| declan_roberts wrote:
| One of the things that makes HN great is that it largely avoids
| the Current Thing discussion.
|
| There's plenty of places to get into that. Can't we have one
| that's focused entirely on hacker news and not any political
| news?
| dang wrote:
| (hmm that's a frequently asked question; I wonder if we
| should have a list of such things)
|
| If you want to know how we think about this, here's a pointer
| to a bunch of past explanations:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.
| ..
| dredmorbius wrote:
| HN is increasingly a significant participant in current US
| politics. Attempting to pretend otherwise really doesn't
| work.
|
| HN has a policy of moderating discussions of YC companies
| less than other threads (and yes, "less" != "not at all").
| There's a strong argument that a similar policy should apply
| to HN-adjacent politics and political acts.
|
| Posting to what was once called Twitter today is an
| increasingly political act. and a strongly anti-democratic
| one. Yang (as evidenced by his Wikipedia bio) is a political
| actor.
| Starlord2048 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| We're getting complaints from users that your comments are LLM-
| generated. Of course it's hard to say for sure, but if they are
| (in whole or part), please stop. Generated comments aren't
| allowed here; HN is for human conversation.
| nashashmi wrote:
| What you have identified is nurturing tech development and this
| has become easier. But more complex tech development should now
| be the next focal point of incubators. And this means founders
| who have more speciality in the work they do.
|
| There is still a gap that needs fulfilling. YC is one player
| who can fulfill it. Late-stage startup development is a
| business structuring problem and the biggest blank slate for
| new founders. From term sheets to understanding convertible
| debt to navigating VC maze.
| jedberg wrote:
| Happy birthday YC! YC has created a ton of value, and I can say
| is responsible for the major inflection point in my career. I'm
| forever grateful to Paul, Jessica, Robert, and Trevor for seeing
| the value in the reddit team before anyone else did.
|
| Incidentally, reddit turns 20 in just a few weeks (if you count
| from incorporation :) )
| alberth wrote:
| "Founders at Work", written by Jessica is what got me into HN
| (and I was an initial lurker for quite sometime).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founders_at_Work
|
| Note: YC didn't have HN to begin with, it was launched 1-year
| later (Oct 2006 as seen by pg profile). And the book was launched
| the subsequent year (2007).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| In case you're not aware, there is a podcast by Jessica
| Livingston and Carolyn Levy called "The Social Radars" that
| interviews founders.
| azhenley wrote:
| Downloading it now. I didn't know about it. Looks like there
| are a lot of big names!
| hakaneskici wrote:
| Such an inspiring book - I still have it by my desk :) I bought
| it because they covered Joel's FogBugz and 37Signal's Basecamp
| (I was building a competitor product back then).
| light_triad wrote:
| There's going to be a lot of "the big successes already happened"
| type comments about YC but I think they're wrong.
|
| Sure all big successes are unique in time, and entrepreneurship &
| web tech are mainstream now. But there's still lots of industries
| to disrupt. What gets harder is that the level of expertise
| needed to disrupt an industry is now much higher. You didn't need
| to work in hotels to create Airbnb, or a bank to create Stripe,
| or deliveries to do Doordash, etc. A bunch of scrappy web
| founders that were hosts, or trying to sell on the internet was
| expert enough to get started. This may be changing in important
| ways, but huge successes will surely happen.
| borski wrote:
| When YC started, people were saying literally the same thing;
| the dotcom bust had already happened, and the era of big
| internet companies was 'dead.'
|
| As usual, the death of entrepreneurship and startups has been
| greatly overstated. :)
| ant6n wrote:
| I'm not so sure YC is really targeting industry experts in
| their fields who are doing startups, or?
| JambalayaJimbo wrote:
| Doesn't YC still predominantly fund young men who aren't at all
| industry experts in some mature field? It appears like the
| majority of startups I see are "AI for X" type applications.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I remember the initial PG announcement about the founder's summer
| program and wanting desperately to be a part of it. I wasn't at a
| place in my life where I ever could join YC but the tribe that's
| been built by everyone involved has added tremendous value to my
| life. I'll always be incredibly grateful that this place and YC
| exists.
| _sentient wrote:
| YC changed my life, and I'll be forever grateful to PG, Jessica,
| and the team for taking a chance on a homeschooled, GED-wielding
| solo founder.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| It's really good to read those stories.
|
| I applied twice (once alone, once with a really amazing co-
| founder) and it felt like applying to a large faceless
| corporation, both times.
|
| Automatic rejection after 30 days with zero feedback.
|
| Kind of sucky, to be honest.
|
| I'd just love to hear that the idea was shit, the application
| was shit, that my face was ugly, or anything, really.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Probably hard to give valuable feedback on tens of thousands
| of rejected applications.
| firefax wrote:
| I keep forgetting there's a front page to this website. What a
| cool story!
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Quick bump for The Social Radars which is an amazing podcast
| co-led by Jessica. A treasure trove of true startup stories.
| urda wrote:
| I thank dang for putting up with me.
| ok_dad wrote:
| ... with all of us.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| I confess.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Happy birthday YC!
| npodbielski wrote:
| Hacker News is just 19 years old? I remember my professor at
| university mentioning it when I told him I am using .net for my
| project. According to him I should use OS language like Java and
| recommended me to HN. I thought it is much older. Time flies.
|
| I wonder if he is raeading HN still...
| weinzierl wrote:
| Y Combinator is 19 years old. Hacker News was launched in
| February 2007, so it just turned 18.
|
| For the longest time I thought Hacker News must have been some
| proof of concept for Reddit and must pre-date it, which is not
| true. Reddit was launched in June 2005, shortly after Y
| Combinator.
| paganel wrote:
| As I remember it HN was initially a "response" to Reddit
| written in Arc, as by that point Reddit had already become
| focused on politics and some other more general stuff and had
| left its programming focus behind. HN was meant to fill that
| gap, with the important addition of the "entrepreneurial" /
| start-up business mambo-jambo behind which I could never get,
| but there were a lot more people that did get it seriously
| back then and which now have a lot more assets than people
| like me (didn't care about start-ups, we were in here only
| for the programming stuff) now happen to posses. Lesson
| learned, I guess.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Appreciate this community. HBD Y!
| bdamm wrote:
| HN has been an outstanding corner of the Internet, seemingly
| invulnerable to all the trash that has consumed the rest. I'd
| love to know how HN has avoided the bots and the spam, while
| retaining a simple and elegant login process.
| IsopropylMalbec wrote:
| A benevolent dictator.
| light_triad wrote:
| dang is an amazing moderator
| zfg wrote:
| Nah, he's become a cynic. dang thinks Hacker News is a "swamp
| of amnesia". It's not a great attitude.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| indeed
| keybored wrote:
| I sometimes forget that this is a venture capitalist website with
| a weirdly computer science name. Okay fine. You can have this one
| day, main YC website.
| smcl wrote:
| Has Garry not turned out to be a bit of a weirdo in the last
| couple of years?
| thom wrote:
| Founders - what would the ideal accelerator (or call it what you
| like) look like today?
| 0xCE0 wrote:
| I'd say the only real reasons any founder needs
| "accelerator"/any kind of VC firm is lack of money and/or
| domain-specific professional help/mentoring when encountering a
| problem that seems to be too hard to overcome by yourself.
|
| So, ideal accelerator/VC would be one that would want to fund
| your (ad)venture without taking too much motivation off by
| having large ownership/control, and have connections/pool of
| domain-specific professional expertise. And wants to believe in
| you.
| 0xCE0 wrote:
| HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open
| every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the
| ambient and relevant view of the techland.
|
| I love the near-non-BS nature of it. And even though the techland
| changes, HN itself has had very little change, so it acts
| somewhat safe stable ground/forum/club for observing the ever
| changing techland. Although I recognize there is somewhat minimal
| degration in comment quality (less professional pragmatic
| comments over the years, at least so I feel), it still trumps
| every other alternative there is.
|
| So, thank you PG/HN, and of course the HN community that makes
| most of it.
|
| PS. I have been read-only mode for the past ~15y (and there was
| nothing valuable for me to comment on anything), but now I
| created account and this is my first comment :)
| cobbaut wrote:
| > HN has been my very favorite website that I consciously open
| every day since last ~15 years. It is the portal to get the
| ambient and relevant view of the techland.
|
| I bet a lot of people here would say the same thing about
| Slashdot ten to fifteen years ago. @HN: Thanks and please don't
| change.
| echelon wrote:
| HN has outlasted Slashdot by a wide margin at this point.
|
| IIRC, Slashdot stopped being great around the same time as
| the decline of the Digg era. It started to sink in quality
| around 2007, which gave it ten years at most of being a
| central part of the online tech community (1997 - 2007).
|
| I started reading HN in 2008. It's lasted nearly twenty years
| as an incredible community.
|
| Here are some graphs:
|
| https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2010/01/slashdot-fail.html
| redox99 wrote:
| You visit every day for 15 years and never left a comment?
| That's kinda crazy. It makes me wonder if this is actually
| common and we don't realize.
| mamurphy wrote:
| I remember reading a stat on reddit that 10% of users upvote
| and 1% of users comment. So if my memory is (near) accurate,
| that's very common behavior.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The 90-9-1 rule, which is common across _many_ mass-
| participation media modalities, not just online.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=90-9-1_rule>
| deadbabe wrote:
| If you comment once on HN you are easily in the top 5% of
| users by comment count.
| hakaneskici wrote:
| I'm at ~19 years - HN as daily home page since inception :)
|
| Before HN, I used to hang out on Joel on Software and Eric's
| Business of Software forums; I occasionally used to post
| there and here but lost old accounts. If you have friends who
| have friends who has HN archeology skills and access, maybe I
| can recover my old account :)
| dang wrote:
| We can try to dig up your old account if you want! You're
| welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com, or if you want to "do
| it live", post here and we can ask for the community's help
| if needed.
| hakaneskici wrote:
| Thank you so much! Sent an email :)
| miki123211 wrote:
| I have plenty of semi-technical friends that do this. Some of
| them only look at the links (e.g. via social media bots), and
| aren't even aware that HN has comments.
|
| They're the kind of people who consider themselves "tech
| enthusiasts", they can install a nifty tool via pip if the
| instructions are clear enough, maybe even figure out what's
| wrong if there's an error, but they're definitely not
| programmers by any means.
|
| Quite a few of them speak "tech English"; they can figure out
| a settings window or a signup form, they know enough tech
| vocabulary and basic grammar to mostly understand manuals,
| maybe with some help here or there, and can barely string an
| English sentence together. Ask them to define "lettuce" or
| "salmon" and they're lost.
| kbenson wrote:
| Probably. I created my account almost 13 years ago, but I
| read for years before creating it. I didn't create a reddit
| account until 2014, or a twitter account until 2015. I was
| reading Slashdot in the 90's though, to give you a sense of
| my age and how long I've been following stuff. I'm just a
| very late adopter...
| nniroclax wrote:
| Absolutely. Some of us see (or at least I see) the level of
| discussion and feel it would be hard for me to say something
| worthwhile that sounds kinda smart. So I mostly lurk while
| being grateful for those who do write incredibly insightful
| comments.
| romanhn wrote:
| Very common. I was a daily reader of Slashdot for ten years
| without ever creating an account. Took me only five to create
| one for HN :)
| mezi wrote:
| Same here. I have been reading this site for 10 years and even
| though it got a bit worse, it's still the best source out
| there. Keep it up everyone.
| HPMOR wrote:
| YC built the culture of the valley, community and startups <3
| thomasfl wrote:
| My HN account is 18 years old. Still no successful businesses to
| speak of after a few attempts. Have started an NGO instead to
| promote better urban planning and design.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Happy birthday, YC!
|
| There isn't a website on the internet that I've learned more from
| than this one.
|
| Thank you.
| computerex wrote:
| Long live Y Combinator, the source of endless inspiration and
| innovation.
| agluszak wrote:
| HN is cool, the startup factory - meh
| paul7986 wrote:
| Been and enjoyed HN since the launch of Justin.tv ... 2006 /
| 2007.
|
| This exact username Ive used on and off from 2007 to 2013/2014
| then solely since then. My karma is low for such an account but
| my thoughts are odd lol ..i guess
| codr7 wrote:
| Been here since day 1, I was already semi-following PG because of
| his writing on Lisp.
| 7e wrote:
| YC has been exploiting naive founders for 20 years. Congrats
| everyone.
| submeta wrote:
| Started reading HN nine years ago, when I screwed up my third
| startup the year before, was devastated, and needed some
| inspiration. And among the shared news were stories that inspired
| me again, that made me come back to this site every single day
| ever since. I like the cultivated discussions, like the things I
| learn about, and I feel like I never miss any tech trend.
| Excellent community. Love it.
|
| Thank you PG, thank you Dang! Thank you to all the contributors
| for the high quality content.
| itsthecourier wrote:
| what happened next!?
| very_good_man wrote:
| Hey as a 20th birthday gift to the internet, why not stop
| censoring comments?
| octernion wrote:
| why on earth did they not post this directly to HN? who goes to
| twitter in 2025
| antirez wrote:
| [I guess the tweet refers to YC the incubator, not the web site
| of news, but I want to focus on the latter]: I registered on HN a
| few days after it was created. The HN community was incredibly
| instrumental to my career, my ability to keep up with the
| development community, with like-minded people, and to have a
| voice, the times my posts and projects reached this home page.
| Thank you, for for all of that. Now, I see that, inevitably, as
| this place becomes bigger and bigger, there is no longer that
| strange, odd and wonderful "90s News Groups" alike quality.
| Despite the decline, I still find quite some value visiting this
| place every day.
| callc wrote:
| HN is the only internet community I've found to be largely good.
| Thank you to everyone for all your kind posts and comments, and
| intellectual discussion. Love to you all.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Agreed. Thank you to all for the endless curious discussion.
| harryquach wrote:
| I love this community, the only social media worth investing time
| into. Here's to another 20 years.
| bflesch wrote:
| Thankful for this nice community.
|
| Also thankful for demonstrating that investors are just lucky
| humans and there is no secret sauce to all of this. 20 years of
| YC, nearly the same time frame as the low interest rate policy
| (started at 2008). The rising tide lifted all boats and thanks to
| social media we can also see the magic go away in real time.
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