Since Sam has taken over at the helm, the expansion of YC including adding partners and employees has been dramatic. The YC website got an overhaul, added (the macro), created YC fellowship and Y Research. It seems like Sam's vision for YC is much larger than PG's was.
While under PG, YC kept things small, specific, and focused. Don't get me wrong, I think Sam is doing an absolutely fantastic job. However there is a stark contrast in scale, speed, and vision.
I agree that there has been a big difference, but I think you may have cause and effect backwards. I was under the impression that PG handed over the reins largely because YC was growing and he wasn't interested in running a large organization.
Brad has a more traditional Associate role since he's on a finance team (Continuity). I'm responsible for the day-to-day of the founders in the current batch and keep my finger on the pulse of our alumni community (in associate-speak, on our portfolio companies). There's very little financial modeling for me (thank god) and a lot of figuring out how to 1/ scale our resources and 2/ make our growing network feel connected.
The first was that these additions seem excellent and that YC will be much more capable and robust by virtue of them.
The second was a reflection on the criticism written against VC in the press for investing in "their buddies' companies" (ex: a16z partners investing in their friends' --who are experienced entrepreneurs with big visions-- companies) and whether we will see a narrative in the future against the common practice of VC firms hiring what can be seen from the outside as "their friends".
(personally I think the practice makes sense since you've often worked with them before and know their character and abilities)
A lot of things! They're making some amazing software for applications and all the data that comes with it, internal tools for office hours and events, and ongoing improvements to our security and infrastructure, just to name a few things without going into too much detail. They're also there to listen to all of us complain about not having this-or-that feature :)
Confusing or misleading titles aside, YC has made literally billions of dollars off of free software and the under- or unpaid labor that produces it. They absolutely should be patronizing free software projects, perhaps not X11/X.org/Wayland, but certainly outfits like the Debian, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD foundations that make their startups possible.
Instead of laughing at ourselves for having misread a title as suggesting that YC might actually contribute something back, we should be publicly shaming them for not doing so and being an open source free-rider.
Hi, I'm Tom, one of the folks joining.
I actually work a fair amount with FreeBSD and its surrounding organizations and have helped several projects get financial backing including paying for code updates.
You can look forward to more updates as time goes on :)
Came here to say this. I hope the fact that I'm using my very limited noprocrast window to say this adds weight to this expression of my disappointment.
Julia has support for unicode in the language (unicode identifiers, etc) and even has some operators/functions (they are the same thing in julia) aliased as their usual symbols, like "in" is aliased to "∈".
