Really love the new site and how it highlights founders so well.
Only minor tweak I'd make is for the desktop viewport size - make it so you can also click the company names instead of needing to precisely scroll for the images to show up for that company. With notched mouse wheels it's all too easy to skip one even with a regular scroll. Or increase the scroll distance.
Also might suggest using a gradient mask to fade out the company logos as you scroll the primary text block up. Some of them get very close to the text and the one-by-one removal feels a tad distracting.
And really minor but kept finding myself trying to click the photos to see things larger. Would be nice if they could come up in a media viewer with a small caption, and let me arrow key or swipe through.
I love that the founders are so prominently featured on this new version.
Impressive collection of embarrassingly young founder pictures :-)
A good remedy against lookism :)
some of the design interactions are really polished. the section written with the quotes from founders is really cool. the hover effect with the before and after of the YC partners is a great touch too!
There's a homepage? Kidding aside, it looks like a good landing page highlighting the top success stories and the purpose of YC.
Impressive! Seeing all the before and after photos is a nice touch. With regards to the actual web page, white text on light background (partners part) makes it nice easily readable.
Looks good.
A minor piece of feedback, though: might be just me, not sure if anyone else has this pavlovian conditioning, but seeing the black banner/bar on top with the YC logo/color below and HN background color immediately makes me think someone passed away.
I think it's fine. If it were a black bar and then an orange bar, that would be a different matter.
Turning a builder into a formidable founder, which via the PG quote is someone who seems they will always get what they want is in its self a death. A builder... a truth-seeking creator dies. Devoured by someone who gets what they want, a superego. There should be a black bar at the top.
/s
Shout out to the risk takers.
Redo the co-founder match sub-site next!
That thing hasn't been updated in years, and could really use some love. If they don't want to do it themselves, just open source the sub-site and I'm sure a bunch of tech founders will happily do it for them (if only to be able to say they contributed to YC itself).
Visiting HN brings me back when to when I just started my career as a entrepreneur, I look forward to the nostalgic design it has. Have been familiar w/ YC's & HN design since 2008.
New YC page looks great – but it just doesn't feel "yc" to me.
The “YC/Now” timer starts (and sometimes flips) before the image actually loads.
There’s something that bothers me about reducing achievement to stock price and exit valuations. Yet, it is sobering to witness the machinery laid bare.
The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress. I’m aware this is the dominant framework, but that doesn’t make it feel less hollow. Welcome to Heartbreak.
> The whole aesthetic of startup success—those triumphant IPO bell-ringing moments—celebrates money, not wisdom or authentic progress.
Didn't see anything about ethics either, which, again, is not necessarily what a VC firm is about. It's actually kind of refreshing--the website clearly conveys YC's focus: It's about being "formidable" and "intensive work" and "urgency" and "fast." The editing on this site is impressive. They have boiled away everything down to the core of what the firm believes in, and it's "work hard make lots of money fast". Not something I'd personally be interested in being part of, but the site's wording is remarkable in its honesty, and I clearly know after reading it that the YC experience would not be my cup of tea!
Wisdom and authentic progress are hard to measure. They are also not the goals enterprises pursue. Enterprises go for the money, but the money is normally paid by satisfied customers; this side effect is what makes enterprises viable and useful. (In case of VC money, customers even don't have to pay for sustainably for some time.)
An IPO or a large acquisition is like a graduation event for school students. A diploma or a SAT certificate also do not certify wisdom, or even progress. They certify a certain degree of success, and a transition into "adult life". Or think about this as of an orbital insertion event for a spacecraft. Not an end goal, but a precondition for a serious progress.
If you seek wisdom, a VC firm like YCombinator is likely not the most appropriate tool for your quest. (An attempt to found a business may bring some wisdom, as usual, at a cost.)
Very cool!
[flagged]
Wow – thank you for that.
Doesn't seem to display anything with JS disabled so it's a fail in my book, but I accept that I'll be in the minority here.
Displays a blank page unless scripts are allowed. :(
Thanks - someone else reported this too (as a security issue for some reason!) and I've passed it on.
I mean trying to insinuate oai is a yc company is just shady right?
I get that the subtext isn’t dishonest, but cmon, you know what you’re doing
They were an early funder. Seems p. reasonable for a VC firm to point that out.
Were OpenAI in a batch though? If not, I think maybe OpenAI deserves a mention but after companies that were actually in a batch.
Typography looks great though, animations are smooth, /formidable founder' is original and it's nice seeing Jared Friedman - he was super friendly and acted as a company champion when I applied in 2016.
It's fine they include openai, they can be very proud of sam. What I found a bit weird is that the reddit founder picture shows only two people. History is written by the winners I guess.
I found the switch of focus from startups/businesses to founders/CEOs particularly strange. Looks like a political campaign to me.
YC has always been founder first.
Back when they started in the 2000s, most traditional VCs didn't recognize that high impact individuals can easily pivot or define product categories, and only concentrated on financial engineering (DCF go brrrrrr).
YC often also mentors founders on pivots (I'd say at least a third of all startups that make it to demo day were mentored into some sort of a pivot).
YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge, both of which really center on the founder first approach or Operators-turned-Angels - which I assume this marketing shift is about.
> YC often also mentors founders on pivots
Interesting. I once talked to an investor (not YC) and they asked me what I would do if the product failed. I said one thing I can do is pivot. And they literally responded with "we don't invest in founders who think about pivoting"
> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing to compete with a16z Speedrun and PeakXV Surge
Maybe. A write up about the new design would be cool I think
> YC has always been founder first.
Internally yes there is a "founder community". But publicly I would argue it was product-first.
> YC often also mentors founders on pivots
It doesn't seem unlikely to me that YC coined or at least popularized 'the pivot' in the context of changing business / startup directions. The first mention of using the word in that sense is in this comment [1] which explicitly mentions the usage by YC, while it only gets used when talking about pivot tables or more traditional uses of the word before that.
Edit: The "Lean Startup" blog series [2], which was quite influential, mentions 'the pivot' a little earlier than the post above, and really seems to coin it, so I guess that's the source (edit again: wrong :D).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=806601
[2] https://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/06/pivot-dont-jum...
That's a fun question! 806601 was from Sept 2009. I found 3 earlier cases of 'pivot' in the startup sense:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=699611 (July 2009)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=676514 (June 2009)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=562739 (April 2009)
All 3 of those posts were by YC founders, so the term was obviously in circulation by then. The last of them includes a (broken) likn to this article: https://web.archive.org/web/20090703130211/https://redeye.fi....
Edit: that one was discussed here, but the comments didn't say the p-word:
Yogi Berra wisdom for startups - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=537331 - March 2009 (9 comments)
> YC also needs to pivot it's marketing
Depends who you're marketing to. Do they need to follow what others did or should they stay in their own niche? Because I'm not hanging out on a16z forum because they make fancy marketing materials, I'm one of the thousands of people who bought into the YC brand which was build over decades. Would be stupid to become one with the crowd of sleeky VCs.
As European I'm quite happy I didn't see YC involvement with the current administration, and if they stay a bit clear of the AI supergau I'm sure they'll be fine.
> YC also needs to pivot
It's been reported that the ratio of mentors to founders had become quite bad. Seems quality has gone down since they tried to scale something that doesn't scale
YC is a political movement. Look at their leaders' activities and what they fund.
any details?
I'm pretty sure the designer used political campaigns as inspiration
Gary Tan shows up in a photo at the bottom but nowhere by name. Gotta hand it to YC, whoever handles their PR needs a raise.