Unfortunately, this is a tech industry problem, not just a YC problem. Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol, and increasingly new entrants in the field are the types of folks who would've gone into law or finance in the past.
Now the ability to build things is more widely available, and there are lots of opportunities to make profitable companies without being on the cutting edge of tech skill. For those, being able to sell and reach customers is more critical. Hence what you are seeing.
In some domains of course, cutting edge tech skill is the key advantage, and for those kinds of startups, that’s where you’ll see YC fund the hacker types.
Since they’re aware, if the trend continues, they might actually believe this conformist archetype has equal or greater chance at success in today’s environment. If that's the case, it's probably bc the archetype tends to overlap with other skillsets that correlate with success (e.g. fundraising, recruiting, management).
“Help revolutions the sales cycle”
“Build developer tools”
“Block chain in your build chain”
Since the dawn of time builders have partnered with popularizers in search of building wealth or power; that's not new.
For MBA's, the easy money is in consulting, financial engineering, or monopolizing enterprises - mergers, crypto, pharma, etc. Tech startup's are typically a romantic sideline for those who want some added meaning. But now that deals, consulting, and crypto are dead for the moment, tech startup's look like a good way to go long or at least keep busy until the river runs fast again.
Against this influx, YC still has technical achievement as a barrier to entry and natural moat.
The real question is not hackers vs MBA's, but how honest investors are with each other. Some might latch on to exciting but opaque technologies, knowing they could sell them in later rounds to other investors. Conversely, later-round investors might only work with early-round investors who provide excellent accurate insight into the viability of technologies. New, hungry investors might give up more insight, while established ones jealously defend opportunities in their space. Investor cohorts might flow in and out with political or currency tides unrelated to opportunity.
The investor signal is much stronger than the market signal. Profitable companies now are cutting employees AND doing stock buy-back's and dividends, to satisfy investors. The same is likely true at YC.
YC deals reflect investor interest and shape the next generation of companies. Let's hope they stop veering from disruption to destruction (and from self-interest to divisiveness), and start figuring out how to reduce coordination costs of all our new prosthetic powers without reducing everything to a bureaucratic corporation.
I couldn’t imagine any group that organizes with the the primary intention of raising lots of money, making lots of money and then redistributing lots of money not eventually attracting lots of “suits” of the MBA sort.
The money is stacked way too high. YC has been around for almost twenty years.
It may be worth questioning whether a young tech company with altruistic intentions that fit your expectations getting billion dollar loans is a promising scenario.
Granted I don’t agree with the outcome or the format, I “get it”. People are trying to get paid. The money is getting too long for banks to just up and disappear overnight.
Half the stories are about ChatGPT or AI, the other are about Twitter/Musk.
I find it a chore to scroll past these two topics some days.
Am I alone in noticing this?
As it becomes more lucrative, more people get involved for the primary reason of making money, whereas formerly a larger proportion of people were involved because they found it interesting.
Both are legitimate reasons to be involved in tech in my opinion, but it's definitely a shift in demographics.
But what’s wrong about good business education?
The tech startup formula has merged with the startup hedge fund or VC fund formula. It has mostly to do with connections to capital. I’d also suggest that most ‘tech’ startups have nothing to do with technology. The biggest have been weird schemes to give something away for free or run unlicensed marketplaces.
At some point we have to admit that technology skills are a tiny part of the formula, but still worshipped because it’s the only part of it that is accessible to all, sort of like how we respect athletes more than sports broadcasters. MMA had a parallel rise, so it’s kind of like YC started out developing fighters and now they start dojos.
Can a fighter start a dojo? Yes; that is the natural order of things, and many do, but many more dojos are started by people with more money than skill.
Startups were not new in 2005; the fervor was just as strong as today, but the role of money was a lot less. The standard advice was ‘going Bedouin’, which worked because the cost of living was a lot lower, and it was much faster and easier to get a job if you needed one. Most people funded from job savings, part-time work, or living with parents[1]. The Facebook deal was unprecedented and weird. Even he took some very strange deals to fund his ideas before that came along. I know because I had a ‘job interview’ with a guy that MZ had some weird deal with to co-fund their projects, of which his was a parking app, and he was mad at ‘the Harvard kid’ for taking $6000 and not doing the work, which he wanted me to finish. I was working on a ride sharing app, so he offered me the same deal. He went to jail soon after, and then sued for 25% of Facebook when he got out. There’s also the infamous deal with ConnectU. All I’m trying to say is that everybody was hustling in weird ways.
Now it seems that the money is freely available if you are in the flow of it, and no amount of sheer brilliance can compete with that if you’re not. I think that may change in the near future, but I’ve been saying that for over a decade.
Also, if I may editorialize even further, the standard advice has always been inconsistent or inapplicable broadly. I liked the YC idea, but didn’t even apply because I was literally taking his advice not to focus on things like that, but obviously club membership has had benefits. When you succeed doing it your way, hacker, hustler, MBA, YC, vagabond, or whatever, you can tell everybody that’s the only way to do it.