This mirrors the military doctrine of "mission tactics" which entrusts subordinates with wide latitude in executing orders. But it requires a high degree of alignment and competence, which explains why YC focuses on founders over product or idea.
This makes sense in a dynamic environment with sensitive local conditions and "network lag" in the chain of command. But in more static or settled market environments it may be wiser (for investors) to focus elsewhere and restrict founder autonomy. We see this pretty commonly with successful founders who get "phased out" and replaced with more experienced managers.
I wonder how much this sort of "distributed decision-making" has been formalized and studied.
This was eye-opening. I used to think militaries were completely centralized and top-down, but a friend who was an officer explained this to me and pointed me to the literature. It was fascinating and educating to understand the principles behind Mission Command being successful as a method (competence, mutual trust, shared understanding, etc).
> Commanders, staffs, and subordinates ensure their decisions and actions comply with applicable U.S., international, and, in some cases, host-nation laws and regulations. Commanders at all levels ensure their Soldiers operate in accordance with the Army Ethic, the law of war, and the rules of engagement. (See FM 27-10 for a discussion of the law of war.)
It isn't very complicated from a military law perspective. The chain of command (following orders) has a lot more weight on it than a given solder's interpretation of military, constitutional, or international law.
If you believe you are being a given an order that is illegal and refuse, you are essentially putting your head on the chopping block and hoping that a superior officer (who outranks the one giving you the order) later agrees with you. Recent events have involved the commander in chief issuing the orders directly, which means the 'appealing to a higher authority' exit is closed and barred shut for a solider refusing to follow orders.
That doesn't mean a soldier isn't morally obligated to refuse an unlawful / immoral order, just that they will also have to pay a price for keeping their conscience (maybe a future president will give them a pardon?). The inverse is also true, soliders who knowingly follow certain orders (war crimes) are likely to be punished if their side loses, they are captured, or the future decides their actions were indefensible.
A punishment for ignoring a command like "execute those POWs!" has a good chance of being overruled, but may not be. However an order to invade Canada from the President, even if there will be civilian casualties, must be followed. If the President's bosses (Congress/Judiciary) disagree with that order they have recourse.
Unfortunately the general trend which continues is for Congress to delegate their war making powers to the President without review, and for the Supreme Court to give extraordinary legal leeway when it comes to the legality of Presidential actions.
The YPG, an armed anarchist military group, defeated Islamic State in North East Syria and more or less founded their own country without a traditional military command structure. Instead they had loosely coordinated teams.
There is a good book on that subject by Stephen Bungay called "The Art of Action". He explains the concept of Auftragstaktik. Great book, although a bit hard to read.
I think OODA is fundamentally different to Auftragstaktik.
Auftragstaktik describes a clear purpose / intent. Like: capture the bridge (but: we don’t care how you do it since we can’t foresee specific circumstances)
OODA describes a process of decision making.
So, Auftragstaktik answers who decides what and why.
OODA answers how decisions are made and updated over time.
If it focused on founders over product or idea you’d see some actual heterogeneity in the YC set. It has been a few months since I last skimmed the startup lists but it seemed like 95% were LLM for X companies.
"Nelsonic doctrine", for whoever wants to google this concept.
> In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey an order. He ought to have gone on, had he the slightest Nelsonic temperament in him.
“ Some say YC is now big enough that it has a self-fulfilling distortion effect where the best founders in the world know they should all apply to YC first before they talk to any other startup accelerators or investors.”
That’s an interesting point but I have to imagine all the worst founders know it too so the filtering may not have gotten easier. I’d be curious to hear from them.
They majorly select a kind of founders as a first filter (good engineers from good companies, ivy league, ex founders etc.), and then they look into the ideas as a second filter, and the third and the least important is the process in which they just spend 15 minutes interviewing and maybe another 15 minutes looking into the application.
The zeroth filter is 'people who apply to YC' though, which YC can only really control by managing their brand and marketing and by approaching potential founders directly and suggesting they apply (I assume that happens; I don't know though). That limits who they can invest in far more than any of their own criteria.
There's also another way in that circumvents all the other filters - being a founder at an existing startup that has really good traction already. You can have a resume of no-name companies, no degree, and never have founded a company before, but if your business is growing, making money, and looks wildly scalable with YC's support then you can get in that way.
Making a game that will sell well on Steam is typically much harder than finding a bunch of boring business leaders and pitching them a SaaS or consulting package. On the surface it might seem simpler to do a game, but once you get into the mechanics of building, testing and publishing something for the masses, the fear of cold calling or emailing total strangers begins to evaporate quickly.
About 99% of the work you do on a game will wind up in the trashcan. Doesn't matter what kind of work it is. Code, audio, textures, models, map layouts, multiplayer balancing work, etc. are all susceptible in the same way. No one is safe from the chaos. It takes a lot of human energy and persistence to produce sufficient 1% content to fill up a player experience.
I'd estimate for a B2B SaaS product, the ratio is approximately the same, however you don't need such a broad range of talent to proceed. One developer with a desire to do the hard things constantly can be all you need to make it to profitability. Going from one employee to N employees in a creative venture is where things go bananas. If you absolutely must do an indie game and you need it to succeed or your internet will get cut off, you will want to strongly consider doing it by yourself. Figuring out how to split revenue and IP with other humans when you can't get the customer on the phone is a nightmare.
Many people agree that being a video game founder is harder than being a tech founder. Staying small and being as resourceful as you can is a good way to mitigate risk.
As a YC founder turned gamedev, I can tell you that failure is the norm in both pursuits. As with YC, the question is: can we create more outsized outcomes when we succeed?
I don't think that's possible and frankly I'd much prefer capital not even try. To the best of my knowledge, the only games which generate the really outsized outcomes you'd need for a VC portfolio do really gross, anti-player shit (gacha, lootboxes, whale fishing, etc.) to get it. Or they become distribution monopolies like Valve, which is fine-ish when Valve is private but would be a ongoing catastrophe if it had been VC-funded. I'd rather not encourage that.
I agree. I'm not the moral police, but video games ultimately have to walk a line where they serve up entertainment that is engaging/addictive without being all-consuming and abusive, and do so for an amount of money for which there is general consensus is "reasonable".
Trying to ride that to the moon is a very different proposition from a B2B play where you sell some service that concretelt delivers $X/mo recurring value to each customer for a $Y/mo price tag, and X > Y, but Y - your costs still turns a healthy profit. If you do that right, everyone is winning and the economy as a whole grows, not at all the same as the zero-sum game that is soaking a few whales and ruining their lives.
I appreciate this perspective.. but I think there might be a false dichotomy here. Some of the biggest gaming success stories didn't rely on exploitative mechanics - Minecraft, Among Us, even Fortnite's initial success was based on solid gameplay before the monetization kicked in. The question is whether you can build sustainable platforms that create genuine value rather than just extracting it. Steam takes 30% but provides real distribution value. Maybe the trick is focusing on companies that help other developers succeed rather than trying to create the next Genshin Impact
> Fortnite's initial success was based on solid gameplay before the monetization kicked in.
Fortnite is a bit of weird backwards example because the early PvE iteration had paid lootboxes, but they were scrapped in the Battle Royale spinoff which actually got popular, and eventually removed altogether. They still do things like engineering FOMO to drive sales but ironically the games monetization was the most exploitative when nobody was playing it.
Agreed. It is possible to make money in video games while treating customers with respect. This is the way! (and what EGG looks for because it builds stronger IP and longterm retention and good will)
I helped Indie Fund Hollow Knight back in the day and look a them now!
I think it is possible to be successful in games without being predatory. Humble Bundle was a demonstration of that.
I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable. They usually yield a “ring of fire” effect that creates a growing ring of users for a while but really you’re burning out all your core users and will implode. This is how many describe the original Zynga model.
Supercell (founded around the same time) has cultivated longterm ecosystems and IP by respecting their players.
>I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable
I don't think they're trying to be. I think they're whale hunting, find a few high spenders, and milk them for all they're worth. Then they spin up a new IP (or license one out), rinse and repeat
Yes they are. The implementation tends to differ from how eastern-developed gacha games work, but they're making billions from virtual slot machines nonetheless.
Yeah, I still indulge in video games, and understand that on the surface CSGO skins feel different than Genshin summons, but from 100 feet up it's all the same crap, imo
I do kinda get what you mean, though. Gacha mechanics feel expected in anything western, while 'loot boxes' are still a 'feature' of some games in the east. Eastern studios have definitely noticed, though, and are running the same playbook.
I see. You can remove 'Overwatch' from my original comment and the point still stands, but I do appreciate the fact check. I know Blizzard from HearthStone and Diablo....not great experiences with gacha there haha (Diablo Immortal, atleast), but those are far from the most popular Eastern games
You're right though. Industrial software/hardware in general always has money in all times. But gaming is essentially entertainment and people only spend on entertainment last. So gaming industry has a lot of failure but even if you're successful in a huge way, you won't earn huge money. There's a big cap there.
VC math follows a power law and expects almost all investments to flop, and the one winner to pay for it all. The question here is not about the flops it’s: are the winners big enough?
Isn't this the exact logic behind the stagnation in media right now? The risk aversion/stakes is so high that real risks aren't taken and we get bland sequel/remake slop.
Ironically when media culture is at is at its healthiest is when winners are diverse and common, and more importantly smaller shows that try out new things can still break even, with periodic flops being generally tolerable. That low risk culture for attempting new ideas is precisely what creates legendary franchises later when a few of these hit everything right.
And now that they're eliminating diversity in their investments are you still certain they will pick the next generation's winners? All they're investing in are AI companies...
Once upon a time someone like me for whom engineering competence is a core aspect of my identity would have never considered turning my back on YC. But now I'm just embarrassed by them. The things they now think are the only things worth investing in mostly make me want to vomit, like the vibe coding casino-IDE startup. As someone who still espouses their old values rather than their new ones, I'd rather succeed on my own.
Both Mark Andreessen and Andrej Karpathy say AI is unique as a new technology in that small teams and individuals seem to be the earliest and most cutting edge adopters. (unlike computers and the internet which were used by government and then large companies)
YC just so happens to invest super early in small teams.
So the overlap of YC and AI is inevitable. AI is not an investment genre per se but it can be used to accelerate or improve any ecosystem if used carefully and cleverly.
Since my Humble Bundle days, I’ve always been partial to small companies and small dev studios. Not all EGG companies use AI but they are all keeping tabs on the technology. Mitch Lasky has said that AI may have opened a window in which small studios may have their best shot at outsized success in recent history. Eventually the big dogs will catch up and adopt the new tech themselves but right now David has a shot at Goliath.
It's funny, because in my industry it's the slavish attention to AI by goliath-scale companies like Microsoft that is leading them to set fire to quality, innovation, and consumer trust, when then gives me and my tiny startup the opportunity to jump in and eat their lunch.
Over the next 10 years, no, I think the market will course correct within that time frame. AI is the sauce that's being slathered on everything right now and demand for it is driving record valuations, particularly for AI startups and their founders. That demand is all investor-driven though: investors are falling over themselves to make AI investments, while consumers are not actually especially eager to have all human contact progressively stripped from their lives.
> That demand is all investor-driven though: investors are falling over themselves to make AI investments
Largely true.
> while consumers are not actually especially eager to have all human contact progressively stripped from their lives
Hmm… I agree with this sentiment, but I think it’s mostly a straw man. There are many things that AI can do well that people will end up embracing directly or indirectly.
Medical scans is one big one, imho.
Mundane but important legal services is another.
Skillful mediation of scutwork is definitely embraced.
Good and fast simple customer service via phone or text will end up being very welcome (at least in some contexts). I realize that most people will prefer superlative human customer service, but that’s currently not a widespread available reality, especially for simple tasks.
All sorts of learning (great and essentially free tutors).
All sorts of practice (e.g., language, speeches, debates, presentations, etc.).
All of the above (and more) are things that people are using AI for right now, and they seem to be loving it.
I realize that some folks use AI tools in regressive and sometimes dehumanizing ways, but that’s not the fault of the tool, imho.
I dunno, I see problems with every one of those things.
You could make a customer service AI that was an advocate for the consumer, but it would likely spend the company's money liberally. So instead you'll end up with AI agents incentivized to be stingy and standoffish about admitting the company could improve, just like the humans are.
You can tutor with AI, but there's no knowing what it will teach you. It will sound as convinced of itself when it teaches you why the earth is flat as it does teaching you why the earth is round. The one thing it will certainly do is reinforce your existing biases.
You can practice with AI, but you'd learn more by posing yourself the questions.
A doctor can have AI look at medical scans, but they can't defer to AI judgement and just tell the patient "AI says you have cancer, but I don't really know or care one way or the other". So again, the skill in reading results needs to be in the doctor.
On some level it's the role of the publisher to pick winners and guide them over the finish line. See for example the hit machine that is Devolver: https://www.devolverdigital.com/games
I'm not an indie dev, but if I was I would happily give up a chunk of my potential profit to be listed on there, knowing the size of the market that says "oh yeah... a Devolver title, I would blind-buy this, it's probably pretty good."
I suspect games are like movies: for every 100 movies, around 20 of them make enough money to cover the losses of the other 80. But predicting which movies those will be is extremely difficult (Goldman's Law: Nobody knows nothin'). Any studio / label / distributor which can do better than the average is probably headed for greatness.
The thing is when a game flops it can be popular in the future. It is still a game that does game things. When $dumbapp flops though, it is a stronger signal that whatever it is trying to do may have no market at all. Like giving a fish a skateboard.
The game industry needs no such thing. You can make profitable games very cheaply, and business models are simple and well understood. It’s a matter of just making a good game and getting it good exposure to customers.
Video games are a subset of entertainment which is capped in TAM by the population the game reaches, the amount of money they're willing to spend per hour on average, and average number of hours they can devote to entertainment.
In other words, every dollar you make off a game is a dollar that wasn't spent on another game, or trip to the movies, or vacation. And every hour someone plays your game is an hour they didn't spend working, studying, sleeping, eating, or doing anything else in the attention economy.
What makes this different from other markets is that there is no value creation or new market you can create from the aether to generate 10x/100x/1000x growth. And there's no rising tide to lift your boat and your competitors - if you fall behind, you sink.
The only way to grow entertainment businesses by significant multiples is by increasing discretionary income, decreasing working hours, or growing population with discretionary time and money. But those are societal-level problems that take governments and policy, and certainly not venture capital.
One recent concern I have is (anecdotally) how poor a deal YC startups I've seen are offering for founding engineers.
Before YC started, early hires who helped make a startup successful could get rich on stock.
YC may have changed the investment scene for the better in some ways, such that founders are less likely to screwed by investors. But today, early hires are the ones who seem to be getting screwed.
In cases I've seen recently, even if the startup has a nice exit for founders and investors, employees would have been better off as a worker drone at a FAANG-like.
Do we need PG to write an essay (or the richest managing partners to make a video), about the value of incentivizing early hires?
Or, don't even talk about the value of it (since some aspiring founders are aggressively confident now, that they know how all the ducks are lined up), but talk about new criteria: YC looks for a respectable pool to incentivize early hires as positive signal, when determining who to fund.
Because the truth is that recent batches are filled with nepo founders and companies that are not really at the caliber of those that carry these VC names from the past (like pre-2015). Lots of fraud-aligned people/companies too.
Now its just a way to sell these companies to those OGs.
It's so easy to post substanceless slurs, but I've been around YC since 2009 and it hasn't changed much from my perspective. The primary difference between pre-2015 and now is that those earlier startups have been around for over a decade longer. Of course the ones who turned out to be successful are better known.
I'm just giving my opinion from what I see. In no way did I "slur" and my point isn't about YC but the founders..
you raise a valid point about survivorship bias I guess, but as of the last few years it seems a lot of rage bait and do anything to get signal instead of the positive optimism that I felt a lot of the companies offered those years ago. i guess what i'm trying to say is that it has become the final version of itself as a venture firm, whereas before it was quirky (again, I am outsider!! so this is my POV) and backed companies that made products/services that I think made my life objectively better.
end of the day, I really like YC and think they do a good thing overall. but I think people/founders have realized how to game it, if that makes sense.
I appreciate this follow-up. There's another variable, which I think may be relevant: all of us who have been following YC for the past 10+ years are by definition 10+ years older than we were back then. Some people (edit: at least on internet forums) tend to get more jaded and cynical over time*. I mention this not to accuse you of more than your share of this, but because it's on my mind a lot about the HN community in general. It's why we added "don't be curmudgeonly" to the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, for example.
(* Edit: and they seem to be highly motivated to post comments!)
I hope you find a good way to help HN be genuinely more optimistic.
Of course, right now, gloom is all over most of social media, and everywhere else, for understandable reasons of world reality (besides engagement manipulation/dynamics reasons).
And, within our field, a lot of the current enthusiasm and curiosity for tech news is for getting our economic tickets, in a tech gold rush that is not nearly as optimistic as the Web one was.
Will the optimism on HN come from topics that are interesting, but detached from all that threatens us, like a break or a reminder that there is still goodness and greatness?
Will it come from finding ways to correct or fight against what threatens humanity?
Will it come from tantalizing hints of personal advantage or opportunity to wind up on top?
I hope so too and I take your comment as encouragement in that direction!
Another question that's orbiting around this in my head is how do we explain to the community what we're looking for and why. Knowing HN, and the internet in general, I can imagine the backlash from certain segments of the commentariat ("Oh so we're only allowed to do happy talk now?" - "Once again the corporate overlords crack the whip" - etc. etc.)
On the other hand, I also know that other sizeable segments of the community have been tired of the cynicism here for a long time - so there will be positive repercussions too.
What you wrote above is so different than what I thought I was reading above that I had to ask myself why it felt that way in the first place. Probably the "nepo founders" bit was what got me, and "fraud-aligned" didn't help either. Maybe also this is a case of the 'rebound' phenomenon where the reply comment says more clearly what was originally meant; that happens a lot too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I wonder who thinks that a practice of combining sub-market salary with miniscule ISO grants (not even real equity) for early hires is a good idea for startups that want to win big.
And yet YC still makes bets on pretty easily detected BS like Pickle VR[0]. That's a startup I sure wouldn't trust.
Pickle is one of the most egregious examples, but I've noticed a trend of these fly-by-night operations with YC backing getting found out as frauds over the last handful of years. I don't know if it's happening more or if I just wasn't aware of them or if the rate was the same but people started talking about them more.
It is the nature of YC that you're going to get instances like Pickle. YC invests at a very early stage in lots of companies. 40% are literally just an idea. It isn't a scam that one of the companies pivot, it's expected. They're meant to work on their idea, and if it doesn't work or they have a better idea they pivot.
What Pickle is doing is essentially they're falling on the wrong line of "fake it to you make it", it would be totally fine to do what they're doing (allowing pre-orders with a $200 deposit for a Q4 '26 product) if they just weren't lying about the specs. It's pretty clear they aren't going to deliver anything like what they've promised, but that is just ambition. The whole point of YC is that 1 out of 1000 of these companies are going to deliver something revolutionary and you don't get that without 1000 of them trying to do something revolutionary.
Having said that, you only need to watch the launch video to realise the CEO is total moron ("If everyone wore the same pair of glasses, what would they look like?"). But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do. YC are going to lose their investment on that company.
> It is the nature of YC that you're going to get instances like Pickle. YC invests at a very early stage in lots of companies. 40% are literally just an idea
But the whole supposed point of YC is investing in people not founders. If that's the pitch and you invest in a moron, that makes you look bad too. YC should be good at telling if people are morons - that's kind of their entire job.
> But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do.
They get 7% of your company. They do actually have some power.
Given the argument around YC effectively "cancelling" naughty list founders. The John Wick Excommunicado poster for illustration is an interesting choice because John Wick is the hero of the series and is constantly being threatened by the institution that both created and emancipated him only to try to destroy him later. Not sure how intentional, but Reeves himself is beloved figure and often noted as a paragon of hard work and integrity in a grimy industry despite a reputation as a "bad actor".
A related but slightly different impression of early YC that I mentioned the other day, touching on the "disingenous and exploitative finance" aspect this article alludes to:
> This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.
Talking about the shift raises the question of why it used to be the other way. Were VCs bad at picking founders who were honest and/or competent, or were VCs always wrong to mistrust founders?
The VC-funded startup environment prior to YC is so different than what we have today that it's weird to compare. Were VCs bad at picking founders in 2004? Mu!
(I raised, with friends, in 1999, and was senior at a VC-funded startup prior to that).
Most people who comment on Hacker News would not have preferred the status quo ante of YC.
I think it just seems like a bad idea? If you believe in expertise in business, giving someone with little of it a bunch of money seems a recipe for disaster. (And YC showed that in fact it’s not a disaster.)
Taken to its logical conclusion, that idea suggests hiring business experts to start companies from scratch rather than investing in existing startups.
The industry has experienced slowed growth and is restructuring which is scary for many people right now. There have been continuous layoffs and studio closures. That sucks (though is not all caused by AI).
But a few quick thoughts:
Video games have always been about cutting edge technology. Because they are interactive, they are best positioned to leverage AI tech. (unlike static media)
Prototyping tends to be the most important but most neglected process for finding the fun. AI is a catalyst for rapid prototyping such that a studio can more quickly build and assess game loops and de-risk the rest of their dev cycle before staffing up or pulling team members off other projects.
AI may long-term create more leisure time macro-economically for everyone, meaning more consumer time that may be consumed playing games. (Owen Mahoney thinks the industry will soon triple in size)
>Because they are interactive, they are best positioned to leverage AI tech.
You have not supported this argument.
On the contrary, I think LLMs are not a big help.
We've already been here. Procedural generation was the magical solution that was supposed to help a single dev make giant worlds. And it did. It helped you make giant, utterly empty and soulless worlds.
Great for minecraft. Not so great for No Mans Sky, as there were significant limitations. Useless for anything that depends on a story or immersion in that story or characters.
This idea that you can wire an in game character up to an LLM is misguided and doesn't seem to understand what players want a character to be.
In Mass Effect 2, a fan favorite character infamously had little content for most of the game. Garrus was a very loved character, including being the love interest for a lot of people who played the game, but during 2 he just sits in a part of your ship and says "Sorry, can't talk, running some calibrations" for almost the entire game.
Put the entire game's script into an LLM as context and have it pretend to be Garrus and try and talk to it. Will the LLM take a strong stance that Garrus would take? Will it correctly figure out that Garrus would rather kill a bad guy than let him get away, and then have him make convincing arguments about that in reference to the previous mission, and then in the next mission put you in a situation where you have to decide whether Garrus is right and whether you should dome that "Bad Guy" instead of letting the police fail to aprehend him? Will that Garrus make you think about this world and your place in it and whether your personal or chosen morals are right?
Probably not.
People don't want to chat about the weather with random NPCs. People want characters that have character notes and integrate into the story and make you feel.
So far LLMs can't really write that well, and certainly are not cohesive and multidisciplinary enough to be able to build that into a game in a convincing way.
There's a famous game called "Facade" which plays up this big fanfare about how it uses "AI" and Natural Language Processing to bring two characters to life for you to talk with and navigate a crisis with, but it's almost entirely lies. The actual logic of how it works is almost identical to old fashioned text adventure parsers in their heyday. It's a heavily scripted sequence, with fairly few actual paths it can take, and the script is not that big. It got so much press for what was basically done in the 80s. I think some people have tried to hook LLMs into it, but it just doesn't feel good. The problems that AI dungeon adventure game always had still exist, just under more paint.
One EGG studio is wiring LLM’s to npc’s in a hilarious way. We’ll be curious to see everyone’s feedback when they make a playable available.
However, I’ll say that as a result of their AI integration they are also doing way more human writing in the form of prompts and other procedural elements than if they just used old fashioned dialog trees.
I think AI can only be used as an enhancement in certain specific and controlled ways.
One mistake I see a lot right now is the assumption that you can delegate design and creative direction to AI. I think that generally yields slop. In fact I think the Creative Director/design role at a game studio may be the hardest digital job for an AI to replace. I had the opportunity to express that idea to Sam Altman once and he did refute it.
1. "More leisure for everyone" is utter bollocks. We know it doesn't work like that. If it did we would all be doing nothing but leisure because of how much leisure we gained by switching to email.
2. Games are just code that's fun. How does this sounds as a process for making something fun: "Start by de-risking." Hmmm OK, yes, this tracks with my experience of private equity companies being the most innovative and successful creators of games.
More leisure will only occur if it becomes true that the marginal return of doing additional work falls almost to zero. So to say people will have more leisure time actually suggests more that they will lack opportunities to do things of value than it does that they will choose to have more leisure time. Which is depressing.
If everyone could live a life of leisure, the logical end result would be roving gangs engaging in street warfare for funsies. If money is no object for anyone, what else is there to do but to seek fame, even infamy?
Each gang member could be running their AI value-miners at home, but of course since they're the only kind of value in the new AI-communist society they'll be the obvious target for the other leisure gangs. So after enough rounds of violence each leisure gang will run a fortified, paramilitary "intelligence mining" operation, and oh by the way indie software dev is punishable by death in these territories.
Is this scenario, like, 9 kinds of insane? Sure! But so is the idea that we'll all be at the beach doing Idunno what, fucking? All this to say yeah, I'm with you that anyone who describes that AI will make a future defined by a lack of productive work is describing a depressing future...
It bases this entire chain of assumptions on "AI is really big and everyone agrees".
But I don't see the games industry as all that vulnerable to AI at all. Game engines already drive constantly-improving dev efficiency through improved abstractions.
None of this is necessarily zero-sum. I'm skeptical AI is going to be a meaningful tailwind for games, but if I'm wrong it could absolutely benefit customers, studios, and labs through boosting productivity.
Is YC still an (upwards going) thing? Looks like their best days are behind them, I'd say 2018-2019 was its heyday.
I don't feel bad for Paul Graham and his partners, I'm sure he's got his bag and then some, but from the outside it looks like it (the YC-adjacent thing, that is) lost big(-ish) when it came to riding the AI hype train.
This mirrors the military doctrine of "mission tactics" which entrusts subordinates with wide latitude in executing orders. But it requires a high degree of alignment and competence, which explains why YC focuses on founders over product or idea.
This makes sense in a dynamic environment with sensitive local conditions and "network lag" in the chain of command. But in more static or settled market environments it may be wiser (for investors) to focus elsewhere and restrict founder autonomy. We see this pretty commonly with successful founders who get "phased out" and replaced with more experienced managers.
I wonder how much this sort of "distributed decision-making" has been formalized and studied.
I'm a huge fan of Mission Command. If you want to read more, I'd recommend the Army's official doc on it: https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34403-ADP_6-... (it's 110 pages but you really only need to read Chapter 1).
This was eye-opening. I used to think militaries were completely centralized and top-down, but a friend who was an officer explained this to me and pointed me to the literature. It was fascinating and educating to understand the principles behind Mission Command being successful as a method (competence, mutual trust, shared understanding, etc).
> Commanders, staffs, and subordinates ensure their decisions and actions comply with applicable U.S., international, and, in some cases, host-nation laws and regulations. Commanders at all levels ensure their Soldiers operate in accordance with the Army Ethic, the law of war, and the rules of engagement. (See FM 27-10 for a discussion of the law of war.)
Not sure this was followed very recently.
It isn't very complicated from a military law perspective. The chain of command (following orders) has a lot more weight on it than a given solder's interpretation of military, constitutional, or international law.
If you believe you are being a given an order that is illegal and refuse, you are essentially putting your head on the chopping block and hoping that a superior officer (who outranks the one giving you the order) later agrees with you. Recent events have involved the commander in chief issuing the orders directly, which means the 'appealing to a higher authority' exit is closed and barred shut for a solider refusing to follow orders.
That doesn't mean a soldier isn't morally obligated to refuse an unlawful / immoral order, just that they will also have to pay a price for keeping their conscience (maybe a future president will give them a pardon?). The inverse is also true, soliders who knowingly follow certain orders (war crimes) are likely to be punished if their side loses, they are captured, or the future decides their actions were indefensible.
A punishment for ignoring a command like "execute those POWs!" has a good chance of being overruled, but may not be. However an order to invade Canada from the President, even if there will be civilian casualties, must be followed. If the President's bosses (Congress/Judiciary) disagree with that order they have recourse.
Unfortunately the general trend which continues is for Congress to delegate their war making powers to the President without review, and for the Supreme Court to give extraordinary legal leeway when it comes to the legality of Presidential actions.
> I used to think militaries were completely centralized and top-down
It is my understanding that the Russians do it that way, which does not seem to work out great for them.
Russia seems to start every war with bad commanders in a bad command structure, then slowly fix... nah scratch that - improve it.
The YPG, an armed anarchist military group, defeated Islamic State in North East Syria and more or less founded their own country without a traditional military command structure. Instead they had loosely coordinated teams.
And how do you suppose IS gained all its territory in the first place? fyi the current president of Syria is ex-Al-Qaeda/el-Nusra/HTS.
For those outside the US: https://web.archive.org/web/20250202000359/https://armypubs....
There is a good book on that subject by Stephen Bungay called "The Art of Action". He explains the concept of Auftragstaktik. Great book, although a bit hard to read.
There's also Franz Osinga's book Scince, strategy, and war, which covers John Boyd's work in detail.
I think OODA is fundamentally different to Auftragstaktik.
Auftragstaktik describes a clear purpose / intent. Like: capture the bridge (but: we don’t care how you do it since we can’t foresee specific circumstances)
OODA describes a process of decision making.
So, Auftragstaktik answers who decides what and why.
OODA answers how decisions are made and updated over time.
They’re complementary but different.
John Boyd, describer of the “OODA” loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
If it focused on founders over product or idea you’d see some actual heterogeneity in the YC set. It has been a few months since I last skimmed the startup lists but it seemed like 95% were LLM for X companies.
Commander's intent is part of the five paragraph order
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_paragraph_order
"Nelsonic doctrine", for whoever wants to google this concept.
> In war the first principle is to disobey orders. Any fool can obey an order. He ought to have gone on, had he the slightest Nelsonic temperament in him.
“ Some say YC is now big enough that it has a self-fulfilling distortion effect where the best founders in the world know they should all apply to YC first before they talk to any other startup accelerators or investors.”
That’s an interesting point but I have to imagine all the worst founders know it too so the filtering may not have gotten easier. I’d be curious to hear from them.
They majorly select a kind of founders as a first filter (good engineers from good companies, ivy league, ex founders etc.), and then they look into the ideas as a second filter, and the third and the least important is the process in which they just spend 15 minutes interviewing and maybe another 15 minutes looking into the application.
The zeroth filter is 'people who apply to YC' though, which YC can only really control by managing their brand and marketing and by approaching potential founders directly and suggesting they apply (I assume that happens; I don't know though). That limits who they can invest in far more than any of their own criteria.
There's also another way in that circumvents all the other filters - being a founder at an existing startup that has really good traction already. You can have a resume of no-name companies, no degree, and never have founded a company before, but if your business is growing, making money, and looks wildly scalable with YC's support then you can get in that way.
Yes but the discussion was about it being hard for them to filter. They don't have to filter some startup which doesn't apply.
Y Combinator forged a long-term, high-trust ecosystem to the benefit of all tech founders. The video games industry needs to do the same.
I feel like this is impossible given how many games flop each year.
Making a game that will sell well on Steam is typically much harder than finding a bunch of boring business leaders and pitching them a SaaS or consulting package. On the surface it might seem simpler to do a game, but once you get into the mechanics of building, testing and publishing something for the masses, the fear of cold calling or emailing total strangers begins to evaporate quickly.
About 99% of the work you do on a game will wind up in the trashcan. Doesn't matter what kind of work it is. Code, audio, textures, models, map layouts, multiplayer balancing work, etc. are all susceptible in the same way. No one is safe from the chaos. It takes a lot of human energy and persistence to produce sufficient 1% content to fill up a player experience.
I'd estimate for a B2B SaaS product, the ratio is approximately the same, however you don't need such a broad range of talent to proceed. One developer with a desire to do the hard things constantly can be all you need to make it to profitability. Going from one employee to N employees in a creative venture is where things go bananas. If you absolutely must do an indie game and you need it to succeed or your internet will get cut off, you will want to strongly consider doing it by yourself. Figuring out how to split revenue and IP with other humans when you can't get the customer on the phone is a nightmare.
Many people agree that being a video game founder is harder than being a tech founder. Staying small and being as resourceful as you can is a good way to mitigate risk.
As a YC founder turned gamedev, I can tell you that failure is the norm in both pursuits. As with YC, the question is: can we create more outsized outcomes when we succeed?
I don't think that's possible and frankly I'd much prefer capital not even try. To the best of my knowledge, the only games which generate the really outsized outcomes you'd need for a VC portfolio do really gross, anti-player shit (gacha, lootboxes, whale fishing, etc.) to get it. Or they become distribution monopolies like Valve, which is fine-ish when Valve is private but would be a ongoing catastrophe if it had been VC-funded. I'd rather not encourage that.
I agree. I'm not the moral police, but video games ultimately have to walk a line where they serve up entertainment that is engaging/addictive without being all-consuming and abusive, and do so for an amount of money for which there is general consensus is "reasonable".
Trying to ride that to the moon is a very different proposition from a B2B play where you sell some service that concretelt delivers $X/mo recurring value to each customer for a $Y/mo price tag, and X > Y, but Y - your costs still turns a healthy profit. If you do that right, everyone is winning and the economy as a whole grows, not at all the same as the zero-sum game that is soaking a few whales and ruining their lives.
I appreciate this perspective.. but I think there might be a false dichotomy here. Some of the biggest gaming success stories didn't rely on exploitative mechanics - Minecraft, Among Us, even Fortnite's initial success was based on solid gameplay before the monetization kicked in. The question is whether you can build sustainable platforms that create genuine value rather than just extracting it. Steam takes 30% but provides real distribution value. Maybe the trick is focusing on companies that help other developers succeed rather than trying to create the next Genshin Impact
> Fortnite's initial success was based on solid gameplay before the monetization kicked in.
Fortnite is a bit of weird backwards example because the early PvE iteration had paid lootboxes, but they were scrapped in the Battle Royale spinoff which actually got popular, and eventually removed altogether. They still do things like engineering FOMO to drive sales but ironically the games monetization was the most exploitative when nobody was playing it.
But now the siren song of lootboxes is calling to them once again... https://kotaku.com/fortnite-loot-boxes-gambling-roblox-20006...
Agreed. It is possible to make money in video games while treating customers with respect. This is the way! (and what EGG looks for because it builds stronger IP and longterm retention and good will)
I helped Indie Fund Hollow Knight back in the day and look a them now!
Well said!
Great point, I think I'm just being overly pessimistic
Related, I find it interesting is that gacha games seem to ahve the highest possible returns but almost none are made by western game companies.
Aren't games like CSGO, FIFA, and Overwatch almost exclusively run on gacha-profits?
I think it is possible to be successful in games without being predatory. Humble Bundle was a demonstration of that.
I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable. They usually yield a “ring of fire” effect that creates a growing ring of users for a while but really you’re burning out all your core users and will implode. This is how many describe the original Zynga model.
Supercell (founded around the same time) has cultivated longterm ecosystems and IP by respecting their players.
EGG takes a similar long-term perspective.
>I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable
I don't think they're trying to be. I think they're whale hunting, find a few high spenders, and milk them for all they're worth. Then they spin up a new IP (or license one out), rinse and repeat
[flagged]
If you don't consider tens of millions of dollars in revenue a success, your definition of "success" is completely out of whack.
Depends on development cost, no? If game development costs 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, 10 million in revenue is a failure.
It’s not successful for a VC.
VCs are looking for the billion dollar exit. 10s of millions is 100-1000x off what they look for
It's successful in my opinion by offering really good value with fair practices. It's not a secret, I think.
Yes they are. The implementation tends to differ from how eastern-developed gacha games work, but they're making billions from virtual slot machines nonetheless.
Yeah, I still indulge in video games, and understand that on the surface CSGO skins feel different than Genshin summons, but from 100 feet up it's all the same crap, imo
I do kinda get what you mean, though. Gacha mechanics feel expected in anything western, while 'loot boxes' are still a 'feature' of some games in the east. Eastern studios have definitely noticed, though, and are running the same playbook.
...I think I mixed up East and West oops
Overwatch is not
Didn't they bring back loot boxes?
Yes, but you basically can't pay for them. Revenue is basically all from direct cosmetic sales or the battle passes
I see. You can remove 'Overwatch' from my original comment and the point still stands, but I do appreciate the fact check. I know Blizzard from HearthStone and Diablo....not great experiences with gacha there haha (Diablo Immortal, atleast), but those are far from the most popular Eastern games
The battle pass contains loot boxes though, right?
Yes
You're right though. Industrial software/hardware in general always has money in all times. But gaming is essentially entertainment and people only spend on entertainment last. So gaming industry has a lot of failure but even if you're successful in a huge way, you won't earn huge money. There's a big cap there.
Games are a zero marginal cost industry driven by hits. The cap is pretty high. The floor is what you should be worried about.
FTR, A "gacha" game is a video game that uses randomized rewards and in-game currency to encourage players to spend money or time.
(Sharing to help others bc I had to look it up.)
VC math follows a power law and expects almost all investments to flop, and the one winner to pay for it all. The question here is not about the flops it’s: are the winners big enough?
Isn't this the exact logic behind the stagnation in media right now? The risk aversion/stakes is so high that real risks aren't taken and we get bland sequel/remake slop.
Ironically when media culture is at is at its healthiest is when winners are diverse and common, and more importantly smaller shows that try out new things can still break even, with periodic flops being generally tolerable. That low risk culture for attempting new ideas is precisely what creates legendary franchises later when a few of these hit everything right.
And now that they're eliminating diversity in their investments are you still certain they will pick the next generation's winners? All they're investing in are AI companies...
Once upon a time someone like me for whom engineering competence is a core aspect of my identity would have never considered turning my back on YC. But now I'm just embarrassed by them. The things they now think are the only things worth investing in mostly make me want to vomit, like the vibe coding casino-IDE startup. As someone who still espouses their old values rather than their new ones, I'd rather succeed on my own.
Both Mark Andreessen and Andrej Karpathy say AI is unique as a new technology in that small teams and individuals seem to be the earliest and most cutting edge adopters. (unlike computers and the internet which were used by government and then large companies)
YC just so happens to invest super early in small teams.
So the overlap of YC and AI is inevitable. AI is not an investment genre per se but it can be used to accelerate or improve any ecosystem if used carefully and cleverly.
Since my Humble Bundle days, I’ve always been partial to small companies and small dev studios. Not all EGG companies use AI but they are all keeping tabs on the technology. Mitch Lasky has said that AI may have opened a window in which small studios may have their best shot at outsized success in recent history. Eventually the big dogs will catch up and adopt the new tech themselves but right now David has a shot at Goliath.
It's funny, because in my industry it's the slavish attention to AI by goliath-scale companies like Microsoft that is leading them to set fire to quality, innovation, and consumer trust, when then gives me and my tiny startup the opportunity to jump in and eat their lunch.
> All they're investing in are AI companies...
Genuine question…
Do you not think that a large percentage of (random cut off) $1b companies over the next 10 years will be AI?
And/or do you not think that the next $100b+ company will be AI-centered?
Over the next 10 years, no, I think the market will course correct within that time frame. AI is the sauce that's being slathered on everything right now and demand for it is driving record valuations, particularly for AI startups and their founders. That demand is all investor-driven though: investors are falling over themselves to make AI investments, while consumers are not actually especially eager to have all human contact progressively stripped from their lives.
> That demand is all investor-driven though: investors are falling over themselves to make AI investments
Largely true.
> while consumers are not actually especially eager to have all human contact progressively stripped from their lives
Hmm… I agree with this sentiment, but I think it’s mostly a straw man. There are many things that AI can do well that people will end up embracing directly or indirectly.
Medical scans is one big one, imho.
Mundane but important legal services is another.
Skillful mediation of scutwork is definitely embraced.
Good and fast simple customer service via phone or text will end up being very welcome (at least in some contexts). I realize that most people will prefer superlative human customer service, but that’s currently not a widespread available reality, especially for simple tasks.
All sorts of learning (great and essentially free tutors).
All sorts of practice (e.g., language, speeches, debates, presentations, etc.).
All of the above (and more) are things that people are using AI for right now, and they seem to be loving it.
I realize that some folks use AI tools in regressive and sometimes dehumanizing ways, but that’s not the fault of the tool, imho.
I dunno, I see problems with every one of those things.
You could make a customer service AI that was an advocate for the consumer, but it would likely spend the company's money liberally. So instead you'll end up with AI agents incentivized to be stingy and standoffish about admitting the company could improve, just like the humans are.
You can tutor with AI, but there's no knowing what it will teach you. It will sound as convinced of itself when it teaches you why the earth is flat as it does teaching you why the earth is round. The one thing it will certainly do is reinforce your existing biases.
You can practice with AI, but you'd learn more by posing yourself the questions.
A doctor can have AI look at medical scans, but they can't defer to AI judgement and just tell the patient "AI says you have cancer, but I don't really know or care one way or the other". So again, the skill in reading results needs to be in the doctor.
> Medical scans is one big one, imho.
People have been trying this for a long time, as it's an obvious win, but have struggled so far. Perhaps newer models will help, though.
"Make something VCs wished people want"
On some level it's the role of the publisher to pick winners and guide them over the finish line. See for example the hit machine that is Devolver: https://www.devolverdigital.com/games
I'm not an indie dev, but if I was I would happily give up a chunk of my potential profit to be listed on there, knowing the size of the market that says "oh yeah... a Devolver title, I would blind-buy this, it's probably pretty good."
I suspect games are like movies: for every 100 movies, around 20 of them make enough money to cover the losses of the other 80. But predicting which movies those will be is extremely difficult (Goldman's Law: Nobody knows nothin'). Any studio / label / distributor which can do better than the average is probably headed for greatness.
The thing is when a game flops it can be popular in the future. It is still a game that does game things. When $dumbapp flops though, it is a stronger signal that whatever it is trying to do may have no market at all. Like giving a fish a skateboard.
No fewer than the number of start-ups that flop each year, so that's not a hindrance as far as I'm concerned.
My thought too, the bar is higher and the rewards are so much smaller. People don't appreciate how incredibly difficult it is to make a mediocre game
YC works because B2B can survive early with a few paying customers
Gaming is pure B2C: hit driven, capital intensive, and unforgiving
Fair point though Humble Bundle was B2C.
There are clever gaming platforms out there and the best games seem to turn into platforms effectively.
That doesn't sound right to me. A lot of b2b comes with high barrier to entry.
Also I know of many successful indie games, some of which were built by one person.
I can think of so many exceptions to your point on both sides that I question your thesis as a rule.
B2B isn't as hit driven as gaming but it's still hit driven. Most startups fail.
That's a good point. Some of the (many) B2B companies in YC also get a decent start by selling to the other YC companies.
It’s a little more nuanced than that. B2B offerings cost money, video games cost time haha
The game industry needs no such thing. You can make profitable games very cheaply, and business models are simple and well understood. It’s a matter of just making a good game and getting it good exposure to customers.
You should check out BigMode.
Dunkey is building a game incubator of sorts and there are some interesting titles coming out of it.
> The video games industry needs to do the same.
Video games are a subset of entertainment which is capped in TAM by the population the game reaches, the amount of money they're willing to spend per hour on average, and average number of hours they can devote to entertainment.
In other words, every dollar you make off a game is a dollar that wasn't spent on another game, or trip to the movies, or vacation. And every hour someone plays your game is an hour they didn't spend working, studying, sleeping, eating, or doing anything else in the attention economy.
What makes this different from other markets is that there is no value creation or new market you can create from the aether to generate 10x/100x/1000x growth. And there's no rising tide to lift your boat and your competitors - if you fall behind, you sink.
The only way to grow entertainment businesses by significant multiples is by increasing discretionary income, decreasing working hours, or growing population with discretionary time and money. But those are societal-level problems that take governments and policy, and certainly not venture capital.
Besides that, is YC building new trust?
One recent concern I have is (anecdotally) how poor a deal YC startups I've seen are offering for founding engineers.
Before YC started, early hires who helped make a startup successful could get rich on stock.
YC may have changed the investment scene for the better in some ways, such that founders are less likely to screwed by investors. But today, early hires are the ones who seem to be getting screwed.
In cases I've seen recently, even if the startup has a nice exit for founders and investors, employees would have been better off as a worker drone at a FAANG-like.
Do we need PG to write an essay (or the richest managing partners to make a video), about the value of incentivizing early hires?
Or, don't even talk about the value of it (since some aspiring founders are aggressively confident now, that they know how all the ducks are lined up), but talk about new criteria: YC looks for a respectable pool to incentivize early hires as positive signal, when determining who to fund.
Because the truth is that recent batches are filled with nepo founders and companies that are not really at the caliber of those that carry these VC names from the past (like pre-2015). Lots of fraud-aligned people/companies too.
Now its just a way to sell these companies to those OGs.
It's so easy to post substanceless slurs, but I've been around YC since 2009 and it hasn't changed much from my perspective. The primary difference between pre-2015 and now is that those earlier startups have been around for over a decade longer. Of course the ones who turned out to be successful are better known.
I'm just giving my opinion from what I see. In no way did I "slur" and my point isn't about YC but the founders..
you raise a valid point about survivorship bias I guess, but as of the last few years it seems a lot of rage bait and do anything to get signal instead of the positive optimism that I felt a lot of the companies offered those years ago. i guess what i'm trying to say is that it has become the final version of itself as a venture firm, whereas before it was quirky (again, I am outsider!! so this is my POV) and backed companies that made products/services that I think made my life objectively better.
end of the day, I really like YC and think they do a good thing overall. but I think people/founders have realized how to game it, if that makes sense.
I appreciate this follow-up. There's another variable, which I think may be relevant: all of us who have been following YC for the past 10+ years are by definition 10+ years older than we were back then. Some people (edit: at least on internet forums) tend to get more jaded and cynical over time*. I mention this not to accuse you of more than your share of this, but because it's on my mind a lot about the HN community in general. It's why we added "don't be curmudgeonly" to the https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, for example.
(* Edit: and they seem to be highly motivated to post comments!)
I hope you find a good way to help HN be genuinely more optimistic.
Of course, right now, gloom is all over most of social media, and everywhere else, for understandable reasons of world reality (besides engagement manipulation/dynamics reasons).
And, within our field, a lot of the current enthusiasm and curiosity for tech news is for getting our economic tickets, in a tech gold rush that is not nearly as optimistic as the Web one was.
Will the optimism on HN come from topics that are interesting, but detached from all that threatens us, like a break or a reminder that there is still goodness and greatness?
Will it come from finding ways to correct or fight against what threatens humanity?
Will it come from tantalizing hints of personal advantage or opportunity to wind up on top?
I hope so too and I take your comment as encouragement in that direction!
Another question that's orbiting around this in my head is how do we explain to the community what we're looking for and why. Knowing HN, and the internet in general, I can imagine the backlash from certain segments of the commentariat ("Oh so we're only allowed to do happy talk now?" - "Once again the corporate overlords crack the whip" - etc. etc.)
On the other hand, I also know that other sizeable segments of the community have been tired of the cynicism here for a long time - so there will be positive repercussions too.
(Edit: factoring this bit into a different post because I want to link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508115 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 - I hope that's ok!)
What you wrote above is so different than what I thought I was reading above that I had to ask myself why it felt that way in the first place. Probably the "nepo founders" bit was what got me, and "fraud-aligned" didn't help either. Maybe also this is a case of the 'rebound' phenomenon where the reply comment says more clearly what was originally meant; that happens a lot too: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Ok
This got downvotes, after getting upvoted.
I wonder who thinks that a practice of combining sub-market salary with miniscule ISO grants (not even real equity) for early hires is a good idea for startups that want to win big.
And yet YC still makes bets on pretty easily detected BS like Pickle VR[0]. That's a startup I sure wouldn't trust.
Pickle is one of the most egregious examples, but I've noticed a trend of these fly-by-night operations with YC backing getting found out as frauds over the last handful of years. I don't know if it's happening more or if I just wasn't aware of them or if the rate was the same but people started talking about them more.
0. https://x.com/thedowd/status/2007337800430198913
It is the nature of YC that you're going to get instances like Pickle. YC invests at a very early stage in lots of companies. 40% are literally just an idea. It isn't a scam that one of the companies pivot, it's expected. They're meant to work on their idea, and if it doesn't work or they have a better idea they pivot.
What Pickle is doing is essentially they're falling on the wrong line of "fake it to you make it", it would be totally fine to do what they're doing (allowing pre-orders with a $200 deposit for a Q4 '26 product) if they just weren't lying about the specs. It's pretty clear they aren't going to deliver anything like what they've promised, but that is just ambition. The whole point of YC is that 1 out of 1000 of these companies are going to deliver something revolutionary and you don't get that without 1000 of them trying to do something revolutionary.
Having said that, you only need to watch the launch video to realise the CEO is total moron ("If everyone wore the same pair of glasses, what would they look like?"). But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do. YC are going to lose their investment on that company.
> It is the nature of YC that you're going to get instances like Pickle. YC invests at a very early stage in lots of companies. 40% are literally just an idea
But the whole supposed point of YC is investing in people not founders. If that's the pitch and you invest in a moron, that makes you look bad too. YC should be good at telling if people are morons - that's kind of their entire job.
> But the way YC works, they don't actually have the power to tell Pickle what to do.
They get 7% of your company. They do actually have some power.
Sounds like damage control.
> we were successfully acquired by Ziff Davis who owns IGN.
Ah, now I know why the vibe of Humble Bundle changed.
The first ones were truly fun packages with soul. Now they're churned out without feelings, it feels all algorithms.
Given the argument around YC effectively "cancelling" naughty list founders. The John Wick Excommunicado poster for illustration is an interesting choice because John Wick is the hero of the series and is constantly being threatened by the institution that both created and emancipated him only to try to destroy him later. Not sure how intentional, but Reeves himself is beloved figure and often noted as a paragon of hard work and integrity in a grimy industry despite a reputation as a "bad actor".
I was just having some fun with the John Wick poster. I too have heard that Keanu is a good, honest human who works hard.
PG does say he actually looks for “naughty” founders as one of the key filtering traits. I link this essay in my post.
But you still have to be ethical and do what you say or it won’t be possible to grow your business long term.
The gamer in me wonders if the “ideal founder” can be described as “chaotic good”?
A related but slightly different impression of early YC that I mentioned the other day, touching on the "disingenous and exploitative finance" aspect this article alludes to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46437148
> This reminds me of when YC seemed to be a response to the dotcom boom environment, a bit "by hackers, for hackers", to help hackers start Internet businesses. Rather than mostly only the non-hackers starting dotcoms (such as with affluent family angel investors and connections). Or rather than hackers having to spend their energy jumping through a lot of hoops, while dealing with disingenuous and exploitative finance bro types.
>> https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Talking about the shift raises the question of why it used to be the other way. Were VCs bad at picking founders who were honest and/or competent, or were VCs always wrong to mistrust founders?
It was all of the above in my opinion.
VC’s raised easy money (ZIRP era) and they wanted to deploy fast. Founders told VC’s what they wanted to hear to secure capital.
The VC-funded startup environment prior to YC is so different than what we have today that it's weird to compare. Were VCs bad at picking founders in 2004? Mu!
(I raised, with friends, in 1999, and was senior at a VC-funded startup prior to that).
Most people who comment on Hacker News would not have preferred the status quo ante of YC.
I think it just seems like a bad idea? If you believe in expertise in business, giving someone with little of it a bunch of money seems a recipe for disaster. (And YC showed that in fact it’s not a disaster.)
Taken to its logical conclusion, that idea suggests hiring business experts to start companies from scratch rather than investing in existing startups.
Yeah, and Graham showed this is folly.
The last YC founder I trusted did $15k of wage theft against me, multiplied by ten employees.
I wonder how long this can survive now that their priority is to fund AI users to use AI
AI tech has the spotlight right now for sure amongst VC’s. But I believe AI is also a huge tailwind for video games.
Namely, small, clever teams will be able to do big and entertaining things that were not possible before.
(But yes there will also be tons of slop.)
It can't be a tailwind for a whole industry. It can only take from some and give to others.
The industry has experienced slowed growth and is restructuring which is scary for many people right now. There have been continuous layoffs and studio closures. That sucks (though is not all caused by AI).
But a few quick thoughts: Video games have always been about cutting edge technology. Because they are interactive, they are best positioned to leverage AI tech. (unlike static media)
Prototyping tends to be the most important but most neglected process for finding the fun. AI is a catalyst for rapid prototyping such that a studio can more quickly build and assess game loops and de-risk the rest of their dev cycle before staffing up or pulling team members off other projects.
AI may long-term create more leisure time macro-economically for everyone, meaning more consumer time that may be consumed playing games. (Owen Mahoney thinks the industry will soon triple in size)
>Because they are interactive, they are best positioned to leverage AI tech.
You have not supported this argument.
On the contrary, I think LLMs are not a big help.
We've already been here. Procedural generation was the magical solution that was supposed to help a single dev make giant worlds. And it did. It helped you make giant, utterly empty and soulless worlds.
Great for minecraft. Not so great for No Mans Sky, as there were significant limitations. Useless for anything that depends on a story or immersion in that story or characters.
This idea that you can wire an in game character up to an LLM is misguided and doesn't seem to understand what players want a character to be.
In Mass Effect 2, a fan favorite character infamously had little content for most of the game. Garrus was a very loved character, including being the love interest for a lot of people who played the game, but during 2 he just sits in a part of your ship and says "Sorry, can't talk, running some calibrations" for almost the entire game.
Put the entire game's script into an LLM as context and have it pretend to be Garrus and try and talk to it. Will the LLM take a strong stance that Garrus would take? Will it correctly figure out that Garrus would rather kill a bad guy than let him get away, and then have him make convincing arguments about that in reference to the previous mission, and then in the next mission put you in a situation where you have to decide whether Garrus is right and whether you should dome that "Bad Guy" instead of letting the police fail to aprehend him? Will that Garrus make you think about this world and your place in it and whether your personal or chosen morals are right?
Probably not.
People don't want to chat about the weather with random NPCs. People want characters that have character notes and integrate into the story and make you feel.
So far LLMs can't really write that well, and certainly are not cohesive and multidisciplinary enough to be able to build that into a game in a convincing way.
There's a famous game called "Facade" which plays up this big fanfare about how it uses "AI" and Natural Language Processing to bring two characters to life for you to talk with and navigate a crisis with, but it's almost entirely lies. The actual logic of how it works is almost identical to old fashioned text adventure parsers in their heyday. It's a heavily scripted sequence, with fairly few actual paths it can take, and the script is not that big. It got so much press for what was basically done in the 80s. I think some people have tried to hook LLMs into it, but it just doesn't feel good. The problems that AI dungeon adventure game always had still exist, just under more paint.
One EGG studio is wiring LLM’s to npc’s in a hilarious way. We’ll be curious to see everyone’s feedback when they make a playable available.
However, I’ll say that as a result of their AI integration they are also doing way more human writing in the form of prompts and other procedural elements than if they just used old fashioned dialog trees.
I think AI can only be used as an enhancement in certain specific and controlled ways.
One mistake I see a lot right now is the assumption that you can delegate design and creative direction to AI. I think that generally yields slop. In fact I think the Creative Director/design role at a game studio may be the hardest digital job for an AI to replace. I had the opportunity to express that idea to Sam Altman once and he did refute it.
1. "More leisure for everyone" is utter bollocks. We know it doesn't work like that. If it did we would all be doing nothing but leisure because of how much leisure we gained by switching to email.
2. Games are just code that's fun. How does this sounds as a process for making something fun: "Start by de-risking." Hmmm OK, yes, this tracks with my experience of private equity companies being the most innovative and successful creators of games.
> "More leisure for everyone" is utter bollocks.
it's fascinating how this delusion persists.
More leisure will only occur if it becomes true that the marginal return of doing additional work falls almost to zero. So to say people will have more leisure time actually suggests more that they will lack opportunities to do things of value than it does that they will choose to have more leisure time. Which is depressing.
If everyone could live a life of leisure, the logical end result would be roving gangs engaging in street warfare for funsies. If money is no object for anyone, what else is there to do but to seek fame, even infamy?
Each gang member could be running their AI value-miners at home, but of course since they're the only kind of value in the new AI-communist society they'll be the obvious target for the other leisure gangs. So after enough rounds of violence each leisure gang will run a fortified, paramilitary "intelligence mining" operation, and oh by the way indie software dev is punishable by death in these territories.
Is this scenario, like, 9 kinds of insane? Sure! But so is the idea that we'll all be at the beach doing Idunno what, fucking? All this to say yeah, I'm with you that anyone who describes that AI will make a future defined by a lack of productive work is describing a depressing future...
I wouldn't say that for sure. Here's a take that says it'll create a lot of growth for the games industry: https://www.owenmahoney.ai/owen-mahoney-blog/size-matters
It bases this entire chain of assumptions on "AI is really big and everyone agrees".
But I don't see the games industry as all that vulnerable to AI at all. Game engines already drive constantly-improving dev efficiency through improved abstractions.
None of this is necessarily zero-sum. I'm skeptical AI is going to be a meaningful tailwind for games, but if I'm wrong it could absolutely benefit customers, studios, and labs through boosting productivity.
I don’t know why but I keep having recurring nightmares of our government giving AI human rights
Is YC still an (upwards going) thing? Looks like their best days are behind them, I'd say 2018-2019 was its heyday.
I don't feel bad for Paul Graham and his partners, I'm sure he's got his bag and then some, but from the outside it looks like it (the YC-adjacent thing, that is) lost big(-ish) when it came to riding the AI hype train.
Its never smart to trust people who have a vested interest in lying to you.
Truth beyond the fold!
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