a) The next two years are the reckoning for a lot of these AI startups. In the enterprise space everyone was being pushed to trial AI products to see whether they can deliver the ROI that was being marketed. Newsflash: it hasn't. And many of these startups will see serious churn.
b) Everyone needs to stop perpetuating the YC lie that they invest in the best founders and they just happen to want to do AI. It's rubbish and insulting because it implies that only young, male, SF-based founders can be the best. Instead it's clear that YC has been aggressively pushing AI which makes sense given they are a significant investor in OpenAI.
Other than the "request for startups" YC publishes YC doesn't push founders to start a specific type of business. AI is simply where the opportunity is (or is perceived to be). YC (and everybody else) understands that most AI enterprise startups will fail, as you point out. The gamble, as always, is that a few startups in the current batch will get huge.
They dont push founders but surely they allocate more on AI startups, so founders put the magic word X with AI or AI Driven in their products for the same reason
> YC doesn't push founders to start a specific type of business
Of course it does.
Founders look at YC batches, see that it is 99% AI companies and are then forced to also go in that direction if they want the benefits of the accelerated YC path.
And YC deliberately chooses founders with AI companies because they have an investment thesis that is different from "request for startups". Garry Tan has been a massive e/acc fanboy since the beginning and genuinely believes that AI in every use case will advance humanity. And the partners all align with this.
This is all inarguable because amongst the tens of thousands of applications there are surely many amazing non-AI companies. Is this implication that they are all worse than what was selected in the batch ?
You are being downvoted but I think you are correct: I'm not sure I could name a single company that came out from YC in the past 10 years, which makes think that YC was essentially pg, and I'm not a fan of him but he was obviously a very talented business person and had a really good eye for startups.
YC's leadership nowadays seem to lack of any kind of vision and just follows whatever shiny tech is currently in vogue, which is a huge red flag for accelerators.
When you read people's experience with AI for building/coding I get the feeling we are still not quite there on a lot of things, but when we get there you can just buy direct from Costco (I.e. OpenAI etc.)
b) Everyone needs to stop perpetuating the YC lie that they invest in the best founders and they just happen to want to do AI. It's rubbish and insulting because it implies that only young, male, SF-based founders can be the best. Instead it's clear that YC has been aggressively pushing AI which makes sense given they are a significant investor in OpenAI.