This is nothing but a pitch by YCombinator to get rubes to work for pitiful amounts of money and likely fail, so that YCombinator can capture the vast profits from the few that succeed. It's YCombinator's business model.
I'm not sure you actually read this because it's pretty obvious that it actually tells many people not to do a startup and makes it clear that 'getting rich' or 'succeeding' isn't a very good reason for doing one. It gives three pretty clear criteria for starting a startup that most people won't meet- those that do might be worth considering it.
That's the sales pitch. "It's too hard, you couldn't do it."
Same sales pitch as gym workout programs. "Are you man enough?" and many others.
Create an artificial scarcity (a barrier to entry), weed out those who will ask questions. Ideally they're looking for people who seek outside validation - the sort of people who often become doctors or lawyers.
I thought the same. If if was genuine, he would suggest another option: starting a small/medium business in tech. You know, a business that helps you escape corporate life, and make money for yourself in the process.
Only problem: there is no way for YC to make money off of it...
So let's ignore S&M businesses in tech and as a valid entrepreneurship route. Let's pretend that the only options are a startup or corporate life.
>if was genuine, he would suggest another option: starting a small/medium business in tech.
It's an essay relating his personal experience. (Notice that Seibel wrote: "Here is how I learned this about myself. [... rest of text ...]"
He didn't cofound a small-medium-lifestyle business so he wrote what he was familiar with: justin.tv/twitch.
Lastly, I didn't see any advice that didn't also apply to small-medium businesses. (See the 3 questions to ask oneself at at the end.) He's not advising anyone to start another billion dollar Youtube clone or a company that requires YC funding. One can take his questionnaire and apply it to starting a small bootstrapped 5-person consulting firm if that's what your idea of a "startup" means to you.
Paul Graham goes to extra lengths to differentiate startups vs other type of business: it's all about growth.
So this essay talks about startups under the YC brand, I assume we're talking about hi-growth business, not small and medium ones that have no goals to grow double digits every month.
Finally, we should stop adding a condescending "lifestyle" qualififier to businesses that are not trying to become a unicorn. It is most businesses actually.
@pg has the right to try and define things however he wants, but he isn't the final arbiter of meanings of words in the English language. I see no reason to suggest that a company isn't a "startup" just because they aren't pursuing "double digit growth every month". There are plenty of ways to get big, and "slow and steady" is still one.
It's also important to realize that a company's growth rate will vary at times throughout its lifetime. You might start out as completely self-funded, bootstrapping, and work very slowly for some period of time, only to reach a certain point and say "OK, now its time to turn on the afterburners and go seek VC / PE money". And as a company matures (hello, Microsoft, IBM, CA, HP, etc.) its pretty close to inevitable that the growth rate will slow down.
The important thing is just to do what makes sense for where you are and what your goals are.
If someone wants to start a business and call it lifestyle, great for them. It usually tells their business is not all their is in their life, and that's great.
When someone else calls a business "lifestyle" just because it is small, i believe it is condescending.
If I called the CEO of the 20-employees plumbing company i sometimes use, and asked him "how's your lifestyle business doing?" he would probably hang up on me.
YC doesn't capture "the vast profits", they take ballpark 6%. That leaves the founders with the vast majority of the windfall, depending on how much outside money you need to make your idea work.
6% of a few billion is still a vast profit compared to their relative effort. It is not a bad thing either. Why shouldn't they make money? Profit is not a dirty word. Still @CryptoFascist makes a valid observation in stating that YC is probably not an impartial entity when writing about whether you should or should not start a start-up, preferably for them.
It wouldn't make sense financially or otherwise for them to try to trick people who aren't well suited to doing startups into doing one, which is what the parent seems to be implying.
Also, the parent says that it's a terrible financial deal for most founders to do a YC startup, which is laughably wrong. If you succeed, there are few better ways to become very wealthy. If you fail, the most common failure mode I've seen is that the team gets a much better than average signing bonus at one of the big tech companies. We've all heard horror stories about people going deep into personal credit card debt to keep their startup afloat, but that doesn't seem to be representative for YC founders.
And whether you end up cashing out for gigabucks or getting acquihired for vested equity megabucks, while you're running it, if you do it well, you get to work the way you like on problems of your choosing with people you like rather than letting your soul die slowly doing pointless tasks and sitting in pointless meetings at a big corporation. People should really not forget that part while they're harping on startup salaries. Startups can be a lot of fun, and you really can have an impact. Unless you join a pointless startup that loves pointless meetings, those exist too. But if you're the founder, you're free to try to run a low-bullshit company.
Anyway, that's all to say that you're trying to find the silver lining of a turd of a comment.
"It wouldn't make sense financially or otherwise for them to try to trick people who aren't well suited to doing startups into doing one, which is what the parent seems to be implying."
Yes it would, because luck plays a role. So long as would-be startups handle some of their runway themselves, of course it suits Y Combinator to have a larger pool of possible candidates.
Not every startup is a an attempt at getting VC funds and make it big. Some startups are the least resistance way of getting something done or trying something new, that the incumbents aren't able or willing to try.
The typical founders are grads of top universities and on average end up worth several million from the YC thing.
(2015 stats - value of YC startups, 65bn, number 940 so valuation / startup $69m. say 1/3 stays with the founders and there are 2 on average that's $11m/founder)
