Would Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator?

You mean would Steve Wozniak &#38; Steve Jobs have applied to Y Combinator? (Oh yeah, that other Steve...)<p>No! They were too busy hacking phones and building things people wanted to waste time to go through the application process of YC. Money was chasing them.<p>This is true for most runaway successes, they were all true hackers that broke things: Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Not the "hackers" who are asking for $125k salary...<p>They didn't care about the money, they didn't care about the allure, they didn't care about the status. They just wanted to break things and make them work better, legality aside.<p>But the landscape has changed, and Steve &#38; Steve are not just starting Apple and YC would not be around if Apple wasn't started when it was, so it's a silly question be it a fun thought experiment.<p>I think YC supports the companies that shoot for the moon, but people aren't willing to take the risk and say no to acquisitions of $20-$100m because that is the short term business model of today and people just want to take their $5m and show off.<p>"The approach of remaining independent, and investing profits back into to the company followed by technology zealots such as Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs is unattractive to an investor."<p>They only way to counter this is to build a great product with little to no money and have it grow like a weed, then negotiate like a mob boss to keep the majority of the voting rights of the company.<p>That's enough for now, time for focus...

I admit that I'm not intimately familiar with YC's and pg's preaching but my impression of what I've read and seen from pg is that he is very insistent on startups having a solid business model and on them focusing on customer acquisition. And I don't remember having ever heard pg advocate quick exits. This is at odds with the assumptions you've based your post on. I might be wrong though - happy to get corrected by YC alumni.<p>As for "changing the world", this is an expression that's as meaningless as it gets. Of course everybody wants to change the world, why wouldn't you? And since everybody lives in their own world anyway, in a way, everybody changes the world. For example, I personally find Facebook to be one of the most useless product I've ever used. I genuinely wouldn't notice if Facebook disappeared tomorrow. On the other side, for my deaf teenage cousin, Facebook literally changed his world. He went from being the weirdo disabled boy in the corner of the room that nobody would talk to to being a perfectly normal teenager communicating on Facebook like any other teenager.<p>So the YC startups you're talking about might not have changed your world but you can be sure that they've changed quite a few other people's world. Arguably, Steve Jobs, who you cite in example, has hardly changed the world for most people. Had he not be there, computers and smartphone would have been there anyway and would have more or less done what they do today (and I'm saying this as a big admirer of Apple who has discovered computing on a Mac SE and is typing this post on a MacBook Pro).<p>When it comes to bigger goals like ending wars or poverty, fixing the global warming problem or space exploration, it would be incredibly naive to believe that you can tackle the problem as a nobody (i.e. as a young, first time entrepreneur with no cash and no network).<p>Elon Musk didn't start with a crazy-big-truly-change-the-world project. He, you know, did Paypal first. Just like what the Stripe guys (a YC startup) are doing. Bill Gates didn't start by tackling the issue of poverty, illnesses and illiteracy in Africa. He started by writing an interpreter. You have to start somewhere and this somewhere is generally relatively small but gives you what yo need (knowledge, experience, network, cash) to follow up with something bigger afterwards. That's my understanding of what YC is all about.

Both Apple and Microsoft started at a time when personal computers barely existed and thus a couple of guys with very little capital could build a computer kit or code a blackjack game in a day.<p>One key difference its revenue: Allen often mentions how any piece of code brought money to the company, simple apps that are 100% free today would have been sold for tens of millions back then. Same with hardware, which is why Apple could get roughly 1 million (in today's dollars) to leave the garage.<p>Basically both companies were in the right place at the right time: right before the PC revolution began. A YC-equivalent at that time would've appeared around 1982, after IBM launched the "official" PC with DOS and the ball was already rolling.<p>That was the time when a lot of other startups appeared, like Amiga, Adobe, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, etc...<p>Note that none of those companies were as successful as Apple and Microsoft were, in fact some went chapter 11 and disappeared.

&#62; I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over income, and exit as quickly as possible.<p>This isn't the model preached by YCombinator at all. It actually literally runs counter to the model preached by YCombinator. YC is 7 years old, and has approached building companies with pragmatism; it's definitely the case that many startups will fail, a some will exit quickly, and a select few will last long enough and be strong enough to be IPOs, and then even fewer will last long enough as public, independent companies (Google is 13, Microsoft and Apple are both older than 20 years) to try doing things in house like building autonomous, self driving cars, or space rockets.YC is well aware of this dynamic, but the key thing this post misses is: creating a company that lasts, or being a founder well resourced enough to fight again, is a crucial part of being able to build space rockets. You have to be there. So with that in mind the model YC ACTUALLY preaches is more like:<p>"Talk to users, write code, build a great product, that makes money, and you wont need investors. If you do this, you just might last long enough and be strong enough to build space rockets."

&#62;I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over income, and exit as quickly as possible.<p>YCombinator never tells founders to "exit as quickly as possible". In fact, they and most other technology investors get 90+% of their returns from the home runs and encourage founders to go big if things are working. You can do the math yourself: how many talent acquisitions would it take to add up to one Dropbox ($4B valuation)?<p>While a lot of companies coming out of YCombinator (and Silicon Valley in general) are focused on the internet, there are exceptions. For example, there was a 3D scanning company in the most recent batch: <a href="http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/27/matterport-3d-scanner/" rel="nofollow">http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/27/matterport-3d-scanner/</a>

Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.<p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html</a>

The more dangerous question...would he have gotten in?<p>After all, you're dealing with a college dropout who didn't study anything related to computer science and had personality issues. I suspect that the HR guys at Apple would drop Steve's resume in the waste bin if he applied today.

The article states: "I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over income, and exit as quickly as possible."<p>I'm pretty sure I've heard the first point mentioned before by the partners of YC, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence of the others. Is there actually evidence of YC telling its classes to exit as quickly as possible? My guess is any quick exits are more likely as a result of founders being offered a chance at a payout rather than YC pushing them to exit.

With all due respect this article seems naive. Sure Google is building self-driving cars now (not exactly innovative, since virtually every 3rd grader lists that as one of the things they imagine in the future), but they did that after acquiring a hugely profitable core business which was "just another search engine".<p>Everything is "just another xyz" until its not.<p>What YC gets is that it asks it's founders to solve a problem. Maybe a real pain point, or a problem you don't know even exists until someone points it out to you, but whatever it is -- solve it well. At that points your minor pivots are leveraged until, before you know it, you're moving a mountain, when you started just intending to move a pebble.<p>And BTW, didn't Dropbox pass on an acquisition from Apple near $1B?

<i>"Is the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates filling in Y Combinator's application form right now, or are they taking the independent route?"</i><p>YC can reproduce the career arc of Steve Jobs, but not Bill Gates. Until the IPO Microsoft didn't sell stock to outside investors in significant quantities. By essentially bootstrapping, Gates and Allen were able to bring Ballmer on board with 8% equity at a point when outside investors would be eyeing exit in a VC backed company.<p>This is in contrast with Jobs, who lost control of Apple by accepting outside money. On the other hand, having grown up in Silicon Valley, Jobs would not have needed the sort of guidance through the startup landscape that YC provides relative to a hacker from Topeka - i.e. Jobs was sophisticated enough to raise money for Apple based upon his social connections within Silicon Valley.

"none of the copycat incubators have an alumni list or investment portfolio containing names such as Dropbox, Reddit, Clickpass, Posterous or Codecademy. I can't think of a better list."<p>Clickpass? Really? I could think of a better list containing just YC companies.<p>And how do Dropbox, AirBnB, Heroku, Weebly, Justin.tv, etc. lack vision?

&#62; <i>I think the problem is rooted in the business model that seems to be preached by Y Combinator: build a great product, choose investment over income, and exit as quickly as possible.</i><p>This seems like a misinterpretation of what YCs investment/mentorship philosophy.

An important factor between Web 2.0 startups and "change the world" startups is the size of investment required. Web 2.0 startups are very cheap. Starting Tesla Motors on Y Combinator funding would be impossible. Apple was also started on a very small budget at a time when electronics was in a similar position cost-wise as the web is now.<p>What is different between most web 2.0 startups and Apple, though, is that Apple expanded an existing enterprise market to the general public. Cloud computing is having similar effects, but otherwise I don't see many similarities.

I don't spend all day reading HN but I'm here quite a bit ... can someone explain the "and deluded database CEOs" reference?

Is there a chance that YC might one day think of funding more capital intensive ventures, like biotech?

I think he would get rejected.

Difficult hypothetical but Jobs was a control freak. Hard to see him going though the motions of an incubator or accelerator.