What ever was the "luster"? It depends on what you thought YC was. Everything else it did or could do aside: if you're building a company that is going to need to raise funds for the business model to work, YC is still the most straightforward path to doing a high-dollar syndicated unpriced seed round, which is a funding model that YC more or less pioneered.
YC didn’t start as a VC firm, but it is one now. You don’t even mention pre-seed here, which is what YC was: the first pre-seed for an absolutely tiny batch of promising founders, who actually got a disproportionate advantage compared to average pre-seed rounds overall. Now, YC only gives disproportionate advantage against unfunded startups, and only a proportionate one against the average raise of equivalent size.
YC has lost all of the people who were there at the start. Saying something like “what ever was the ‘luster’” is akin to saying “who the heck was Steve Jobs, who cares, Apple is still the same business.”
> "YC has lost all of the people who were there at the start. Saying something like “what ever was the ‘luster’” is akin to saying “who the heck was Steve Jobs, who cares, Apple is still the same business.”
Sheesh."
Apple does still make hugely popular products and still makes a huge amount of profit.
Plenty of institutions, from universities to businesses, have managed to continue succeeding across multiple generations, just as many have failed after losing a generation.
I've no idea how YC helps now vs. the beginning, but different people isn't proof of it being worse.
