zlacker

>>etc-ho+(OP)
Y... ikes!

It's about time Y Combinator has executives who aren't so busy with politics. It gives the whole incubator, startup scene, etc, a bad name.

The good ol' days are over. I still have in my mind Y Combinator of Paul Graham (a man wise with his words), but given that we've already had even Sam Altman in control of it.

I'm guessing YC nowadays is not that different from private equity/VCs like A16z, which enjoy having their fingers on everything. Typically, it is stuff they don't know much about and look plain stupid.

I hope PG can bring the good ol' days back someday, when it was about entrepreneurship, having people laser-focused on building disruptive companies.

>>thiago+r8
> GRAHAM: No, no, no, politics. The problems with San Francisco are entirely due to a small number of terrible politicians. It’s all because Ed Lee died. The mayor, Ed Lee, was a reasonable person. Up till the point where Ed Lee died, San Francisco seemed like a utopia. It was like when Gates left Microsoft, and things rapidly reverted to the mean. Although in San Francisco’s case, way below the mean, and so it’s not that it didn’t take that much to ruin San Francisco. It’s really, if you just replaced about five supervisors, San Francisco would be instantly a fabulously better city.

> COWEN: Isn’t it the voters you need to replace? Those people got elected, reelected.

> GRAHAM: Well, the reason San Francisco fundamentally is so broken is that the supervisors have so much power, and supervisor elections, you can win by a couple hundred votes. All you need to do is have this hard core of crazy left-wing supporters who will absolutely support you, no matter what, and turn out to vote.

> Everybody else is like, “Oh, local election doesn’t matter. I’m not going to bother.” [laughs] It’s a uniquely weird situation that wasn’t really visible. It was always there, but it wasn’t visible until Ed Lee died. Now, we’ve reverted to what that situation produces, which is a disaster.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/paul-graham/

>>amadeu+Hb
the sage wisdom of "the problem with politics is that the people who get the most votes win"

>>microm+ec
I get you are being sarcastic, but the real problem is people don't vote and you see this at every level of government office. Other than the president, it's hard to engage people (which I don't really fault them for) and so you end up with politicians - all across the field - who do nothing but pander to the most extreme voters.

>>nemoth+Tg
That's not what he's saying in the quote though, he's mad that the people who are engaged are people that don't agree with him and dismisses voters as "crazy"

He even goes as far to call this "broken" — it's literally democracy.

>>microm+ql
A political and electoral system can have elections that are fair in principle but tend to produce results few are happy with in practice even when they voted for the winner. Is that democracy? Well, maybe, but I'd argue it's not doing democracy very well.

US presidential elections come to mind; the likely nominees of both major parties are viewed unfavorably by a majority in polls, but one of them is almost certainly going to win.

>>Zak+jN
US presidential elections aren't "really" democracy IMO, we've had a long string of presidents that didn't even win the popular vote