Occasionally in YC founder circles a new founder will raise a bunch of money and then ask something like "What's the best way to invest all the money our company just raised?"
The responses are always along the lines of "Your startup is already risky. Don't innovate in areas of your business where the status quo is known to work. Innovate your product + technology, don't be innovative with your company's finances, HR, etc"
That advice always stuck with me. It just makes a lot of sense to do things in the most boring way possible, except where it matters (your competitive advantage <-- that's where you innovate, that's where you set yourself apart)
Running a startup is distracting enough. Doing things non-standard just adds to the list of distractions that you don't need as a founder.
The simplest explanation is that this is a mostly symbolic move: They want to show that the stable coin and crypto companies they invest in are actually trusted by YC. It starts to look hypocritical if an investor is funding crypto companies and praising them as important breakthroughs, but not actually using them where it’s important.
Advising unproven risky businesses to depend on other unproven risky businesses? Doesn’t that just increase the likelihood that something goes wrong?
Read carefully: They’re not actually advising that startups prefer it. They’re allowing it as an option.
It doesn’t mean that it will actually be used. They just don’t want to appear like they’re avoiding the companies they’re funding. It’s a bad look.
> YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged (…)
“Encouraging” means advising, advocating for, not “allowing as an option”. I don’t know if YC really does that, but that’s the conversation. It’s about the claim made in a comment, not the submission.
Yes, I understood that perfectly.
> I wasn't claiming they encouraged the use of stablecoins.
Neither have I claimed you did.
> I was adding historical context to the move.
Yes, I know. All my answers are congruent with that.