Y Combinator has lost its soul: A YC founder's perspective - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AdamNeumannsCoS/status/1285651161723342848 <comment><USER2> The idea that check sizes should be small so people should be forced into dire financial situations is a terrible one, and one that would absolutely hurt diversity. You're going to end up with a bunch of rich white dudes as founders (because very, very obviously the other way that people can afford to take smaller checks is if they have a lot of money in the bank).

The smaller class size issue is probably fair, but reducing check sizes as a filtering method will absolutely filter out socioeconomically disadvantaged people. Just a terrible suggestion from somebody who I would wager heavily is not unsure of where his next meal is coming from.

<comment><USER3> It also doesn't make any sense from an investment perspective. Reddit would have been one of the most successful YC companies of all time, except for that they basically had to shut down because they couldn't raise money. This happened to lots of early YC companies that could have otherwise been successful.

Had Reddit not sold for pennies on the dollar to Conde Nast, that alone would have probably paid for the extra 100k for every YC startup since.

<comment><USER2> Great point. People think a willingness to take extreme financial risks is somehow a useful personality trait when it comes to entrepreneurship because of selection bias. People who take that risk and make it tell that story. People who take that risk and don't make it aren't heard from. People who don't take that risk also aren't heard from.

There are lots of people with great ideas and the ability to execute on them who also have a deep sense of financial responsibility that precludes them from going 50k into credit card debt.

<comment><USER4> And often, getting credit card debt is not a material risk, but a minor embarrassment when they ask their family to bail them out and/or move in the guest house for a few months, rent-free. When poorer folk take the "same" risk, they can be ruined for decades.

<comment><USER5> Here here. When you empty your 401k to build your business, and don't contribute to it for 15 years while you are building, as you simply don't have the cash, and cannot afford it ...

Yeah. The implicit assumptions of the "live in poverty" of the OP, are wrong.

I'm 54, and I was financially wiped out at 51. I will not ever recover from this. No family wealth to fall back on. I do not believe I will ever be able to retire. And noting that there is a bit of ageism in this space, makes the threat of potential long term unemployment even worse for folks like me.

Sort of an inverse Ozymandias. Gaze upon my flaming cratered company, and beware. Here be demons. That you cannot control.

I had skin in the game. And I lost it.

<comment><USER6> > ...I'm 54, and I was financially wiped out at 51. I will not ever recover > from this....

You need a fighting spirit to achieve great things. Many people have overcome far greater problems. Never give up you are only one transaction away from financial success. Good luck

<comment><USER5> (really not sure why this was down voted ... it is a good comment)

Thanks. I'm aware of others struggles. I figure that my story could be a cautionary tale for some, and others may take lessons from it.

When I say in other fora, never, ever take debt financing of anything if you can avoid it, this is coming from personal agonizing experience.

If I go back into the startup world, I'm going with a very clear perception of what is what. No rose colored glasses. No "if you build a better mousetrap" mentality. I know how things can go horribly wrong. I know where the traps and mines are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (throwaway as YC founder for obvious reasons)

I've spoken to a half dozen YC founders this morning -- no one disagrees except the check size debt thing. Mostly "that is dumb" for that one.

For those who worked at startups when they were small (5–20 people), the difference between then and when they grew to be 100 or 200 people is night and day. Very real difference.

For those who haven't, think of class sizes. Do you think a uni class with 18 people in it will be the same as a survey with 200? Course not.

Three founders in my batch (early 2010s) have started companies in the past year and opted out of YC b/c of 1. batch size 2. YC doesn't mean to investors what it once did. The brand is heavily diluted.

YC is a broad based investment fund. The partners cannot handle the size of the batches or give the attention they once could. The partnership simply hasn't scaled.

Somewhat informed guess: partners don't want to give up their own returns by splitting it with more partners. Understandable -- human nature. But not good for YC as a whole.

<comment><USER8> That perspective makes sense, but I think it's also worth considering that it is likely that not all of those YC founders would have been accepted if batches were smaller. You're totally right that per founder, YC was more valuable when batches were small, but I think it's less clear whether the aggregate value is higher.

<comment><USER9> Well, sure, but then YC in the _present day_ is collecting value based on what YC was in the _past_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He lost me with the whole "make founders take on massive personal debt to survive" tweet. Removing that particular stressor, particularly from people from poorer backgrounds who lack the access to that kind of credit is how we get a better sampling of ideas.

<comment><USER11> I'd suggest the opposite. One who is used to living off $1k a month for 1-2 years have an upper hand on founders used to a more cushy lifestyle. Or even having no income and almost broke for years like many successful founders I know of.

<comment><USER12> There's a significant trade-off here – it can result in overvaluing money in comparison to time / effort. If you've been scraping by for a while, you train yourself to always pick the cheapest option, which often isn't the best option. I've seen several founders waste time and effort trying to work around shortcomings in cheap / free tools or implementing something themselves when spending an insignificant amount of money would make the problem go away immediately.

<comment><USER11> I don't disagree with that as a side effect; in the end, the only thing that matters for a company is runway of the founders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Recent YC founder here. I disagree with the premise that boring ideas are inherently bad. Stripe is a B2B company that adds an API on top of existing infrastructure. Airbnb is a basic CRUD app.

I also disagree that YC is not funding interesting ideas. Our batch had quite a few. Someone was making a rapid cargo ship. Someone else was making a fully distributed cell network.

The only real copycat ideas were the ones duplicating successful startups for international markets. In my opinion these were obviously good investments.

The social climber phenomenon was real. I think anything that becomes elite will attract them. I'd say, I was impressed that half the batch did not fit this profile.

My sense was that YC actually went out of its way to fund more interesting ideas. I'm sure my startup would not have gotten in, based on our traction and backgrounds, if our idea wasn't out-of-the-box. (We are bottomless.com, a smart coffee subscription that uses a WiFi scale to ship at the perfect time).

I'd even venture to say that there appeared to be a negative correlation between interestingness and outcome in our batch. It's possible YC should fund more boring companies, not fewer.

<comment><USER14> The author didn't say anything about "interesting" vs. "boring" companies or ideas. He said YC should curtail funding of dev tools/SaaS startups, because the traction they appear to have is misleading. They're selling to each other, revenue moving in a circle, without demonstrating value creation outside of the sphere of similarly-situated startups. Not explicitly stated, but he's also implying it's a portfolio risk for YC.

<comment><USER15> It's a myth imho that it's just so easy to sell your saas/devtool product to other YC companies (in your batch or otherwise), and that it somehow guarantees you early traction. It may have been true in the Stripe days when there were much smaller batches, but now being in YC means being bombarded with pitches from your batchmates (and then from each new batch as an alumni). Highly effective growth channels tend to quickly get over-saturated, and this one is no different.

Companies in YC are maniacally focused on their own goals and generally don't have the time and energy to adopt products just as a favor. They also tend to have NIH syndrome. They'll try it and give you feedback, but getting them to _really_ use it is still very hard and requires that you're truly solving a problem.

I think a lot of companies start YC with this idea that they'll just sell to other YC companies, then quickly change their minds when they see how hard it actually is. Other early stage startups are not great customers for most b2b companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Bay Area has lost its' soul. I moved here to meet creative people tackling big problems and I've found it's no longer about innovation and risk. Just a big pile of uninspired B2B SaaS companies. SV has become a well oiled money making machine for these kind of companies. If you want to work hard and get rich you come here and follow the grind to get your checks, status, clout, etc...

I've found some creative people tackling big ideas, but they are exceedingly rare and largely unsupported by the community. I've met a lot more people who moved out here with big ambitions and have been railroaded down the route of conformity, which makes the most money for VC's. It leaves them without fulfillment or purpose as they grind on products they care little about. SV will continue to produce billion dollar software companies, but I doubt they will produce real innovation over the next few decades. The bay area has conspired to railroad its' potential for greatness towards profitable mediocracy.

<comment><USER17> "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters." ― Peter Thiel

I think people love to use "The Bay Area" and "Silicon Valley" and conflate that with "software startups that raise VC funding".

Silicon Valley still produced most of the internet (for better or worse) and the only new American mass production car company in my lifetime. Let's not overlook the successes while we are busy complaining about the average (especially because the VC model assumes 900+ failures for every 1-3 unicorn IPOs).

Not sure what the next few decades will bring (I'd be pleasantly surprised if the USA doesn't go through an actual revolution), but I'd wager that "real innovation" is still more likely to happen in Northern California than almost anywhere else in this country, even if the establishment VC club doesn't get disrupted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> As someone who did yc in s09 and w19, it was very different. But, you get out what you put in, like most things. These generalized critiques are useless. B2b is thriving at yc because it's easier and more in the wheelhouse of developers. If there were tech climbers there I didn't meet them. There are so many people the useless are easy to avoid. We got 6 months of work done in 3 months and the bigger check vs 09 was very helpful.

<comment><USER19> Also if you look at how the US economy works, all the money is in businesses, not consumers - compare the current stock market to the unemployment numbers for example. B2B was always going to out-compete B2C in the long run.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't think the author is advocating that founders take on a ton of of personal debt, just that historically it was a filtering function that is now absent. I would imagine that this filter function can be replaced by something else that does not also weed out people without any safety net.

The point is valid - startups are a risk, and so if all the risk is removed, it will increase the number of people who are coming to YC for status vs. coming because they believe in their idea.

As good at interviewing as the YC partners may be, interviewing is no substitute for the harsh reality and incentives imposed by taking a great risk.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am somewhat sympathetic to the check size argument simply because I have seen a lot of people drift from accelerator to accelerator to accelerator and mostly focus on getting to their next one. They become really good at the pitch and grant collecting, but have websites that barely work or rarely go and meet customers. There is a perverse incentive in the accelerator spot in itself being a reward.

I suppose it depends on what YC wants to optimize for. You can risk giving money to not so serious founders or risk excluding ones who want to cap their risk.

I don't get why they would want to ban dev tools and SaaS. The latter especially is a huge segment. Many enormous companies like IBM and SAP are built around those types of offerings.

<comment><USER22> So don't change the check size, just filter out companies that passed through other accelerators and still failed to gain significant traction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> There's a Burning Man analogy in the Twitter comments that struck me as quite apt. In fact, it holds for everything from vacation destinations to multi- decade music acts.

People who were there at the beginning feel that something magical has slowly been corrupted by success and all the bigness issues that come with it. They aren't totally wrong. But people who get there later still find something of value, and everything is now sturdy enough to support wider participation.

I'm okay with seeing it both ways.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it seems to be the natural evolution of anything that starts out small and obscure, then becomes famous and cool.

I have no doubt that there's some obscure, ramshackle accelerator out there that will someday be as prestigious as YC, just like there is some small, tight knit festival that will eventually become as huge as Burning Man.

But taking part early also means foregoing the prestige factor, and accepting that this obscure accelerator/festival will most likely _never_ get big or cool. You can't have it both ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Several years ago I used to read pg old articles (also Joel S, pgreenspun) without realizing who he was or know what YC was. It clicked with my nerds mindset. I had an impression that he was a champion for the underdog, nerds like me who is smart enough (but not genius), willing to work hard and live frugal. I also had the understanding that ambition to be a unicorn not necessary, it is much more important to be ramen profitable. Success will come if you work hard and persevere, but not blinded by ambition. I also thought that success did not require social capital, eg ivy league degree, FAANG connections, etc.

I filled up YC applications last year, but not sure how to answer question whether my idea is worth a billion. I will be satisfied if my SAAS business can make $5k MRR. If I have more than that, it will be a blessing.

Should YC remove questions that favors those social capital? I mean, YC can have a simple leetcode question to prove you are smart enough. Then, run a lucky draw to pick which ones selected.

<comment><USER15> I don't think pg or the YC partners more generally have anything at all against bootstrapping or smaller scale businesses. But they're a business too and have their own investors to answer to. Billion dollar exits are what make their business work.

$5k MRR is a great goal, but you shouldn't expect investors to give you money if you there's no potential upside for them.

<comment><USER25> there's definitely some jockeying for "the YC of bootstrappers" among the indie hacker crowd now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As an investor, all I can say is that having gone through YC is not the signal of quality it was 7 or 8 years ago. This doesn't mean YC is doing anything wrong regarding _their_ investment strategy. It simply means they are expecting a very skewed power law of returns.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised no one has mentioned this PG essay, black swan farming. YC appears to have switched to exactly this strategy. Invest in a far larger set of startups, with more possibility of failure but also larger possibility of finding the rare large ones.

[http://paulgraham.com/swan.html](http://paulgraham.com/swan.html)

<comment><USER28> This is an excellent essay that speaks to the financial calculus of startup investing.

In addition, I think YC partners also have a non-financial desire ( _e.g._ first footnote in that same essay) to encourage entrepreneurship more broadly. Hence the larger YC batches and experiments like YC Fellowship [1] and online Startup School [2].

[1]: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc- fellowship/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-fellowship/)

[2]: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/onlineclass/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/onlineclass/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I went through YC in S14 as a co-founder of a hardware company. I agree that YC optimizes heavily for SaaS companies, but smaller checks would probably exacerbate this trend. Hardware companies need to not only subsist on the $120k but also develop prototypes. That's difficult enough, but it is completely impossible on $25k unless the co-founders are independently wealthy or have already raised money.

</comment><comment><USER30> I find it disturbing that this is getting so much attention. The argument (such as it is) is utterly without merit, unsupported by anything other than the tweeter's personal opinion. It is, quite simply, a troll. And it seems to be working.

In fact, the whole cultural phenomenon of paying attention to what people tweet is deeply disturbing. Twitter is not designed to support rational argument supported by data, it's designed to be a morphine drip of novelty, a machine that dispenses mental M&Ms. People who follow twitter are like lab rats pressing a lever in exchange for a drop of sugar water. It's troubling to see this phenomenon invading HN.

<comment><USER31> Normally we'd downweight a submission this lame, but we can't do that because [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment). We turned off the flamewar detector for the same reason.

It's nice that the commenters have pointed out most of the wrongness though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> One thing that made YC great was that it was started to allow the original 4 partners to learn how to be investors. The first batch wasn't intended to be profitable, it was intended to reveal what works and what doesn't. (Luckily for YC it got a lot right by accident). Sure YC could go back to small batches and small investments but they can't go back to "let's figure things out with only rough theory as a guide" because YC is no longer the startup born out of ignorance and curiosity it once was. You can't forget lessons learned and dial back your sophistication. The magic of early YC isn't lost forever but it will be refound among the next group of rich people who are willing to spend a bit to figure out if this investing thing is to their taste.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is anyone else unimpressed with the ideas being funded? I look at Work at a Startup and it is just new web frontends on existing industries. I'm sure that makes money but holy hell is it boring.

Some are working on cool things, but the founder who has a PhD in that topic will be doing the interesting work and they are hiring for infra or interface.

One company was a great match for my skill set but the equity was so low for early hires. I get that 1% can be huge for a FB scale exit, but 180k and 1% is generally just a paycut. In this case the founders were undergrad dropouts and not SMEs. It just seems like a really inflexible ecosystem when you can't give 5%-10% to an early hire when they would be the SME and core engineer.

<comment><USER34> >Is anyone else unimpressed with the ideas being funded? look at Work at a Startup and it is just new web frontends on existing industries.

If there's money basically just lying all over the ground, why wouldn't you pick it up?

<comment><USER35> Sure but that's not addressing his point which is most of the ideas being funded are uninteresting and aren't really moving the ball forward. Instead they're doing some kind of rent seeking.

<comment><USER34> I don't think it's rent seeking by definition to modernize a product and/or make it more accessible to people. The fact of the matter is that there is a tremendous backlog of legacy industry/infrastructure that needs to be modernized. There is plenty of opportunity in doing so to democratize access to services that are currently inaccessible to most, which is more or less the opposite of rent seeking.

You can also just not do a shitty job of modernizing an old thing, and end up creating a product like Netflix that front-end devs fawn over, learn from, and emulate. It doesn't have to be uninteresting.

<comment><USER36> Netflix was started in 1997. This conversation is about companies started a decade ago versus now. The rise post 2010 startups seems much more focused on creative interpretations of laws instead of actual innovation. The whole gig economy is a way to circumvent employment laws.

<comment><USER34> I am responding to the comment about

>just new web frontends on existing industries

The gig economy is just some subset of that.

In reality, 'just new web frontends on existing industries' describes the majority of the demand for software development right now. It's not good or bad, though some of the actors and some of the businesses will be good or bad. It's not boring or interesting, though some of the applications and implementations will be boring or interesting. It just is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> He says "the check sizes are too big" as if they're giving prelaunch startups $50M or something. The $125k that YC gives startups is nowhere near big enough to remove the drive/urgency to succeed.

If startups are coming into YC with a more mature product than in the early years (and it seems that way), then adjusting the focus towards fundraising actually makes sense.

Not to repeat what's been said in other comments, but to say that founders should be willing to put themselves in deep financial risk to prove their drive...that just comes from an incredibly privileged mindset.

It reminds me of the people saying that if their school is going online-only, students should instead take gap years to build something, incorrectly assuming that no one needs that student loan money for living expenses.

</comment><comment><USER38> His perspective seems built around ego. It's no longer the special club he wanted it to be, it's not "hard enough" for the people he sees as "wrong" to participate. He liked YC when it was a band no one else had heard of etc. etc.

Without knowing the metrics for how YC judges the performance of its intake and their future objectives, there's no way of making sensible recommendations for how (or if) it should change.

</comment><comment><USER39> FWIW, the vast majority of YC founders I've met have told me "It was good when I did it, but I don't know if I'd do it today. The batches are so big!"

I chalk it up to a pretty typical nostalgia. Everybody is biased towards thinking the experiences of their youth were perfect, and any change is detrimental.

<comment><USER40> There's a term for that: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The SAAS thing is real. In my own broader network, I've seen so many interesting new consumer companies not even get an interview but SAAS companies of all stripes not have a problem getting an interview. It also heavily correlates with FAANG/Stanford phenomena which then leads to a mostly white male batch.

There are so many reasons why all this is, including the fact, these applications heavily bias towards 'solving a big problem that the interviewer CAN grep', and so many of those readers and interviewers are themselves from SAAS backgrounds.

Anecdotally, within female founders, it is quite understood that if you are a female founder with a consumer startup, good luck getting an interview whereas if you are FANG employee with event hint of an idea, you get an interview!

<comment><USER42> I would guess that if you are a _founder_ with a consumer startup, good luck getting an interview!

I think this makes sense too – YC is in the business of picking will-be billion dollar companies. The number of consumer startups that make it this far is probably significantly lower, percentage-wise, than B2B SaaS companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is the Twitter version of bad journalism.

* pick something famous * say it's dead * cherry pick the worst things about it * get your 10 minutes of fame

All it costs you are some burnt bridges. I've met several really smart founders from recent batches who are building something interesting. Making blanket statements like this is not particularly helpful to YC.

Famous institutions always attract climbers. That's inevitable, but it doesn't invalidate the institution.

</comment><comment><USER44> Check sizes are 125k now; you won't be able to hire a rockstar dev but you have something to hang onto for a year if you budget wisely:

[https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/](https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/)

<comment><USER45> You can absolutely hire a rockstar dev, you need to think in terms of cashflow. You may not be able to pay a full year of salary, but you can still pay their full weekly salary as you go until you either run out of money or produce enough revenue to get to that point.

<comment><USER46> Agreed, it's not even about the money.

My last company had a technical cofounder who by all means was highly sought after and managed a team of 15-20 other developers in their primary dev consulting company meaning not only did they rock technically but also had biz acumen.

That individual worked FOR FREE for 3 years 25 hrs/week before collecting any money.

Don't ever think you have to pay a developer some market salary (or any salary) upfront. If the idea + company + team is legit, they will jump at the chance to be involved.

<comment><USER47> > Don't ever think you have to pay a developer some market salary (or any > salary) upfront

"A developer" should definitely be paid market rates, otherwise they are a founder and should be rewarded accordingly with equity. I think this mindset of "getting work for free" is very damaging to the person holding the short end of the stick.

Someone who already has a well paid job, is willing to do a startup on the side, and actually be effective at it is extremely rare. What you'll usually find is someone at the beginning of their career that doesn't really understand what they are getting into.

<comment><USER46> "otherwise they are a founder and should be rewarded accordingly with equity."

Of course - as they were. My point was on cash money comp. Never said they worked for free hence their title of technical cofounder which implies equity.

"...and actually be effective at it is extremely rare. What you'll usually find is someone at the beginning of their career that doesn't really understand what they are getting into."

The onus is on the founding team to be sufficiently compelling to attract such a rare breed and if they execute correctly there is no short end to the stick to be had.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> "this was the sam altman effect.

pg kept the entire system small and personal on purpose.

but sam wants trillion dollar funds. sam approaches everything from "how can sam altman own the entire galaxy?"

now YC is an endless low effort 90s-era "groupware for groupware nerds" fund" \--- [https://twitter.com/mattsta/status/1285988679958138881](https://twitter.com/mattsta/status/1285988679958138881) this retweet is also true

<comment><USER31> That's quite wrong. pg always said that YC should operate like a startup and his primary definition of startups is growth. The original spirit behind YC was let's-hack-the-economy with an experiment in the mass production of startups. That's encoded in the name itself.

In other words, much larger batch sizes were guaranteed as YC grew. How pg and the original founding team might have gone about it, compared to others, is a different question—but certainly not by "keeping the entire system small". Whoever wrote that is speaking from ignorance, which fits with the personal smear against Sam.

<comment><USER49> >The original spirit behind YC was let's-hack-the-economy with an experiment in the mass production of startups.

If the experiment is no longer working as well as it was, it's time to change the parameters. That's how experiments work.

<comment><USER31> Who says it's not working? That would be an argument that batch sizes haven't grown large enough—something no one here seems to be saying. Actually that would be more interesting than the things the OP and some of the commenters are saying, most of which have been going around for 10 years or more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> My suspicious is that this is satire, but I'll pretend it's not and if so I like your gusto for publicly criticizing YC, even if I disagree with nearly all your points. I personally think YC has gotten way better over the years, but fun to contrarian read opinions.

Point #3 doesn't seem to be talked about in this thread yet, so let me bring it up:

> Free SaaS and Dev tools...IMO YC should ban them

YC's #1 investment of all time ([https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/](https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/)) is a SaaS/dev tools company (Stripe), and nearly 50% of their top 20 fit this category. Also, ViaWeb fits that category as well. Are you suggesting they should stop investing in their most successful category, the category they know best?

</comment><comment><USER22> So his suggestion to improve YC is to increase financial pressure on founders so you filter the ones that _"really believe in their product"_ , ignoring what would happen with the ones that failed all the same and ignoring that an obvious consequence is also filtering people for who can afford 3 months without pay.

Also, his suggestion is to block the startups that are most likely to succeed (the ones who can validate and gain traction from within YC network). And the reason for that is... a sense of nostalgia when B2C was a majority in YC? He assumes B2C is the spirit of YC and that should be reason enough to make a decision that will make YC select companies less likely to succeed at YC?

Reducing batch size is the only idea there that make any rational sense at least (which doesn't mean it is correct).

</comment><comment><USER51> Ultimately, YC exists for the benefit of the investors. It's symbiotic with startups, of course, but the measure of success is ultimately the return YC achieves for itself. It seems unlikely that anyone but the inner circle has that data, but given the type of people that run YC, I'd expect they experiment and then observe results, refactor, experiment again, ultimately heading in the direction of what improves their return. I'd be surprised if they haven't debated class and check sizes at great length since the beginning, and then settled those debates by observing the results of the changes over time.

</comment><comment><USER52> > "make founders take on massive personal debt to survive"

That assumes massive personal debt is even an option.

A lot of poorer people are turned down for personal debt with respectable institutions.

They go to the bank, credit company or whatever, and the answer is a straight no, we have nothing for you. Maybe if they're lucky they can have a small overdraft, worth less than a month's rent. Not enough to move the needle. Loan sharks exist but that's a terrible idea.

I mention this because I have the impression some people, who are used to easy credit (especially credit cards), don't realise there are a lot of people who can't get _any_.

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm not usually one to think in these terms, but this somehow still strikes me as a caricature of white middle-class privilege:

"Having to take considerable financial risk definitely sucked, but it was also was a great filtering function. If you didnt have conviction in yourself or your product theres no way you would have been there. For those who made the leap, it made success the only option."

<comment><USER54> Based on the responses in this thread, you're not alone. It's not often that a series of arguments is so thoroughly undermined by just one spectacularly bad one, but that's really the comment that's been driving all the discussion. His point about batch sizes is maybe something worth actually discussing, but there's nearly no discussion on that (and maybe a couple comments on how YC should stop funding everything but consumer companies which is also IMO ridiculous).

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> $25k is like 2 developer months + ops overhead. I don't think that's going to buy anything _but_ high margin/quickly realizable ideas like B2B SaaS and developer tools.

<comment><USER54> According to the thread it's not supposed to be enough. You're supposed to go deep into credit card debt because that's how you know you're a Real Founder(tm). You know, if you're privileged enough to have limits high enough on your credit cards to go into that sort of debt, dont have people dependent on you, have a safety net to make this not so big a deal, etc. Clearly the best founders are the ones starving themselves so they can lower their risk of having to file for bankruptcy. And the best thing to do to fund a high risk tech startup with uncertain cash flows is apparently debt. Equity financing exists for a reason, you know. And the point of incorporating as a separate entity is liability protection/equity financing etc. For an investor, pushing your founders to increase the risk levels of their high risk companies by levering up with a personal guarantee is ridiculous. They increase the risk level so debtors can get the reward if things work, which is now less likely because of the compounding interest and personal stress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> A smaller check size hurts startups in capital intensive industries. Others already made excellent points about the diversity if founders that can be attracted with a smaller check size, since less money favors people with money already in the bank or with easy "friends and family" rounds. I'd also like to add that smaller sizes work against company and market level diversity as well. If YC is purely for software, sure, but they've been trying to fund hardware/biotech/etc, and you need that cash to build an actual prototype. Smaller class sizes makes sense as a proposal, but if you reduce funding to original levels as well, you'll be stuck with an overwhelming number of overrepresented demographic founders starting b2b SAAS companies. From a financial perspective that locks out a talent pool and limits your investment horizons in a pretty big way.

</comment><comment><USER56> Would love to know YC's real matriculation rate. I know of several teams that got accepted in and opted not to go, in part because of ballooning batch size and dilutive terms.

<comment><USER25> then why did they apply? signaling?

<comment><USER57> The YC application process in and of itself can be very useful for founders. It forces them to really think about what they're building and why it's going to bring value to customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm curious if the author has data that the 'free sabbatical' folks are less successful as founders than others. If YC is selecting the wrong types of people/companies for their batches, I think they'll figure it out pretty quick when those companies fail to pan out and their fund suffers as a result.

Is the author's YC company's success somehow contingent on YC not having these types of founders?. If so, I have grave concerns about their company anyway. If not, like, what are you complaining about? YC's decision to accept people who match that profile literally has nothing to do with you.

<comment><USER59> It does, in so far as you are more likely to be successful if your batchmates are a source of inspiration and motivation.

<comment><USER58> I think the impact size of that effect is likely to be very, very small. The whole thread reeks of gatekeeping around (as someone in another comment put it) what it means to be "Real Founder."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> > 3\. When i went through YC (recently), we had a "masterclass" of sorts on > growth with @patrickc & @collision . Once of the first questions they asked > the group was "how many of you are consumer companies?"

> Like... 2 people raised their hands and everyone else laughed hysterically.

Are B2C inherently better than B2Bs? What's his argument here?

I, for one, was never one to enjoy B2C products (matter of fact, I think most of them are stupid), so I don't understand his disdain for everything not B2C

<comment><USER61> His argument is that B2C is underrepresented and laughed at in YC, despite it being a vital and huge market. He isn't saying one is better than the other.

Ebay, AirBNB, Apple, Uber, Github, heard of any? It's too bad you were never able to enjoy B2C products, because these products are worth trying.

<comment><USER60> I'm not saying these companies provide any value. Looking how I wrote my previous comment, I might've mispoken. What I was trying to say is that early on, whenever someone pitches B2Cs to me, I tend to think they're all stupid. I don't get them.

That's not to say they don't provide value. Same thing on the B2B side. They provide a ton of value, so no reason to think one is better than the other.

<comment><USER61> You don't 'get' how B2C companies work? What does this even mean? You would pass on Uber because you can't understand how a business could possibly sell directly to customers?

Why not just say you focus solely on B2B companies? That's a lot more reasonable than trying to argue that B2C is 'stupid', because the market caps of these companies would strongly disagree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> What exactly does he mean by "tech climber"?

<comment><USER63> Get-rich-quick grifters, would be my guess.

<comment><USER64> Possibly that these smart young people view everything like highschool. Everything is a formula driven contest to outshine your peers for the limited spots at prestigious schools. Get the perfect grades, study nonstop for the SAT, find the perfect volunteer experience, get dad to shmooze with his senator friend for that shiny recommendation letter, get into Harvard.

Same thing on loop. After the prestigious internships and summa cum laude, they graduate into a FANG job at 21.

I think the criticism is that these people are conformists. They're good at following an obvious system to the T but has never innovated or taken risks in their life.

<comment><USER65> That's a good insight. The problem, though, is that this pattern kinda works (until it doesn't). Get your FAANG job at 21, follow the pattern to get promoted, get promoted, make more money, compete to buy a nice house, get married, have kids, compete to get your kid into the "best" preschool, then the "best" private school. Compete to get into the "best country club", then retire and...play golf all day?

<comment><USER54> At that point you've got enough wealth built up that if you've played things right you have a part time job managing your own portfolio. And a lot of people on that route that I've met have vague ideas of doing charity work or something at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I totally understand if he feels this way..his own opinion. My own opinion is this, as a founder running our startup (catering marketplace for businesses and individuals) for over 2 and half years. Still working with No Angel or VC money, just friends and family funds. With our sweat and blood we tested the market from "Uber" style, events to iterating to various verticals.. The painful truth, it hurts when you can't pull out your best solutions to problems because of low funds, it leads to poor execution most times.. competition is fierce and business means war. Most founders would have given up before year one with no VC money. I see no harm in YC's cheque size and scaling. Heck.. Covid 19 just dug out some new interesting problems in need of urgent solutions. My Opinion. Cheers HN.

</comment><comment><USER67> Are there really many cases of founders who went all-in and lost, ending up homeless or otherwise destitute? Asking honestly- I know a small population of founders, and they have all failed, but generally have bounced back quite well. They at least got to a point where they launched and at least tried to find their market fit, and even getting to that point is an incredibly valuable experience.

None have massive houses in the Hamptons, but generally they have all found good jobs and are in the management ranks (aside from one who just decided that he did not want to go that route) at decent companies. It seems to me that if you took a decent stab and didn't completely flame out with some obviously poor idea or execution, you really tend to fail "up" in the end.

<comment><USER68> I think most tech founders are more than capable of getting a decent paying engineering corporate job if they choose to do so.

The problem (at least for me, who started off in FAANG initially) is that the longer you're in the start-up world, the more you _hate_ the idea of going back to a corporate job.

So in my previous start-up I went all-in, racked up tens of thousands in CC debt and would have sold every single one of my possessions before letting it happen. When I missed my first rent payment, I ended up reluctantly selling the company and only accepted the offer on the condition that my transition period would be one month or less (i.e. I don't actually have to work for the acquirer).

Throughout that time, my previous coworkers/managers from the companies I originally worked for kept trying to convince me to come back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I can really empathize with this. I was an early employee for one of the magical YC unicorns, and I thought I could be successful as a YC founder afterwards, but then I learned the truth about startups and realized it's hopeless.

Nowadays being a founder is only for those who are already rich, well connected, and have a safety net to fall back on. It's super sad because I think it means the end of the great SV meritocracy as we used to know it.

I think it's just a matter of time before another country comes along and takes the reins from the US as the leader in terms of innovation. The entire country feels like a failed state right now.

</comment><comment><USER70> I agree having large check sizes does change the culture of this game. The filter function being talked about here is really just about the general concept of a moral hazard ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard)). Just like with insurance deductibles, there has to be a way for founders to be committed and share in the risks significantly. Does that mean they need to be starving? No. But it does mean they need to at least incur a large opportunity cost (relative to working at FAANG for example).

</comment><comment><USER71> An article [0] that takes a critical stance on Paul Graham/Y Combinator, specifically Graham's advice that you should stop focussing on passing tests, despite Y Combinator being entirely built around passing tests.

[0] [http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction- advertise...](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertised- as-production/)

<comment><USER31> The 'tests' YC is focused around are getting users and customers. Startups are strongly discouraged from working on anything else, including fundraising before Demo Day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Haven't followed YC closely in a while. Has anyone compiled objective data on how it's trending and the success of the program YoY?

<comment><USER15> It takes like ~10 years to have any reliable sense of whether a batch was successful or not, so it's not something you can easily measure YoY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Yc taking advantage of their b2b alumni network is common sense in my own opinion, they are playing to their strength in fact.

<comment> site-packages1 It's helpful, I have spoken to maybe 5 companies of the current batch who were introduced through the YC network and are working on problems that would help us succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Is a sign that Y Co is a plant grown too large for its pot and needs to be split up and transplanted.

In 2019 the best business model was selling pitchforks to gold miners in San francisco, in 2020 the disruption happened. Big cities have a competitive advantage in terms of exploiting the Bezzle, but when that is gone then what?

</comment><comment><USER31> "Things have always been getting worse."

</comment><comment><USER75> Twitter is really a terrible platform for posting more than 10 words.

</comment><comment><USER76> Isn't YC just a numbers game?

Back enough companies and hopefully some will be winners.

</comment><comment><USER77> > You're going to end up with a bunch of rich white dudes as founders

Why not just say "rich dudes" ? That is the qualifier. The race might be true too, but it's not what defines the argument.

<comment><USER78> I'm surprised you find the race unnecessary, but continue to include the gender. "Rich people" would be all that's required.

<comment><USER79> Isn't a random sample out of the set of rich people going to yield a lot of whiteness and dudeness though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Did @pg respond to any part of this thread?

<comment><USER81> No</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Were you in a computer user group, back in their heyday? - <AUTHOR> I'm writing an article about The Golden Era of User Groups, and I'd love your input.
This idea came to me when I mentioned user groups to a young person who'd never heard of them. Oh no! It was such a special time of community support! Let's not permit the memories to go away!
So tell me about your experiences!
The basics:
When, where, what type of group, how big it was.
Your role, if relevant. (e.g. I was president of one group, VP of another, and on an international board of user groups... you might be "just a member" which is fine!)
Your memories: How involved were you, for how long? What drew you to the user group? What made it special?
Mostly I want to hear stories, anecdotes, and nostalgia. So please share! (And let me know if I can quote you, at least by first name.) <comment><USER3> Amsterdam Subversive Center for Information Interchange (ASCII)

It was a group of squatters, hackers, anti authoritarians, non-conformists and anarchists. They proselytised Linux and GNU software. I only visited some of their courses, pretty basic stuff where they would teach about Linux usage, HTML & CSS, some basic programming, etc. The audience was always a motley of social classes and skill sets. The actual members seemed mostly Italian and German (pretty strongly represented in the Amsterdam squatting scene, as I understand it). They were real deal squatters, evac fights with SWAT teams and all. Big fans of XS4ALL (the first dutch consumer ISP, and legendary for its true hacker spirit).

The workshops would always be in these random squats. You'd have to knock on some nondescript reinforced steel door, say a password, walk through 3 floors of rubble, to emerge in a ramshackle room somewhere and learn about memory management in C for 2 hours. It was quite an experience.

I thought these guys were the "real deal" hackers, though looking back it was perhaps a bit form over function. But their dedication to individual agency and resisting authority is something I will never forget.

They shut down in 2006, apparently. RIP.

[https://scii.nl/](https://scii.nl/)

<comment><USER4> There was a similar scene in the early 2000s in Madrid. Diverse people, some of them more political, some more technical, some trying to promote free software. I'm not sure why it disbanded, but I got the clear impression that unity was delusional.

Political activists parasyted the free software movement. They contributed nothing, except the wild epic, while they used volunteers' work to publicize their agendas.

I remember leaving a squatted house where Stallman was going to talk, when the girl I dated was utterly disgusted with the hygienic condition of the place and the squatters' children. That was the last straw for me.

<comment><USER5> I like how you ramble about how the political people contributed nothing without realizing that free software, or at least the GPL, is inherently somewhat political.

<comment><USER6> There's nothing wrong with that. The parent is talking about people who _only_ contribute politically (ie activists). There's nothing wrong with people who contribute free software with political motivations (GNU), but that's not the people that the parent was talking about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the early to mid '90s I was involved in three user groups in the K.C. metro area: the Kansas City UNIX User's Group, MacCORE, and the local LUG (which, according to kclug.org, is still active). MacCORE was the largest and most organized, with dozens of people at each meeting, guest speakers, and promotional items from Apple and other companies in the Mac ecosystem. The KCUUG and KCLUG meetings were more bare-bones and less formal.

I enjoyed the social aspects of each group, but they also had a huge impact on my career. This is particularly true for the KCUUG where I served for a short time as president. One of the attendees saw me speak at a meeting (on managing an NNTP server IIRC) and asked me to do some consulting at a local ISP. They ended up hiring me, but couldn't afford a Sniffer, which led me to start writing a protocol analyzer for Solaris and Linux. That analyzer (Wireshark) now has its own active online community. We don't have any official user groups, but we do have conferences in the U.S. and Europe each year.

<comment><USER8> Very cool to hear that Wireshark has roots in a user group!

Personally, I was deeply inspired to start thinking about hypertext publishing after visiting a UCSD Mac User Group as a high school student around 1992 and seeing amazing HyperCard stacks driving multimedia on CD ROM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was a kid in an Apple ][ pirate user group in Okinawa, Japan in the early 80's. My Dad was a schoolteacher on a military base there.

We'd meet once a week on Sunday afternoons in the High School cafeteria, everyone lugging in their computers and boxes of blank disks. And what did we do? We copied.

The club had massive binders full of hundreds (thousands?) of 5.25" floppies. You'd "check out" a disk by replacing it with your membership card, make a copy, and return the disc. More experienced members could help you get around thorny copy protection, and people left helpful notes of which copy program worked best.

They would also organize bulk purchases of cloned computers. My first computer was referred to as a "Happle", i.e. a clone from Hong Kong. IIRC we got the computer, a green-screen monitor, 2 slim disk drives, joystick, paddles, some games, and a 9-pin dot matrix printer for $1000. At the time, a regular Apple 2 cost that much for the computer alone. Our clone also had helpful modifications like lower-case letters and built-in keyboard shortcuts. E.g. ctrl-6 would turn into "PR#6" which was how you booted from disk.

There's no way my parents could have afforded non-clone prices at that time, let alone purchasing software. So I'm very grateful for that club, and all the amazing software I got to try and learn from. I learned so much programming from Beagle Brother's tools [1] and had my mind completely blown by the Pinball Construction Set, which Steve Wozniak rightly called "the greatest program ever written for an 8-bit machine."

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Bros)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set)

<comment><USER10> In private elementary school in the mid 1980's, I remember LOGO and Oregon Trail on Apple ][e's. For some reason, I recall the power indicator light on the keyboard (an incandescent bulb?) would have a cover that would be missing or burnt away, and hot and sometimes painful to the touch. Oh yeah, I went to summer school once that had Pinball Construction Set.. it was one of the first open-ended, sandbox-type games, a kind of "spiritual predecessor" to The Incredible Machine series that really did UX well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Both ComputerLand and Radio Shack sponsored computer and robotics groups in Gillette Wyoming from 1979-or-so, but I lived far from town so wasn't able to attend much of it. I did hijack the local 4-H club with Popular Electronics projects and ideas from Byte magazine. Until the IBM PC and Mac, everything was 8-bit. Again, everything was remote, so I ended up getting into Apple-Cat modem tricks (phreaking), running a BBS, and later (1983??) getting a used PDP-11 and running UUCP (email and Usernet), for quite a few accounts for that quadrant of WY for a while (using a Trailblazer 9600 baud modem - I had to mow lawns for 6 months to buy that thing).

I'm sorry that I don't have many UG stories, because everybody was so far flung, it was hard to be intensely (or interactively, at least) social about it!

By the time I got to college (RHIT - Rose-Hulman), it was all men, all engineering, all the time, so there wasn't much need for an independed UG.

I feel as if I was "in the culture", but not "part of the gang" for much of that period. The WELL started about the time I was finishing up high-school, but it was a lot of fun, and made me sad about what I had been missing out on...

</comment><comment><USER12> Circa 1984 or so in Silicon Valley, I was a member of ModemCycle.

To be a member one had to own a computer and a motorbike.

It was a small group of very diverse folks, really a fun time while it lasted.

The monthly Paul Revere rides were the most fun, we'd meet around 10 PM at a Denny's somewhere and ride all night during the Full Moon, ending at a Denny's somewhere else around 5 or 6 AM, then home to sleep.

Wonder what happened to them all, great folks!

</comment><comment><USER13> I was the in the "Computer Club" in highschool, in the late 90's early 00's. In retrospect it was quite amazing that we lucked out, because what happened was a guy who had been working in the industry decided he wanted to bring computing to his hometown, and so left the industry and used his contacts to push for a top-notch tech center in the high-school. It was one of the very first high schools to have the Cisco Networking Academy for example, so many of us had our CCNA before we had even left high school. We were issued laptops and cisco routers... which at the time I thought was awesome but it didn't dawn on me till I was older just how much this one person had done for us kids. It was he who encouraged us who ended up always in the tech center to start the computer club, and do things like compete in the VICA (now SkillsUSA competitions) and we regularly dominated.

It was under his tutelage I first installed RedHat linux, and he would have us do things like CTF's with each of our issued routers/laptops to teach us practical security.

Most of our events we organized ended up being basically LAN gaming parties, but back in that day gaming required you to know some basic networking stuff so it was also used to hone those skills. Once a month we would do all friday night lock in's, mostly playing Half-Life, Team-Fortress, Quake, Counter- Strike, or Unreal Tournament, and sometimes Starcraft/Warcraft. Lots of Jolt soda, mountain dew, and Bawls combined with pizza.

Some really good times that I look back on fondly, and I often wonder what all the guys are up to these days. I'm sure almost all of them ended up in some facet of the industry, but it was quite fun to teach me that you can't judge a book by it's cover. We had jocks playing football and the rest of the time in the computer center with us. We had stoners. We had a handful of girls. It was a very diverse group that broke the sterotype and I loved it.

I really am thankful to that man for bringing the future to my high-school so that many of us had a headstart in the industry ourselves.

<comment><USER14> This kind of donation is an eventual goal of mine. There are so many other often-well-funded focuses (sports and theatre) and myriad other social activities and distractions during high school that many students never have structured avenue to look into programming or CS though the creative/logical/teamwork benefits are hugely diverse for those who get past the entry barrier of learning a language or framework (even apart from career impact).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Tokyo Linux User Group

I have been running the Tokyo Linux User Group for the last 13 years. The club was started in 1994. I was first involved in 2002.

We have an event once a month alternating between technical meetings were we have speakers and Nomikai's[1] (Japanese drinking party).

Its hard to say exactly how big the group is because we have a lot more users lurking on our mailing list then people attending any given event. Our events attract between 10-30 attendees, and they are mostly different people depending on the time and topic being discussed.

Open source software dramatically changed the way a lot of people used computers. A lot of open source software runs on Linux which made TLUG a great meeting place for a diverse group of people.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomikai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomikai)

<comment><USER16> Wow, 10-30 attendees in Tokyo! It really puts things into perspective how one should measure a user group.

<comment><USER15> Most of our presentations are in English which is a barrier to many.

That said, around 20 attendees is a really nice size. Its small enough that its easy to host technical meeting or book restaurants but large enough that you have a range of different people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Please post the article to Hacker News when it's done! Email us at email@example.com and we might be able to give you some tips.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh heck yeah! Look, I'd post it to HN even if someone else wrote that article and I just found it somewhere.

Though of course, if that were the case I'd be cussing at how much they got wrong. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh god, I am tearing up a little.

Do ask [https://www.facebook.com/csokonaimikroklub/](https://www.facebook.com/csokonaimikroklub/) for stories.

Starting some time in the 80s (1987? or so), in Hungary (this is behind the Iron Curtain, mind you) there were many community centers. One of them in a rather outskirts district have housed a "micro club" every Friday evening. Yes, piracy was very important because getting legal software was near impossible at that time for the 8 bit computers. But it was a community and later when we grew up many of us staying with IT we learned a lot from each other... I believe it stopped in 2005 or so and then rebooted in 2014 as a retro computing weekly meetup.

</comment><comment><USER19> User groups provided assistance, shared knowledge, and shareware software before there was the Internet.

I attended a PC users group at Stanford during the late 1980's. Mostly product announcements and demos. A lot of I did this, you can do it too! People selling shareware software on 5 1/4 inch floppies for a dollar: text editors, simple databases, games. People were welcoming to newcomers, and helpful. IBM clone PC computers cost over a thousand dollars without hard disks.

I also attended a couple of meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club at SLAC. Mostly ego boasting. I missed Woz showing the Apple I.

Some of the BMUG CD roms and a huge batch of user group newsletters are on archive.org.

If you are in Silicon Valley, there is a Vintage Computer Faire West on August 1-2, 2020 at the Computer History Museum. Lots of personal collections on display, and CHM has lots of unique stuff. Demos of operational DEC-1 (Space War!) and IBM 1401s (card readers, line printers, tape drives from 1959). [http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival- west...](http://vcfed.org/wp/festivals/vintage-computer-festival-west/)

Can quote: Randall

</comment><comment><USER20> I led PFIG, the Potomac Forth Interest Group, in the early 1980s. Some said the P was silent; others said the F.

We met monthly in a rec center in Arlington, Virginia to present member projects and discuss Forth topics. After the meetings, we would cross the street to continue our conversations at a Pizza Hut. Our roughly 30 members came from Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC.

Most of us were running some variation of FIG Forth on Z80- or 6502-based computers. Presenters would lug in their Commodore PET, Apple II, TRS-80, Kaypro II, Atari 800, or other bulky computer and monitor.

Most projects were pure Forth software; some involved hardware connected to serial or parallel ports. I recall several variations of Forth data structures mapped to disk blocks. There was a Prolog implementation in Forth. I have many of the handouts buried in storage somewhere.

On the hardware side, Forth translated English text into allophones and played them through Radio Shack's Archer SPO256 Narrator speech processor chip connected to a small amplifier. The system read Lincoln's Gettysburg address clearly until one of the 8 parallel port wires came loose. Demos!

</comment><comment><USER21> Washington Apple Pi in the mid 80's. Had no idea that would be thought of as a 'heyday'. I was in high school and used it mostly as a group of people to get software from...shareware and... otherwise.

There were also some fun bbs games like TradeWars 2000, of which nothing like that exists today. I remember racing home from school to see if there were still colonists left on Earth to take to my planets.

</comment><comment><USER22> Back in high school, my friends and I used to use the computer lab with Macintoshes to play Netrek ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netrek)). We weren't supposed to be playing games, so we'd pick the computers furthest from the door. When a teacher or lab assistant walked in, they'd hear N simultaneous dings as the N of us all mashed that reset button on the side of the computer.

Not club related, but I also got a talking to when I printed a 300 page book on the laser printer when printing on a single page was more than 50 cents. And then there was the time I crashed the lab because all of the journalism class students were logged in with the teacher's creds and I decided to see what would happy when I changed her password.

</comment><comment><USER23> I helped form the NeXT user's group at BYU in the early 1990's. I was the NeXT campus consultant. IIRC we hade 15-25 people who met, I want to say weekly. Wednesday evenings I think. I was involved for two years, until I graduated.

The nice thing about our user's group is that it drew both students and faculties, NeXT building fairly powerful workstations.

My primary role was to be the "crazy NeXT rumors guy" before John Moltz made that an internet thing. I would spend five or ten minutes every meeting providing comedic relief, talking about funny things NeXT would never ever do (warp drive, Bill Gates Terminator drones) plus one thing that I knew fairly certainly that they were actually doing. I would make members guess which rumor was actually true (which wasn't all that hard).

<comment><USER24> I'm curious how many NeXT machines were on campus? Where did they end up (which depts)?

<comment><USER23> Funny, I don't really remember. We had one prof from the music dept, and I think he had a number of them. I think a few in the "engineering technology" department, a few in graphic design. Kind of scattered. The CS department, in which I was a student, had none. We also drew members from the local community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My Dad was (I was 6 and would tag along), in 1980-84 or so. It was a group of ~20 other guys, probably the only other Atari 800 owners in a 50-mile radius. They would get together once a month to show off new peripherals, pore over type-it-yourself BASIC programs from magazines, brag about high scores in Centipede, and of course, copy floppies. It was equal parts hobbyists club, amateur mutual tech support society, and den of piracy (though it wasn't called that yet).

Here's my story. There was one guy in the group, George, whose basement was entirely filled with cardboard banker boxes. Some of them were packed with 5 1/4 floppies, and many more were Xeroxed documentation (both for defeating "look up the thing on page X" anti-theft, and just being able to use the software). By '84 I would guess he had 50k-100k disks, which probably accounted for a good percentage of the total software an Atari could run.

The amazing thing about George was, he never actually used any of it. He disliked games, and didn't really need business apps. He would get disks in the mail (he used BBSes to meet other enthusiasts, but mostly traded via USPS), fire them up once to see if they worked, file them away alphabetically, and never touch them again except to make copies for others. He just liked collecting, or maybe hoarding is the right term.

Anyway, it's my private theory that the whole edifice of pre-internet piracy would've collapsed without people like George. Of course, people would've still copied games with each other, but the 'scene' where you could find almost anything, including older and less-popular wares, relied on completionists pirating for the sake of it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I was the final president of the Panorama Amiga Club, a division of the Commodore Computer Club based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Our last formal meeting was probably around 2009, although I kept going to lunch on Saturdays with three of the group's members until a couple of years ago.

I was never around for the heyday of the club in the 1980s, when they would rent out the giant auditorium at Simon Fraser University, invite distinguished guests like Jay Miner, and run daisy-chained rows of floppy drives multitasking the mass copying of software. Back then I had a PC-XT that had one color (orange) and one sound (beep), and had heard of Amigas and their thousands of colors and multitasking operating systems only in whispers and legends, as if they were inhabiting a parallel universe much more advanced than our own.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the group would meet for lunch every Saturday at the Royal City Cafe in New Westminster, near the geographic center of the Lower Mainland. That's when I joined them to start writing my series of articles on the history of the Amiga for Ars Technica.

</comment><comment><USER27> In Hack Club ([https://hackclub.com](https://hackclub.com)), we are helping students start the modern equivalent of user groups in high schools. Hack Clubs are in 2% of US high schools right now across 35 states and is now also in 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons each year.

I started it 6 years ago when I was 16 and reading about early hacker culture and the original user groups, desperate for a community. Hack Club is a nonprofit, donor-funded, and completely free for everyone involved - <USER2> nearly everything is open source at [https://github.com/hackclub](https://github.com/hackclub).

</comment><comment> tony-allan I was associated with a capacity planning user Computer Measurement Group ([https://cmg.org](https://cmg.org)), also UK CMG and CMG Australia from the early 1990's. CMG and UKCMG are still going strong. A group of CMGA members still meet socially every once in a while.

Once I had done my initial on-the-job training, these groups were an essential way to keep my skill levels up and keep in touch with a group of national and international highly specialised IT professionals who worked across mainfame, mid-range and now cloud environments.

Presenting at user conferences was a great way to share experiences and maintain a profile in the industry.

You can quote me.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used to be in the "Triangle Linux Users Group" in the early 2000s -- it seems they are still active! [https://trilug.org](https://trilug.org)

Back when running Linux on the desktop was a full time job, it was really cool to have an in person network to talk to when your latest kernel compilation bricked your system or whatever. It was also cool since RedHat is based in the Triangle we'd get people from RedHat coming to the user group all the time and could get all the dirt on them.

</comment><comment><USER29> BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh Users Group) should be on your radar. I was a passive member but it got me into the computing industry working for a well known Mac networking company at the time.

<comment><USER30> An important Google developer who created a product most of you use was a BMUG member, as was a current Siri developer, a former head of MacOS ... devrel IIRC, and others. BMUG probably deserves some credit for my own 20 year career as a programmer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I suggest you put some contact information in your profile so that people can get in touch with you outside of HN. People here use aliases because they enjoy anonymity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Done. I actually thought it was there already!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> No, but one of the more surprising things I learned this election season was that Beto was in a hacker group.

Didn't strike me as a computer guy but I guess he is/was?

</comment><comment><USER33> Hi, I was not in on the very early days of User Groups, I joined my User Group, the Oklahoma PC User Group (OKCPCUG), in the early '80s and I do remember my club having hundreds of members and meeting in an auditorium for our General Sessions. This club was one of the original ones formed that had IBM in its name. It was later changed to OKCPCUG due to a possible lawsuit from IBM. Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Adobe were the headliners. They gave presentations that drew the hundreds and provided wonderful giveaways of full versions of their software. You could always expect the introduction of new versions of their products would be a big event. Much like the way Samsung and Apple launch new hardware today. We had more than a dozen different SIGs that touched on every aspect of computing. Our club offered classes that were always full usually having a waiting list. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were treated like rock stars. The club is still in existence with a much smaller membership roster. The reason, no freebies and an older and dying members.

Bill

</comment><comment><USER34> My first user group was Decus. I still have an original "flea circus" (aka field service) leather toolkit but it is missing the tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to include a photo of the toolkit... even just its logo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was a member of "The Northwest of Us", which was a play on Apple's tagline for the original Mac, "The computer for the rest of us." It was in Chicago's northwest suburbs (Palatine, Arlington Heights, Rolling Meadows area).

This was during the late 90s, early 2000s. At the time it was a great way to introduce less technical users to the Internet and various computer tools they might not know about.

The thing that eventually made it not worth my time was that as time passed, it was more and more newbies, and less and less technical stuff. They eventually spun off a programmer's group and I pretty much stopped attending the main meetings and just attended the developer meetings.

A typical main meeting was about 3 hours long. It would start with anybody from the audience asking questions and the techies would answer them for about 30 minutes. Then it would be followed by an hour or two of guest speakers doing product demoes or sometimes members of the group presenting something they thought would interest the group. It would wrap up with a raffle that usually included a give away of whatever was demoed.

After going to these meetings for a year or so, it just became too much. 3 hours once a month on a Saturday is a lot of time to spend for what ultimately wasn't much reward. I did enjoy meeting the people who attended, as they were a fairly diverse crowd from very young to very old across a spectrum of different lifestyles - high school and junior high-aged kids, moms and dads, small business owners, etc.

In fact, I had my own small business at the time selling graphics software. One guy I met there was a retired motion graphics artist who had worked on news and talk shows in the 70s and 80s before they used computers for that! It was fascinating to hear him talk about the methods they used to use. I do miss making those sorts of connections, but don't miss the hours of boring product demoes.

</comment><comment><USER36> I was active in the Ubuntu Massachusetts Local Community (LoCo) Group from ~2007 - 2009. We had occasional meetups in Boston, did some release parties where we handed out some nice Ubuntu swag, had installfests at the MIT Media Lab, and helped maintain some Ubuntu computers for the community in the South End Technology Center in Boston. I don't remember how big we were, I think maybe a dozen or so pretty active members and another few dozen lurkers? I was disappointed that the group faded out a bit by the time I got back to Boston after college.

Here's a link to our old site: [https://web.archive.org/web/20110930172321/http://ubuntu- mas...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110930172321/http://ubuntu- massachusetts.com/)

</comment><comment><USER37> [http://www.pcug.org.au/wp/](http://www.pcug.org.au/wp/)

It was quite a thing back in its hey day.

Had a shop front, a regular magazine, hosted a BBS, and held regular meetings with door prizes (I think I won a mouse once). When the internet came along they offered isp services and I remember connecting via trumpet winsock and then Netscape navigator.

I was just a kid at the time, but I still remember reading through the magazine when it came, and I think I may have attended some of their training courses as a kid amongst the adults.

I don't know if they were affiliated with the computer fairs (semi regular events held in schools and community halls where everyone came to sell/buy computer and tech parts), but they were another pretty central part of the culture at the time.

</comment><comment><USER38> I was in an Apple II user group in Brazil, mid 80's. It was called "Clube dos Applemaníacos".

<comment><USER39> Ha, I was in "Clube do CoCo" for TRS-80 Color in Porto Alegre / Brazil, in mid-80s.

Our main focus was CoCo, but a couple of folks had Apple II, and soon MSX started to show up.

(ps: good to see you here! Hope all is well)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Anybody in a modern user group? I know of Homebrew Website Clubs - [https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club](https://indieweb.org/Homebrew_Website_Club)

I guess robotics clubs are still going strong.

<comment><USER41> Boston Linux and UNIX Users -- blu.org.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was in the Boston Computer Society. The one really interesting project was a crazy Harvard professor who was installing Mac computers in Eastern Europe after the revolution.

I went over, met my wife at a university, and have been happily married for almost 30 years.

<comment><USER43> Also re:BCS to get an idea of what a big deal it was in the day they got Steve Jobs to basically reprise his announcement of NeXT in Boston's Symphony Hall for BCS members.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm not old enough to have been around in the day of the original user groups, but I'm pretty active on Meetup these days, finding other developers in my city using similar languages and tools.

Curious to know what the contrasts are of the golden days and modern day.

<comment><USER45> Yeah same goes for me, I am activr in meetup groups and used to be in a "maker space" for more hardware-oriented stuff. (Toys like drones, 3D printers, Raspberry Pi stuff).

I am curious about the difference as well - my guess is that now it's pretty mainstream so there's no real "group / niche" feeling.

Certainly feel that way about some gaming communities I was in in the early 2000s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I was a member of an Apple user group in the 1980s as a young kid. Things I remember:

\- someone remarked how sorry they felt for people who had to type on IBM keyboards.

\- someone explained the difference between a serial and parallel bus to me.

\- only one or two of the adult members had a clue about programming, others were early adopters of various programs. Guidance on how to learn to program or what to buy/read was minimal and unhelpful.

\- The leader of the group had cut is teeth on the Lisa and would mutter comparisons about the Lisa when using the Apple machines.

\- The group met at the local Apple authorized retailer.

\- The early Apple enthusiasts were (in hindsight) pretty cynical about Tandy, TI, etc. In hindsight I really think that was foolish of them.

</comment><comment><USER47> Back in the eighties I was the founder (and president for several years) of a Danish user group for BBC/Acorn computers (called Quercus). We included all computers from Acorn ranging from the Atom and the various versions of the BBC and Master up to the new RISC based Archimedes computers. This was before the internet, but we established a BBS and had a lot of fun. We had a reunion a few years back where people could play with a BBC model B and a Raspberry Pi.

</comment><comment><USER48> I was in two MSX user groups in 1984 and onward in the Netherlands. One was for all kinds of usage and one was for 'hackers'. I was teaching people at both and learning at the hacker one. It was great fun dragging computers, eprom programmers, boxes with diskettes and sometimes boxes with electronics (like memory chips and soldering irons) to the crappy community house to have a sunday of fun.

</comment><comment><USER49> I was fairly active in the mid-1990s with a Bay Area group called the Software Entrepreneurs' Forum (SEF, later called the Software Forum, and still later the Software Developers' Forum).

Alan Cooper [1] was running the group at the time, and two of their events stand out in my mind.

Bill Gates spoke at a dinner meeting. Fran Finnegan [2] and Alan and I sat at a front table. In the question and answer period, Fran started heckling Bill about undocumented APIs that Microsoft used in their own apps. Bill said "there are no undocumented APIs in DOS or Windows, and if there were, there's this thing called the publishing industry that would find them and write about them."

I was a regular contributor to Microsoft Systems Journal at the time, so as we were walking to the buffet line after the talk, I introduced myself to Bill. He said, "Michael Geary? I read all your articles!"

Will Hearst [3] spoke at another meeting about marketing your product and company. As part of his talk he showed some TV commercials and commented on them. The most memorable was "Points of View" from The Guardian:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SsccRkLLzU)

Besides being part of a newspaper publishing family, Will is also a mathematician and at the time was an AWK programmer. (I don't know if he's kept with it, but it wouldn't surprise me.)

Will's interest in math and programming was fairly well known in the SEF community. After the meeting I overheard someone say, "I thought he was going to talk about technical stuff, but it was just marketing." After all, why would you want to hear about marketing in a Software _Entrepreneurs '_ Forum meeting?

[1] [https://web.archive.org/web/20190507180438/http://www.cooper...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190507180438/http://www.cooper.com/alan/father_of_vb.html)

[2] [http://www.secinfo.com/](http://www.secinfo.com/)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst_III)

</comment><comment><USER50> I really wanted to go to my local 2600 meetup after talking to them on IRC but my introversion/social-anxiety got the better of me.

</comment><comment><USER51> Friend of mine introduced me to his friend's step-dad who was a unix guru and I started attending the everett linux user's group for a few years. We had some fun over the years and made some fun projects happen. The most interesting of which was a computer with 3 motherboards and one power supply, and 2 of the nodes would netboot from the first.

</comment><comment><USER52> I lead a 42 year old Mac User Group still going strong. [https://www.wap.org/](https://www.wap.org/) I have a short video clip of Walt Mossberg waxing wistfully about how his tech journalism career started with early Pi sessions swapping components and software. May I share that with you?

Jonathan Bernstein

</comment><comment><USER53> My parents were apart the Atari club in Eugene Oregon, US. I grew up with the 16bit, 32bit, the STE and the Mega STE ataris before stopped making them in the early 90s. My parents still have them around. My earliest memories were loading games off of a cassette tape

</comment><comment><USER54> Claris Works users group was awesome. They published a newsletter with a lot of great content on both the software and desktop publishing in general.

It's still around in a way: [https://www.awug.org/](https://www.awug.org/)

</comment><comment><USER55> I joined a Perl user group for a very short time. I live in a rural area and drove a couple hours to attend a meeting. It wasn't at all what I expected. It was basically a Larry Wall fan club.

I have no problem with Larry or fan clubs. They're just not my thing.

<comment><USER56> FWIW, I think you've touched on a problem with longer existing user groups: they turn into meetings of long-time friends that like each other's company, but have little to do with the original reason of coming together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> 3 of us started the Kalamazoo Linux User's Group (KLUG) back in 1998 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Still going strong today: [https://kalamazoolinux.org/](https://kalamazoolinux.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> What made you decide to do so? How did you go about it... posting flyers in computer stores, or what?

<comment><USER57> exactly that actually, we posted a flyer in a computer store, I think it was called "Cybertech" and had a couple ppl show up the first night, then a few more, then a few more. We started having a table at computer shows helping people install linux on their desktops, and finally we ended up taking over a cybercafe and converted all of the desktops to linux. You could run a web browser, play doom, it was fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Do you mean something like these: [https://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups](https://wiki.python.org/moin/LocalUserGroups) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not looking for a list of user groups. I'm looking for people's experiences with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> [https://www.tpug.ca/](https://www.tpug.ca/)

</comment><comment><USER10> My high school (Leland HS) didn't have a named group, so much as what would be called now an extended hackerspace / "AP computer class" around the mid-/late-90's. It was full of random PS/2 25 and 30, PC jrs and random donations and casts-off. A lot of students were working on VGA/audio demos, code, trading wares and writing joke viruses.

Fond memories of pointless techno-factoids:

0\. It's possible to instantly lock-up a system by trying to copy any file to one of the special IBM DOS reserved file names like CLOCK$ or some-such. _COPY CON CLOCK$_ or _COPY CON > CLOCK$_ ?

1\. The giant capacitors of the linear PSUs held enough charge so you could flip a machine's power switch on-and-off fast enough without it resetting.

2\. It was awesome to code on systems with actual IBM VGA adapters, and more challenging to code towards 286's lacking FPUs rather than 486's.

3\. Floppy disks were terrible: slow and prone to developing errors if you looked at them disapprovingly. If you wanted something, you better make two copies because looking at a disk wrong would lead to corrupted sectors. Wares was a slow business back then.

4\. 10Base2 was awesome so long as no one disconnected the line between nodes or either terminator.

5\. There wasn't much open source back then. In fact, the prevailing paradigm led to pointless code hoarding for things that weren't ever going to be products. And, so much was lost and less exchange of knowledge occurred because of it.

6\. There were some really artistic coders in the bunch who combined mod tracking and VGA tricks into awesome demos.

7\. Oh and we had a "satanist" who I think was trying to troll society as much as possible.

8\. I remember writing my own "rawrite" floppy image saver that could copy 5¼" and 3½" disks including DMF disks too.

9\. At home, I was probably the only kid with my own computer on a UPS and networked access to an HP LaserJet 4. I remember there was a class where a final (test) could have one (1) 3" x 5" (7 x 15 cm) notecard worth of notes, and so I used WordPerfect and a 0.5 pt font to print out over 50 lines per size and 4 columns of text on each size. Thank you 600 dpi and youthful better than 20/20 vision! I don't think many word-processors (except a publishing system like InDesign or LaTeX) allow text in decimal fractions < 1.0 pt.

Without Dr. Thaw letting kids do their own thing for the most part, I don't think it would've been as cool.

IIRC, Nolan Bushnell visited my AP Physics class, although I didn't understand his significance to tech until later in life.

PS: I was about 6 and was taken with my family to see this random house under construction in the hills that had a castle theme. More enticing that whatever it was about, the steepness of the grade of the street in front of it seemed like a good place to launch a skateboard or see how fast my bicycle would go. :D Years later, I found out it was Woz's house. |-d :-B

</comment><comment><USER60> I started the "Oric User Group" in Perth, WA, in 1983. We met about 6 times, each time mostly spent trading tapes. I had a dual-cassette boombox that was seriously pushed into service, and we also had "type-a-thons" where the more competent keyboardists among us would type in magazine listings, which others read aloud.

Was pretty fun, but soon enough we all started meeting on BBS'es, and moved to other systems, and I got on the Internet and discovered ftp and gopher and usenet. The physical meetings didn't seem relevant at that point.

Then, in the 90's, I got the bug and started a few other user groups, mostly oriented around digital synths and other studio gear. We used mailing lists to keep everyone organised and for a while there were tens of thousands of us, on various lists, discussing all kinds of things. Lists seemed to work better than USENET - not everyone that could set up mail somewhere had the chops for NNTP ..

Some of the folks from these groups still meet up for a jam every few years .. its indeed been a situation that we've all grown up together.

And of course now its all been replaced by social media and the big guns. Some of our members went on to be quite famous and don't quite have the need to cahoot with the riffraff, others have gone on to do other things, and indeed .. some of us have passed away.</comment>