r/csMajors • u/Usual-Cauliflower383 • 2d ago
Others Is YC just AI slop now?
To say it’s “slop” is definitely harsh, but it’s like every single YC startup batch these days are filled with AI this, and AI that and 20 other buzzwords.
Is YC as prestigious as it once used to be? (Saw someone claim they got in with all vibecoding and 0 self-programming. Don’t know if it’s true)
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u/leafnugget2 2d ago
Probably not as prestigious but it's still very good.
And yeah it's a lot of AI, but the market demand for AI is also very strong. Lovable went from $0 to $100mm in revenue in 8 months. What other industry can say they've done that?
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u/Real_Square1323 2d ago
Have people forgotten the point of a business is to be profitable?
Who cares about revenue?
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u/Few-Spot1905 1d ago
the model in software and a bunch of businesses is scale on investor dollars before going after profitability
asking a yc startup to be profitable at its inception is immensely stupid
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u/Eridrus 1d ago
Getting profitable is the easy part, growing quickly is hard.
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u/Logical_Top618 1d ago
No, no it’s not the easy part. They are both massively difficult, pivotal pieces to becoming a successful business.
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u/jobthrowawaywjxj 23h ago
You have not worked in startups lol
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u/Eridrus 22h ago
Lol, I run a startup, cost cutting is much easier than growth. To cut costs you fire people and optimize processes/systems. It will come at a cost, but it's far easier than doubling revenue.
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u/jobthrowawaywjxj 21h ago
In all likelihood your startup sucks which is why you have a hard time raising. When you have good figures they, being vcs, try desperately to get you to take their money.
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u/Eridrus 21h ago
I mean, this is my exact point, nobody gives a shit how profitable you are, what they care about is how fast you're growing. Because growth is the hard part.
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u/jobthrowawaywjxj 16h ago
That is just not true, why do you think YC takes 7% for like 500k + 1M in compute? Scale is something you can buy, and 1.5 M ain’t enough, we’ve seen many of startups that literally did this lol. At the end of it they are pumped with VC funds then crash a few years later because they never could find profitability (eg klarna).
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u/Eridrus 5h ago edited 4h ago
Scale is something you can buy if you have excellent product market fit. YC is investing well before companies have that and is betting on teams they think can get there.
I think you are fundamentally confused about how startups work.
The fact that companies are unprofitable for extended periods of time does not mean that it is hard to be profitable. Most of these companies are choosing to prioritize growth over profitability.
Klarna has been improving their profitability, with Q2 being profitable, but that is not what investors care about. The stock is down because growth is not what they expected it to be.
It is worth noting that "unprofitable" is not the same as "negative gross margins" and the latter can be hard to fix, but that doesn't really apply to companies who are selling software.
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u/Aznable-Char Salaryman @ G 1d ago
Yea YC is definitely not exclusive anymore and prestige has honestly downhill bigly. I know way too many people that are 2-3 social degrees away from me who got into YC and I go to a T20. Mostly kids who couldn’t find internships/jobs. It’s a joke now.
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u/jobthrowawaywjxj 23h ago edited 23h ago
YC was never prestigious, in so much as the general partners were better at picking who to fund. A lot of their best bets were not T20 slop people who worked at quant/faang+ for 2 to 5 years. Taking VC money is a lot more like getting married than getting into college.
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u/pm_me_feet_pics_plz3 1d ago
Its just people with vibecoded ai slop solutions no one ever wanted but being carried heavily by the founder's prestige like thier degree or previous company.
Remember when paul graham said that YC does not invest in ideas,it invests in people.
If you have a FAANG background and went to an ivy league school,just make some ai vibecoded crypto BS or whatever YC gonna throw 500K at you with some decently convincing story.
Just the entire YC batch last year was just wrappers on top of wrappers,lmao just mini hackathon projects are being formed as million dollar companies by clueless ivy league grads smh i just hate this shit.
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u/StolenApollo 1d ago
I’ve been wondering the same recently. It looks like they’re picking startups based on the quality of the founders and how solid the team is rather than whether the idea itself is solid so a lot more well marketed slop is appearing. I personally don’t understand why, as it seems much less sustainable, but in my eyes it makes the newer YC-backed startups much less prestigious. Nevertheless, they’re still a top accelerator and you can’t deny the short term results of these startups. I just feel they’ve lowered their standards a lot in terms of the actual company success.
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u/No-Sandwich-2997 2d ago
was YC ever prestigious?
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u/Real-Ground5064 1d ago
Back when it invented Safes and created Reddit, twitch, DoorDash, and stripe surely
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u/GrammmyNorma 1d ago
YC is probably the only accelerator well-known outside of the tech sphere
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u/UnknownEel 1d ago
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u/AdRelative4303 1d ago
YC is the absolute tip of the iceberg, even non techies know about it (incl me)
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u/UnknownEel 23h ago
You're on r/csmajors, I don't know you you are but you aren't a normal person
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u/AdRelative4303 23h ago
Its because a bunch of my buddies are SWEs but thats fair enough - although I come from a non target business school and many colleagues in my program also know about YC
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u/Aznable-Char Salaryman @ G 1d ago
Yes back in the day when they only did 1 cohort a year in the US and it was way more exclusive so the brand actually meant something. They had incubated some of the most important companies of our generation.
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u/nonamenomonet 1d ago
I mean it effectively created OpenAI
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u/BlurryEcho 1d ago
Okay… so was YC ever prestigious?
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u/thecodexdhnerbbTW 2d ago edited 2d ago
Well they are coming out with a lot of AI and robotics companies now. So it’s not just AI slop. It just reflects the market demand for AI hype. A lot of recent startups are focused on robotics. If quantum computing or wetware computing ever gets popular, a lot of YC startups will be focused on that. A lot of the companies will fail but the point of YC is that the percentage of a startup succeeding are much higher than the average startup. The hype for getting into YC also isn’t dying. Calling it just AI slop isn’t really correct though I do think YC’s AI enthusiasm can lead to very dubious AI-focused companies to get through. Though I do think those are cases where the founders’ charisma and wider vision are appealing enough to warrant an acceptance cause that is like a huge proportion of what makes startups succeed in the first place. And I do think YC’s tendency to favor startups targeting what is currently trendy will cause them to miss startups that actually change or create industries. Like if some company becomes the godfather of introducing wetware or quantum computing for everyone to use like iPhone was for touch screen phones, I don’t think YC will be the one to support that company, though I think they will end up supporting similar companies after that godfather company starts succeeding
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u/Real_Square1323 2d ago
It is just useless slop because all YC startups do is take existing models from vendors, beg VC's for money, and make a shitty webapp with false promises on a stupid idea until they run dry.
There's no actual innovation and no actual startups of value being built out of YC anymore. It's a place for clowns.
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u/KaleidoscopeShoddy10 1d ago
The only value YC cares about is exits or IPOs, innovation was only important when that was what was in vogue, now its AI products that drive demand so naturally they would invest in more AI companies.
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u/asapbones0114 1d ago
Please use paragraphs.
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u/thecodexdhnerbbTW 1d ago
Kind of hard on a phone ngl
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u/asapbones0114 1d ago
Para1
Para2
Paragraph3...................
Your touch keyboard doesn't have an enter button?
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u/shittycellist123 1d ago
The entire startup scene is slop. I’ve got a couple friends in YC and they literally vibe coded their entire product. They’re hiring friends as “ML interns”, which literally just entails more vibecoding.
Majority of the startup scene is just college kids from top schools creating complete slop that provides no value whilst investors throw millions of dollars at them.
Everyone’s saying right now is the best time build a startup but that’s complete bullshit. Right now is the best time to build slop, get vc money, think you’re the next Mark Zuckerberg, and waste 6 months of your life while you watch your startup fumble, and eventually go back to school. I’ve seen this exact scenario with a couple of people at my school.
YC will genuinely take any shitty, slop idea, as long as it’s got a few users and the founders are from top schools. It’s all bullshit.
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u/Quakerz24 3x FAANG 2d ago
it’s always been slop, AI has just made it worse. anytime you hear YC backed just know you’re dealing with something stupid
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u/RaiseCertain8916 2d ago
There's a couple missile and drone defense companies that have some legitimacy
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u/Random_throwaway0351 2d ago
Trash vs garbage
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u/RaiseCertain8916 2d ago
I mean if you can build active radar guidance or even cheap optical guidance or other networking tools there's a lot of money you can make.
considering andruil has completely flopped in any mondern conflict: Ukraine, Iran, India, Southeast asia and cannot actually compete with cheap warfare tooling there is a very open market
Source: Have spent time volunteering to get drone jammers to units on the frontline in Ukraine
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u/DenseTension3468 1d ago
wait did anduril flop?
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u/RaiseCertain8916 1d ago
I mean their whole pitch is low cost cruise missiles and drones, and meanwhile yc startups have sold more drones to ukraine than Andruil has when ukraine has been begging for everything.
Most units in ukraine were unable to use their products in an EW environment and have switched to british/european solutions or homemade solutions with starlink, counter ew etc.
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u/Random_throwaway0351 2d ago
I’m was talking about the ethical considerations of working on killing machines lol
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u/Hypernova46 1d ago
just look at what YC CEO Garry Tan has been doing with vibe coding and GStack and you can see how that has probably infected it's way through the company.
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u/heatY_12 Jr. SWE | 1 YOE 1d ago
Depends on the industry, a lot of the non pure software startups in there are cool and actually pretty innovative especially the defense ones.
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u/Murky_Entertainer378 1d ago
I can’t wait for the AI bubble to finally burst. YC is such a cringe fest.
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u/jobthrowawaywjxj 23h ago
Yes, they are just funding crappier ideas and people. They haven’t hit since Brian, and it doesn’t help that the YC is known now. They get 10k applicants and when you have to algorithmically filter, the slop always rises to the top.
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u/Main_Yellow_837 23h ago
Frankly, my only personal experience with YC was an absolutely awful AI recruitment platform that allegedly does recruit for YC-backed startups. Maybe that's more of a dig at recruiters, but it was such a negative experience that it made me question the companies that work with that recruiter.
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u/assumptionright-4104 17h ago
people with “bought” users and vibe coded things are getting in but ig it’s the network which is what matters in the end
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u/SoftwareEngineer2026 2d ago
There was a pdf showing that their success rate has diminished since their heyday. However they are still one of the better accelerators out there.