I was at YC when Milner and Shpilman arrived. It was about 630pm, we'd just had office hours with PG, and I saw the both of them hanging around discreetly in the lobby.
About 5-10 mins passed and eventually I felt bad and walked over and asked if I could help, to which Shpilman replied, in a thick Russian accent, that he was hear to see Harj. Yuri was keeping himself to himself. I walked over and told Harj they were a couple of ppl waiting to meet him, then went and sat with my cofounder at the end of one of the long tables.
I jokingly said to my cofounder that they must be the DST guys, wanting to invest in YC. I had no idea I was correct, they were very low profile.
There is a second installment to this interview coming tomorrow on why Harjeet joined YC. The most interesting part for me was that when Yuri and Ron first said they wanted to invest in all YC startups, he thought they were joking. pg wasn't even in the meeting and was doing office hours. That's quite revealing and says a lot about YC's priorities I thought.
I wish Taggar had addressed how this is going to impact the application review process. It sounds like the YC partners already have their hands full with the number of applications coming in each round, and I assume those numbers are shooting through the roof this round. Are all of the partners still going to read all of the applications, or are they going to need some triage this time around?
I doubt anything will change. We've always had to cope with rising application numbers, and we've constantly been tweaking the system to deal with them. Between more partners, more alumni, and more software, we'll probably manage without any externally visible change.
"[...] money at seed stage has become commoditized."
Investors have always waived around their experience and business connections as differentiators. It's still going to be in their best interests to differentiate themselves.
More competition is always going to be bad news for second-rate offerings in any market.
Does this mean more seed investments on the whole?
About 5-10 mins passed and eventually I felt bad and walked over and asked if I could help, to which Shpilman replied, in a thick Russian accent, that he was hear to see Harj. Yuri was keeping himself to himself. I walked over and told Harj they were a couple of ppl waiting to meet him, then went and sat with my cofounder at the end of one of the long tables.
I jokingly said to my cofounder that they must be the DST guys, wanting to invest in YC. I had no idea I was correct, they were very low profile.