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- Hacker News
- Wonder if people going to this will have the same infamous sense of arrogance and entitlement that is common to Y combinator folks?
Source:
by ViktorRay - Hot take but I don't mind startup founders being plucky and a bit arrogant/naieve. They need it.by alansaber
- What was he replying to?by NewJazz
- Mark Cuban posting about a sense of arrogance and entitlement is certainly something. There's a reason behind the character of HBO Silicon Valley's Russ Hanneman...
[spiderman pointing at spiderman.gif]
by walrus01 - This type of group is exactly what develop that feeling of entitlement and arrogance. It would be very surprising if that’s not the case.
That being said, all the ex YC people I interacted with in person have been awesome. But there is definitely a YC entitled group
by dgellow - Having been through YC, there's certainly some of this, but the overwhelming majority of founders were pretty down to earth. People generally just want to solve hard problems.by nostrebored
- How could that possibly happen to a hand-picked group of YC's enterprise-AI founders?!by Den_VR
- Being about 'AI' is mandatory now, I guess?by listic
- This isn’t just AI…it’s ‘enterprise-AI’.
It’s AI, but with more bureaucracy and politics.
- > The Early Access Network is an invite-only group of senior technology leaders who want to see what's coming before it's on anyone's shortlist.
> Four times a year, we put a hand-picked group of YC's enterprise-AI founders in a room with buyers who can actually run a pilot. Fall 2026 kicks off on October 22 in San Francisco.
Hi Claude!
by ElProlactin - AI copy from the AI company incubator is hardly the worse sinby alansaber
- What clues did you use in this to spot Claude?by ra0x3
- It's been obvious for years that AI will bifurcate society even more between the haves and have nots, contrary to "democratizing AI" niceties espoused by big AI CEOs.
It was less obvious that access will be further gated by an Old Boy Network. I guess the frontier model whitelists of yestermonth were a portent.
by avaer - Nature has shown variety wins over inbreeding, I don't see how AI will change thisby random3
- Seems just like another case of collusion - continuing the story of VCs pushing all of their companies to use each other and 'stay within the network'. The good news (kinda) for the rest of us, is that many of these VC marketing/product/'strategy' people aren't actually all that competent - this is literally the best they can come up with.by aleqs
- What's the "old boy network" thing here? This looks like a sales outreach event. It's connecting enterprise startups that want to do pilots with enterprises that will consider pilots.by tptacek
- YCombinator has its biases, but I don't know of many other investment firms that have a university style, "application" process. It's almost always, warm-intros you need.
This Early access network is just an intro system once you get through the Application process (like Universities having a job fair).
by pj_mukh - The future isn't found in consensus or groups.by rglover
- I wonder what the dress code is.by zatkin
- "business causal" ofc :)
- My guess - next round of this will be for pay. This is the soft-launch before they monetize this "exclusive access" .by behole
- nope.
- No but it reinforces the value of the YC brand. VC is always looking for an edgeby alansaber
- Help me understand. The purpose is to help founders get sales contracts? What's the value for the buyers? Acquire people before they become competitors?by 4lx87
- understand what founders are building, which helps them deploy AI internally. you'd be surprised how hard this is to do in a big (tech) company. also, yes there is a peer group aspect.
- Usually the rule of a CTO/CIO is to foster innovation. Getting a custom solution from a big name VC helps then fulfil their JD within the company.by alansaber
- This is interesting, but I think most enterprise AI buyers probably aren't looking to buy from the current batch; they're just too volatile at that stage. This does seem like an opportunity for cross-pollination where early start-ups get to test their product signals and enterprises get to see what's on the cutting edge.
This seems more beneficial to the founders because the the enterprises could instead just choose to do some research on the start-ups. It's not like the start-ups are keeping their knowledge quiet because for them to survive they need to convince everybody what their doing is meaningful.
by jzelinskie - Right, the point of this from YC's perspective is to identify and pre-qualify the minority of enterprise AI buyers that can move quickly. Even those buyers aren't going to research and inbound to early-stage YC startups very often. The startups aren't intentionally staying quiet, but often they haven't nailed product-market fit and/or messaging yet.by tfehring
- > The Early Access Network is an invite-only group of senior technology leaders who want to see what's coming before it's on anyone's shortlist.
> Four times a year, we put a hand-picked group of YC's enterprise-AI founders in a room with buyers who can actually run a pilot.
Seems like a win-win.
by wxw - This is mostly AI companies needing a large investment (maybe larger than YC's standard 500k) to get off the ground, and so YC now starts acting as market maker (more than it already is), by literally getting people that are primed to buy (filling out the form where minimum amount is 500k, talking about their last funded pilot, company size, etc), so YC can now say this is the size of validated opportunities, so their (potentially higher) seed is now derisked, but also they don't have to wait for their startups to 10x in 3 years, they can 20x in 12 months.
The startup however, will do the thing they advised them not to do, which is tailor their roadmap to a large customer.
But yes, this is early exit/rugpull planning. If it weren't, it would not be AI exclusive and I don't think companies are that excited to know the latest and brightest AI companies. They can simply wait for the market. But they create FOMO, and now they open a small window, make calls to know how much you'll commit and all the FOMO execs will fly in. I'll be fun.
by figassis