It seems like it would be difficult to just have a public conversation about a topic. Do you think about that much when you write?

After I wrote this one, I had to go back and armor it by pre-empting anything I could imagine anyone willfully misunderstanding to use as a weapon in comment threads. The whole of footnote 1 is such armor for example. I essentially anticipated all the "No, what I said was" type comments I'd have had to make on HN and just included them in the essay.

It's a uniquely bad combination to both write essays and run a forum. It's like having comments enabled on your blog whether you want them or not.

At least some of the people who are questioning you are probably doing so out of intellectual curiosity, rather than animosity. You probably know that intellectually, but for many people—including me—it's sometimes hard to remember that in the heat of the reading moment.

Of course, my blog posts don't get nearly as much attention as your essays, and I don't have the problem of having people try to draw attention to themselves in the hopes of being remembered when applications are considered for the next YC round.

Your posts are more technical in nature, and can benefit from debate. Other people might write things that are more personal, or opinion, or thinking-aloud, and while a little bit of good-natured feedback from trusted people might be appreciated, lots of nitpicking and debate and very public arguing is not.

The point I was trying to make was that I would be disappointed if what pg clearly saw as a problem was "fixed", because for me it's a feature.

(I'm not picking on you btw, I have a tremendous amount of respect for you. But I don't think your desire for debate on what you write is suitable justification for other people putting up with the same, especially when it's discouraging them from writing.)

This is perhaps the worst thing about discourse on the internet. If you and I were having a conversation in room, you'd never pretend to not understand me to rip into me (maybe to understand my point better.) But on the internet, so many people are just trying to score points that it's nearly impossible to have a conversation.

1, that's terrible. So many benefit from the ability to read (and interact with) your opinions. It's so much more valuable than a random once-off Reddit AMA. It's a shame the value is reduced through the actions of a few.

2, this community attracts young smart people, exactly those who might want to match wits with you. Some of it is valuable, some is just annoying. I'm reminded of the niceness value in discussion; if everyone was nice about it, maybe you wouldn't feel as apprehensive or besieged and we could still have a good debate to extract the maximum benefit.

In the end, I hope you find some way to care less about the opinions, because what you do and write about are so valuable. In the spirit of "If you aren't writing enough wrong stuff, maybe you're being too cautious."

You don't give your detractors enough credit. Many of these misunderstandings are not willful, and actively seeking to avoid them is almost always good practice on your part. (In my opinion.) For the record, I found footnote 1 illuminating.

I'm sure that the intense scrutiny you get would annoy any writer. But I think it genuinely makes your essays stronger, too, and I hope you don't hate it too much.

I think at least half of the misunderstandings that arise in HN comment threads are honest misunderstandings.

The essay reminds me a bit of the argument that the Native Americans actually got a great deal when they sold Manhattan for $24, because that money would be worth about $30 trillion today if it had been invested at a return of just 7.5% for the past 385 years. I think it's interesting and worthwhile to explore these sorts of mathematical ideas, but at the same time it's impossible to make good business decisions without fundamentally basing them on human needs, human scales, and human timeframes.

What would happen if you split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and YC Black Swan, and placed founders into the groups post-interview? People who were placed in YC Classic could continue to have the expectation of ~100% demo day success they do now, while the people placed in YC Black Swan would be told "I find your idea interesting and we'll let you in but don't expect funding after demo day." People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections if they wanted.

There are a bunch of problems with this approach, but I wouldn't be totally surprised if way more than 30% of YC Black Swan was funded.

While a theme was that the outsized returns can come from ideas which sound bad, it doesn't necessarily say that all outsized returns come from bad-sounding ideas.

Not only that, but I think reading the essay will show that the outsized returns are not known until several years after demo day.

Sometimes bad ideas are just bad ideas. In the Venn intersection between bad-sounding-ideas and good-ideas - the 'bad sounding and not good' is a much bigger area.

To me, the entire essay is about making sure that institutionally, the bad-sounding-but-ultimately-good ideas are not left out. Trying to further identify and silo them at application stage would be even more fraught.

In a world where potential founders are making a choice between YC or doing the startup anyway without YC, sure. But the world is more complicated than that, and I'm sure there are plenty of potential founders whose decisions are informed by what they hear from YC.

[...] split up the batches into two groups, YC Classic and YC Black Swan [...] People could take the Black Swan offers as rejections if they wanted.

This sounds like a very good model, in that it would separate the "is this something YC wants to invest in?" axis from the "does Paul Graham think that I'll succeed?" axis.

Let's say that p_accept is the probability that YC accepts the founders of the next Dropbox. YC itself cannot optimize for p_accept because of the factors mentioned above: instead, it has to optimize for p_apply * p_accept * p_fund, the product of the chances that those golden founders will apply to the program, be accepted, and find the funding they need to grow and thrive.

With the hypothetical YC / YC Black Swan split, the original YC can optimize for p_apply * p_fund, and YC Black Swan can optimize for p_accept. Not only that, but since all Black Swan candidates would have started as applicants to YC, Black Swan's p_apply would equal that of the original YC. Numerate investors with the same sense of the power law as pg would take care of Black Swan's p_fund.

Thus, all the prestige, cultural appeal, and midsize exits would derive from the original YC, but all the power-law returns would emerge from Black Swan.

So, pg, new business model?

The main difference in branding for KV's funds is really only to the LPs, though they do mention it to founders on their website. They want to cover themselves in case the seed funding both doesn't return anything and looked to be imprudent in retrospect. Luckily I think they're doing well.

Vinod is actually quite explicit about trying to find black swans in his pitches :-)

The group-think effects are to be considered, before adopting this model. Am obviously not predicting anything, except perhaps this move might make the Black swans even more unpredictable.i.e: if you look at the Tableau of payoffs here(http://edge.org/conversation/the-fourth-quadrant-a-map-of-th...). this move can push investments from complex payoffs to very complex payoffs easily. Personally, i am likely to even shoot for the YC Classic group deliberately or in rare optimistic moments, the Black Swan group.

Would be interesting to learn why the black swans have done better then the normal batch, or why the normal batch did better or why it was a 50/50 split.

You might even learn that because a startup is considered as a black swan founders in that group work harder and thus have a higher success rate. This would really put into light debates about how much intelligence vs hard work may effect success rates in the world of startups.