Y Combinator: Google Traps Zenter in Coding Zoo
By DONNA BOGATIN • Mar 22nd, 2008 • Category: BIG PICTURE
Google engineers are no better than caged animals in a zoo, so suggests Paul Graham in a rambling, anti-big business manifesto. Why then did the Y Combinator evangelist broker the move of his ramen noodle eating Zenter coding protogees straight over to the multi-billion dollar massive Googleplex cage?
“The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things,” Graham unilaterally declares in ominous warning to developers still “in the wild.” Y Combinator’s inelegant ode to self-made code: “It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.”
Paul Graham’s purported distaste for corporate engineering is belied, however, by his self-interested parading of his micro-financed Y Combinator startups to the big, bad–but gloriously deep pocketed–Google, Microsoft, Yahoo…zookeepers
Graham rallies that well-heeled, respected, Fortune 500 engineering pillars are unhealthy for the human condition. It is the Y Combinator self-serving agenda, though, that software developers ought to be wary of. Paul Graham warns engineering youth :
You weren’t meant to have a boss,…Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees.
Do not finance your startup with credit cards…It is a trap set by evil companies for the desperate and the foolish.
If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree?… the experience of college is warped in a bad way by the expectation that afterward you’ll be judged by potential employers.
What IS good for programmers, in Paul Graham‘s world? Sellout fast and cheaply to 1) first Y Combinator, and then 2) to the Google (animal) kingdom.
In the words of the (once) Google biz dev guru, Chris Sacca:
Y Combinator comes down to two kids in a room with two computers and ramen noodles for a summer.
How high then could Google theoretically value a few hundred man-hours of coding? How low can you go, is the more likely Y Combinator negotiating stance, supposedly on behalf of its stable of under nourished programmers.
Y Combinator prepares its prospective hacker teams for a rapid-fire sell-out strategy, probing:
Which companies would be most likely to buy you? If one wanted to buy you three months in, what’s the lowest offer you’d take?
Three months in may very well be the entire life cycle for many a Y Combinator backed “startup” with a low ball “exit” to look forward to! Is that any way for a financial backer to inspire an entrepreneur?
Y Combinator: Boot-camp for entrepreneurs, or low-rent hackathon?
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DONNA BOGATIN is the Founder & CEO of STARTUP ALPHA
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