Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins
fortune.com134 points by shscs911 19 hours ago
134 points by shscs911 19 hours ago
This is intersting.
Occasionally in YC founder circles a new founder will raise a bunch of money and then ask something like "What's the best way to invest all the money our company just raised?"
The responses are always along the lines of "Your startup is already risky. Don't innovate in areas of your business where the status quo is known to work. Innovate your product + technology, don't be innovative with your company's finances, HR, etc"
That advice always stuck with me. It just makes a lot of sense to do things in the most boring way possible, except where it matters (your competitive advantage <-- that's where you innovate, that's where you set yourself apart)
Running a startup is distracting enough. Doing things non-standard just adds to the list of distractions that you don't need as a founder.
YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged their companies to use products and services from other companies in their portfolio.
The simplest explanation is that this is a mostly symbolic move: They want to show that the stable coin and crypto companies they invest in are actually trusted by YC. It starts to look hypocritical if an investor is funding crypto companies and praising them as important breakthroughs, but not actually using them where it’s important.
> YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged their companies to use products and services from other companies in their portfolio.
Advising unproven risky businesses to depend on other unproven risky businesses? Doesn’t that just increase the likelihood that something goes wrong?
Does anyone remember being voluntold to use Skiff for email and calendar, instead of a product that actually handles timezones in event invites?
I'm convinced the point of YC must be something other than launching successful businesses
I mean it’s obvious that successful businesses are only a side effect of what the point is - a successful exit. And if one big success can be strongarmed to help other ventures exit successfully, they’ll do it.
Why wouldn’t they?
From the POV of YC, they don't mind too much if it is a bit risky for any given individual company if it increases the legitimacy and stability of their portfolio as a whole.
YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged their companies to use products and services from other companies in their portfolio.
Are you saying founders don't mount an FTP account using curlftpfs and access it using SVN?
But what advantages do stablecoins have?
Seigniorage accrues to private entities instead of the state, enriching the owners of those private entities rather than everyone in the state that issues the currency.
Faster and cheaper transactions that don't get locked up by the whims of a bureaucracy. They continue to operate on non-business days.
That’s also a downside: When your funds can be transferred away by anyone who happens to acquire the key without triggering any fraud prevention or additional verification checks, losing your entire bank account at 4AM Sunday morning becomes much easier.
This is why people who happen to own significant amount of crypto typically get hardware wallets
That would make it a single point of failure, no? Not a good idea if your company is riding on it.
multisig exists
Cryptocurrency recapitulates the history of the modern banking system, and illustrates the necessity of regulation on a daily basis.
Doesn’t that mean a home invader can break in, torture you a bit and walk off with your millions?
I think there was a rash of this kind of this kind of wrench cryptocurrency robberies in the Netherlands a few years ago.
Break in, bash owner about with a wrench, get coins. <Insert xkcd>
Yep, the meme in crypto community is that you can have all the digital security possible but it'll lose to the $5 wrench attack.
Yes, let's go back to hiding cash and gold under our beds. Maybe buy a machine gun so you can defend it from home intruders.
> Yes, let's go back to hiding [...] gold under our beds
The people that did exactly that never had to worry about (hyper)inflation...
Still, they have to worry about them and their family not being kidnapped.
Oh but hey, checkmate, burglar who is threatening to cut my daughter’s finger, my wallet is multisig !
[flagged]
I bet you can. And I bet that raising the limit takes you a few minutes at most. Or you need a better bank.
Why do you have a bank? Don’t you use crypto for all your needs? Or does crypto fail you in that?
If your bank doesn't want to raise the limits, there's probably good reasons behind that.
No, there's not. There are rarely good reasons behind what banks do because these are organizations that are run by mediocre people who are not incentivized to not suck. They don't care at all about anything. This "fraud prevention" thing only gets in my way and doesn't prevent the less sophisticated people from sending their money to India.
> If your bank doesn't want to raise the limits, there's probably good reasons behind that.
Why would their having reasons make me feel better when my payments don't go through? We complain when Apple plays nanny and makes their product a walled garden. How is a bank different? They should be doing their job without causing inconvenience for me.
Unnecessary rudeness.