YC genuinely changed the game by making seed funding more accessible. Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and the entire YC team saw how broken the system was and fixed it.
It was ridiculously hard to raise seed before YC. I remember pitching a group of 8 angry partners straight out of a cigar filled banker like black and white movie around 2013.
Credit where it’s due. They fixed a broken market.
That's arguable. More accessible for whom? It was - before YC - and it still is hard to raise seed. Not much changed in this system. Only that a player like YC got too big - and has weakened the position of bootstrapped founders. They also get to say on which ideas founders should work on - and the founders are closely listening instead of building things they really believe in and care about.
It was ridiculously hard to raise seed before YC. I remember pitching a group of 8 angry partners straight out of a cigar filled banker like black and white movie around 2013.
Credit where it’s due. They fixed a broken market.