In the early 2000s, Paul Graham and Jess Livingstone started YC to genuinely help technical individuals learn the basics of Silicon Valley to the point where individuals can 1) work on cool stuff and 2) raise capital.

In their own words, paraphrased, they saw smart people who had promise, broke, and wanted to see what they could provide. In a rough sense, I like to call this “cleaning up” a talent pool.

At one of my first investing jobs, I had a manager of mine that loved to recite something along the lines of, “I’m going to clean you up… make you into a real investor.”

At first, I hated this! So much! I felt like I had gone through enough personal grit, slept on enough couches, read enough Series exam test preps, done enough syndicate and angel rounds that I knew I already had the very real ability to sit down and access founders. And the truth is, I did. To this day, I can still put my money on that I definitely had that intelligence and ability.

What I lacked was Context.

As mentioned in PreFounder, VC is an investment in different talent pools. And when those talent pools begin to become more appetizing to institutional VC investment, VCs have this annoying, social thing where they expect this very confident, brilliant, creative individual (technical or not) to speak, write, act, learn, move and, again, speak exactly like they do.

Is this bad?

I can’t reiterate enough this does not actually impact any talent pools ability to be talented, but moreso an unfair and real expectation of individuals stripped of their own individuality that have experienced conforming pressure in other parts of their lives and apply it to work.

Any person in a specifically marginalized group understands that this pressure can come from individuals who mean well (parents, teachers, friends, etc.) but it’s counterintuitive to someone who is making the choice to be Loose in their life.

How to make it work

This part is easier than you might think. Again, I’ll grasp from my own experience learning Context. You need to provide a loving, personal, encouraging environment. A place that has tons of resources, patience, and real-time curriculum.

This is the importance of YC, culturally. Granted, whether of not it stays like this for decades to come is a different story, but one thing is for sure - this is the way it started.

Nontechnicals: Cleanup
Is this bad?
How to make it work