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.
I think you are confused. I don’t care about the announcement, I’m specifically addressing a point from my parent comment, which I quoted. Again, this time with emphasis:
> YC, like most incubators, has always encouraged (…)
“Encouraging” means advising, advocating for, not “allowing as an option”. I don’t know if YC really does that, but that’s the conversation. It’s about the claim made in a comment, not the submission.
Re-read what I wrote: The "encouraged" was about past use of other products, to provide context. I wasn't claiming they encouraged the use of stablecoins. I was adding historical context to the move.
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.
Would you consider it risky for a startup to use its own product?
I would consider that a risk decreaser, because the loop creates a stronger fit signal.
Even more powerful, since across a cohort the encouragement is N-way, or really N^2-way, it actually lowers risk on average the more startups act as each others’ early customers.
And co-adopters benefit from getting unusually responsive suppliers with a strong indirect stake in mutual success.
Encourage isnt a requirement. Adopt only if it makes sense.
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.
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.
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.
In addition to the security issues, they would have to deal with non-negligible transaction costs every time they wanted to convert it to actual money so that they could purchase something. If they were using it as an investment, they had to deal with the opportunity cost of underperforming $SPY.
It really comes down to the burglar's expectations. If most crypto holders used geographically separated multi-sig, these attacks wouldn't be worth the effort anymore.
It’s the same logic as iPhones bricking themselves after being stolen. Even if your specific phone isn't an iPhone, the fact that most phones are now useless to thieves discourages the crime across the board.
Our knowledge is constantly expanding, allowing us to build things differently than we used to. Modern cryptography, which makes things like multi-sig possible, is only a few decades old; it didn't even exist when the current banking industry was being established.
This isn’t just a problem in the Netherlands or a thing of the past. 2025 actually saw the highest number of attacks ever recorded [0].
There are ways to prevent this. Like using multi-sig with geographical separation (so you can't move funds alone) or setting up forced time-delays. Ultimately, being your own bank is a massive responsibility, and I think too many people take that reality too lightly.
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.
It typically doesn't, it just implements compliance with laws and regulations in your jurisdiction.
Withdrawal and transaction limits are commonly such a thing, politicians get hounded because some people were frauded out of their monies and they feel a need to show that they're doing something about it.
Banking is very international, you can put your money in some other jurisdiction if you'd like to. Many transnational banks are connected to the usual payment providers, you can probably figure something out if you put your mind to it. One way to do it is to start a company, business accounts at banks generally have different limits and then you pay a lawyer or bean counter to clear how to do the books and pay appropriate taxes.
I can only really use Canadian banks because that's what Interac, Canadian system for sending money by email works with. The bank does decide what I can pay for because it limits the amount of money I can spend via Apple Pay (like $500), and in general (like $1000). You need to bring your physical card and call them to temporarily increase the limit to buy anything expensive.
Web searching a bit seems to say that e.g. tourists can use their foreign issued cards and typically carry their issuers' limits with them, unless the merchant has their own limits for some reason.
Putting stricter limits on intermediate devices like pocket computers doesn't seem very tyrannical to me. Interac's web site says the typical default limit would be 2-3000 CAD, i.e. 12-1800 euros or so, unless you have a small business account, then it's more like 25000 CAD.
If you often find yourself spending thousands of CAD on a whim, perhaps it would be a good idea to open accounts with a bank that is tailored to people with a lot of money. I'm sure there are some available in Canada.
Yeah all of that sounds way more convenient than your grandma irrecoverably losing her life savings because somebody kid fished her for her crypto authentication.
You can redeem stablecoins in blocks of a million if you are a registered bank. This is the only way to redeem them. Otherwise you can only trade them.
No, it's not. It's not possible to come to the US soldiers with a bunch of US dollars and some demands and get what's demanded in return for the dollars.
Only trust of the other market participants backs the US dollar.
It's been like 3 years since Silicon Valley Bank got a bailout because a bunch of startups put their money in a bank that wasn't guarded against economist instability.
I agree, if you just want to not "waste" the cash while it's sitting, keep it very simple with something like T bills or, if you don't need it immediately, maybe a total market fund.
This also makes sense from the investors point of view, they invested in your company to receive growth from your product/business, not from random stocks you bought with it.
That said, I think there is a distinction between trying to be innovative across the company (ex. Gitlab's open employee handbook, CEO shadows, etc.) which is arguably not a bad thing at all, and this specific case of trying to actively invest company funds. In some cases, a more innovative way of doing things may actually be simpler and less complex than the default way for bigger companies, it just depends on the exact scenario.
> if you don't need it immediately, maybe a total market fund
That strikes me as unwise. If there’s a sharp downturn in the total market, that’s precisely when you might need to call upon otherwise unneeded cash reserves.
It does seem ironic that a startup would immediately pivot to devoting some of its precious time and attention to becoming a hedge fund just as they've got the funding for their 'startup idea'. On the other hand, any big whack of cash should have an optimisation plan, lest it be wasted. Does YC provide templates?
Oversimplifying:
X = full amount of raised capital
Y = expected spend over 12 months
Z = $ value of percentage contingency for 12 months
Y+Z goes into use-it-however-and-whenever-you-want account (likely low to no interest)
X - (Y+Z) goes into a 12 month higher interest account, ideally staying untouched until maturity (stake the stablecoins in this context)
I'm skeptical of crpyto holding companies though, explicitly because of the lack of regulation. The likes of BlockFi, Celsius, and FTX gives me the cold sweats. Regulation in the US is notoriously lacking even in well established finance and banking, never mind the crypto 'industry' which was always high-percentage grifters, and now the Epstein files has added 'morally corrupt' tags to more of them.
Recipe for sleepless nights, which is already a problem for a startup founders isn't it?
The point is, treasury accounts are not designed to manage crypto. So that's another layer of money management that startups have to deal with, when they could simply ignore it using a treasury account.
But of course, YC being YC will fund another startup which will help other startups manage their stablecoin portfolios...
Also note that in most jurisdictions, you cannot pay employees with crypto, stable coins or not. Nor can you pay suppliers. Or AWS/GCP/Azure.
This is literally a textbook example of, in YC's words, a solution in search of a problem.
Not all stablecoins are intended as investments. For many it's just a way to send money internationally without dealing with the SWIFT system, waiting periods, banks losing payments etc.
Yeah but after a series of Big Prints we finally managed to make an inflation spike, a run on Silicon Valley Bank, the US President openly contemplating dollar devaluation, "Sell America trade" working for the first time in 50 years, the marginal buyer of treasuries eliminating the last dove on the path to war, and precious metals whipping around like meme stocks. "Park the money in a USD money market at SVB" used to be not just OK, but universally agreed to be obviously OK, which had value of its own. Now it's just OK. Probably. I hope.
Will we see some pivots into bullshit crypto holding companies? Sure, but VC returns are notoriously lottery-ticket distributed and 0 is 0 however you get there. I'd hazard a bet that the number of otherwise-successful companies who die due to this policy rounds to 0, while the probability of an inflationary wrecking ball that wipes out an entire batch of otherwise promising startups in the absence of such a policy is... north of zero.
To be clear, I don't think this is due to a special property of crypto, just the flexibility to get away from USD in case of emergency.
EDIT: maybe 24/7 trading could be an argument. It would be a meme for the ages if a raft of startups survived because they were up hustling and grinding at 2AM when the boats hit the Taiwan Strait.
You’re describing an event that would wipe out the US economy and trying to protect against that with stable coins, or at least that’s the impression I’m getting.
If the US falls apart, your startup will too. No matter how well preserved your cash reserves are.
The US going to war or entering hyperinflation is probably at the bottom of most founders lists of existential worries. Not a risk to mitigate (it’s a risk you need to accept since there’s nothing you can do - worrying about it won’t help)
Also, worth mentioning that no one lost money with SVB’s collapse. One might argue it was an incredibly smart decision for YC to recommend people bank at SVB since if SVB goes under, virtually all LP’s and everyone in the VC community will go under too (too big to fail, so they won’t, or if they do, everyone else fails too — kind of like AWS us-east-1)
Nah, hedging war is a meme, but I labeled it as such.
Startups that wanted to treasury in BTC or GLD, were told no, and were vindicated in hindsight are not a meme. Startups that were force-fed 10% inflation and a collapsing bank aren't a meme. That happened.
You can complain that it's irrational to hedge against these things which have been happening an awful lot lately, but you aren't the one who gets to decide. If an enterprising alternative VC is peeling away good founders by being flexible on this point, YC's option is to compete or let the deals go.
is this the right comparison? us-east-1 goes down a lot to an extent because everything goes down at the same time, rather than as a collective need to stay up. its one of the worst AWS regions if what you care about is stability and up time. too big to fail does not add extra up time guarantees to that region
No one might have lost their money with the collapse of the banks but with the large amount of new money printed, the value of each dollar will continue to erode.
Inflation and hyper-inflation can wipe out debts with future money that's cheaper more easily in some ways. I forget where I had read or learned more about this in other countries that had experienced it.
The fear is the loss of safe guards and independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump is actively trying to remove safe guards and independence that would allow the Federal Reserve to counteract anything like this. If for instance Trump wants to hold interest rates low regardless of what anyone is telling him, he wants that power[0][1].
The upcoming decision by the Supreme Court on case Trump v. Cook is about this very issue[2]
Then again, to play devils advocate, doing all the other stuff in a new way might also help your company break out of the cycle that typically impacts startups. It may be that the other things you do apart from your product are what make it successful.
I mean if you have a significant chunk of free cash sitting around there's almost no reason not to put a portion of it in 3-6 month Treasuries or something.
The return won't be much but it's better than letting the cash sit idle and evaporate due to inflation
In a competitive banking landscape the bank would do it for you, then just give you a competitive interest rate on your account. Is that not present in the US?
The question is why you'd use money you raised for anything but the reason you raised it. You've probably raised a shit ton more than I have, but hear me out - when one raises, there's generally a timeline of fund deployment from the startup's UoF, right? That's how it was done in my case - we tell the investor what we need, why we need it, and when we need it, etc. And then if the investor agrees to invest, it's not just a lump sum sitting in the bank - a good amount of that money gets deployed to help the startup fulfill its mission.
I get that if you're running super lean and you've raised enough to run lean for a while and use cash when you need to, but at the same time why raise more than you have need for?
I've seen VC's who care a lot about understanding how their companies are going to spend the money. And other VC's who don't even ask the question, or accept generalities like "hiring, scaling" with equally loose timelines.
Depends on the funding vehicle. If you're on a SAFE, and still a going concern, then I think returning investor funds would trigger a priced round and you'd end up converting at a (hopefully) high valuation
This comment really shows how far the SV VC culture still is from running profitable businesses with solid fundamentals. No surprise that I am hearing this on the same website where people come to act like hard-done-by factory workers whenever [incredibly bloated and dysfunctional FAANG] lays people off after facing the real-world financial realities.
For the love of God, no. Do not do that. The cycle begins when you take the money. How there are still people here that don’t get this, I don’t understand.
That chart is telling about the durability of this business, but do we actually know the precise point at which YCombinator as an entity sold out?
For instance, I know Coinbase may be down -22% from the IPO price, but that doesn't mean YCombinator lost money nor made very little. If they, for instance, sold off during the first few days of the IPO they would have made out quite well.
There's also the whole question of how much money did YCombinator put in vs what they got out.
Without knowing this, about all the chart tells me is YCombinator is not a predicated on building exceedingly durable businesses, but it doesn't mean they lost money on any of these investments either.
YC isn’t the “bigger fool”, their business model is great for them. Of course they made money at IPO. They don’t care about durable businesses. More than likely they sold at IPO.
I realize, but that's my entire point: the durability of the business as represented by these valuations says nothing meaningful about YCombinator startups other than they aren't building alot of highly durable businesses.
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.