Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…It's so funny to think about now, there are over 300 companies that go through YC about every year, but it was this little corner and community of the internet. I mean it still is a community, a very large community now in a certain sense. I remember being a YC fan first and foremost and using the products. I was proud to be a Dropbox user and abandoned my flash drive because it was a YC company. I suppose that that has even actually a bigger effect today, but it felt at some point like a club. I think it's like senior year in my high school. I felt like I was in some sort of club for even knowing what it was. Yeah, I had that feeling. I eventually ended up doing YC and I remember distinctly, there are maybe 35 companies in my batch or something. All of us felt YC had jumped the shark. It used to be so intimate and so small back in the day. Now, it's just this huge impersonal thing. You only get to see Paul Graham once or twice a week, what even is this? Of course now, it's 10 times bigger than it was back then.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.