Simon Willison’s Weblog

Does Paul Graham steal business models from teams not accepted into Y Combinator and feed them to accepted teams as pivot ideas?

14th September 2013

My answer to Does Paul Graham steal business models from teams not accepted into Y Combinator and feed them to accepted teams as pivot ideas? on Quora

No. If he did, word would quickly get around and strong teams would stop applying to YC.

Posted 14th September 2013 at 11:45 am · Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter or subscribe to my newsletter

More recent articles

DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026
Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026
A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

This is Does Paul Graham steal business models from teams not accepted into Y Combinator and feed them to accepted teams as pivot ideas? by Simon Willison, posted on 14th September 2013.

hacker-news 42 paul-graham 20 y-combinator 52 quora 1005

Next: I would like to attend a Big Data conference but I am short of funds. Is there any big data conference that helps students attend those conference through scholarship?

Previous: Getting the most out of technical conference as a services provider?

Monthly briefing

Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

Pay me to send you less!

Sponsor & subscribe