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.
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.
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)
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.
Why won’t the fed raise rates?
The upcoming Supreme Court case Trump v. Cook is about this very issue[2]
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/29/economy/federal-reserve-indep...
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/why-the-federal-reserves...
[2]: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/will-the-federal-reserve-remai...
The return won't be much but it's better than letting the cash sit idle and evaporate due to inflation
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.
Occasionally it’s the public market…
https://medium.com/@Arakunrin/the-post-ipo-performance-of-y-...
Most often for successful exits, it’s to get acquired and shut down the original product with a “Our Amazing Journey” blog post.
Don't get bogged down with that stuff.
Or perhaps Y Combinator is great at funding startups, but incredibly bad with financial decision making.
In which case it is an IQ test for Y Combinator, which they have failed.
It also trades under the ticker "COIN": https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/COIN/
And after a serious beating it's still value at $48 billion.
Put it another way: of all the companies YC funded, both those who succeeded and the countless who failed, only two companies, AirBnB and Doordash, are valued more than Coinbase.
I don't think YC hates cryptocurrencies as much as the typical commenter on HN.
Not to say that Trump isn't wreaking economic havoc and madness, but the USD is resting on a far stronger base than somewhere like Argentina.
And if you didn't know that's what you're supporting with the hype train, well now you do. Those folks all love and greatly benefit from difficult to audit financial instruments.
Of course, given that the grandparent said "If they aren’t a crypto startup" - Axiom clearly doesn't apply.
YC -> Circle -> Coinbase -> YC
It feels like the entirety of cryptocurrency, outside of being a thing people used to buy drugs, has been an example of Chesterton's Fence, with half of Silicon Valley in denial of this fact.
We have people in this thread praising KYC.
Then I could at least save the time I spend at the asian supermarket to get more work done.
Edit: Also vouchers for a good cafe with wifi please.
Indirectly it might provide some more public visibility initally anyways.
(FWIW, it did end well, as going with a relatively large federally insured bank meant that no one lost any money during the crash)
Of course today startups are probably using Mercury/Ramp/whatever.
chase did what they were asked for years
up to the point they were told there had fraud going on, at which point the walls went up
which is entirely as to be expected
If I had an FDIC account I would basically want a bank that invests my money in the most wildly hazardous ways with the most reckless financial controls to give the max returns and flexibility, then let everyone else bail me out if it went south.
I'm waiting for the demands for a bailout when the next big stablecoin goes bust. Especially if it's Trump's.[1]
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-usd1-stablecoin-hits-5b...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31686140
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5mghcxCabxuaK4WTs/...
The best example is SBF's guru who bought a 15 million GBP mansion in the UK for the EA movement with stolen funds.
Now he's keeping a very low profile because I know for a fact that up to a few years ago there was still assets being clawed back from the Enron fraud (!). So that mansion could be seized one day from the EA movement.
Let's steal money, let's buy private jets and fancy villas for our parents in tax heavens, let's give some to worthy cause (worthy in their own eyes).
Despicable people this EA movement.
And, no, I'm neither taking lessons nor explanations from what are, in the end, just petty scammers / thieves.
https://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/41452/1/112....
You'll never guess, but most banks didn't actually have enough specie to back their notes, and banks constantly failed during the Free Banking era. If a bank failed then the notes value went to zero, and so notes always traded at a discount to their face value, and there were even brokers who were paid by local merchants to give them the latest correct discount rates for all the local banks (updating daily), and if a bank note got far enough away from the bank that the local broker didn't know about it, well, then it wouldn't be accepted by a local merchant. So effectively a similar result here in the capitalist, non-aristocratic US for about 15 years.
This is an enormous amount of overhead in actually running an economy, which was why it was ended and we had the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 to try to create a more uniform currency, and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing created in 1862, etc. Because the actual businesses started to demand simpler accounting, and so more financial regulation of the banks.
That sounds like a libertarian paradise. Sign us all up!
Ironically enough though, could feudal currencies actually be better on a blockchain? Think shares in a business. Bitcoin is backed by nothing, but if businesses all trade on Ethereum–style L2s, you could lock in whatever you want. Think: I want 2 tonnes of lumber for my new house build so I will trade whatever for 20000 $HomeDepotLMBR and it entitles me to exactly that amount when I go into the store.
- Transferring money across regions with the best 'normie' tools (eg Transferwise/wise.com) is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than $0.0000015 (tranferring USDC or another GENIUS-compliant stablecoin on Solana).
- You can easily put stablecoins in a Lulo savings account and get 5% interest instead of 0.1% or whatever your bank provides. Yes Lulo has insurance.
- The Genius act regulates stablecoin provision. US-issued stablecoins are backed by government bonds with proof of reserves. USDC and PyUSD are compliant already, USAT exists because USDT isn't compliant.
- There's no offramp fees for PyUSD, and you, random American, have a Solana address in the 'crypto' tab of your Paypal app. 1234.56 in PyUSD means you get 1234.56 in Chase or Wells Fargo or whatever. In future your bank will hold these assets directly without need to off-ramp at all.
If you want to throw your investors money away to outdated percentage point cross border payments systems you're welcome to.
I don't see how that's relevant to YC startups. Startups can't legally pay their employees in crypto through transfers, any more than they can write checks out of their bank account or pay their employees in cash. I've paid an overseas employee in BTC before, but we still had to go through a payroll provider and do everything above-board to satisfy IRS requirements.
I edited my comment above to provide answer. Swap whatever stable to PyUSD (negligible) and then send to your Solana address in Paypal. You can also hold crypto in US banks pretty soon.
- I bet with whatever way I can convert the stable coin to my local currency (EUR), that it will be more expensive than Wise. Certainly Paypal is really expensive (as in SWIFT transfer would be better)
I mean, for goodness sake, "normie"? Come on.
Both are equally stupid, and you have to exchange them to buy most of the things you might need.
Crypto more hype-able
It'd be friction against spending, a little bit of investing, in the case of gold, but friction against spending with crypto only makes sense if you don't lose a lot on moving it into a real bank account.
The Fed is interested in converting the debt to another medium, for obvious reasons. Stablecoin looks to be the leader, since a number of the new administration have talked about it in the last decade (re: Scott Besset stablecoin speech).
I can understand why some companies want their runway in a currency that may go up during a transition (a more favorable exchange rate). There's little lossage in the exchange of USDT/USDC in the short term. Seems like a hedge strategy.
Nope. Not until these companies allow an independent external audit. I don't take "trust me" from a crypto bro as proof of backing funds.
Oh, and the current administration is clearly corrupt, so this administration wanting to convert the US to bozo bucks isn't one for the plus column.
This is a good distillation of the inherent issue going forward with crypto. The people in tech I trust _least_ (cryptobros) are selling in a service that I require the _highest_ level of trust (finance). It's a very bad sales pitch.
Neither of these were "publicly anti-Trump" as much as Garry Tan has been.
Actually, where'd you even get that from? I cannot with my life imagine that Dalton would publicly post about politics. I've googled around a bit and found nothing either.
Either way, my point is it's an extreme stretch to believe their departure, Trump, and crypto stablecoins are somehow related.