/Tech11h ago

Paul Graham and Jared Friedman say Bookface reviews protect Y Combinator startups from bad investor behavior

Investors face exclusion from Demo Day for poor behavior.

2217253335.2K

Original post

conor brennan-burke@contextconor

lots of investor horror stories being shared, but very few are from yc companies

one of the underappreciated benefits of yc is how it puts a check on investor behavior

if an investor treats yc companies poorly they will get bad bookface reviews and hot companies won’t take their calls

if it gets bad enough they can even get banned from demo day

i’ve fundraised both as a yc company and as a non-yc company, it was night and day difference in how we were treated by investors

the smart investors know everyone is watching and are careful to not waste time, not ghost, not break promises etc

the bad investors get filtered out automatically and find nobody will take their calls

have @ycombinator behind inverts the usual power dynamic

2:07 PM · Jun 6, 2026 · 35.4K Views

/Tech11h ago

Paul Graham and Jared Friedman say Bookface reviews protect Y Combinator startups from bad investor behavior

Investors face exclusion from Demo Day for poor behavior.

2217253335.2K

Original post

conor brennan-burke@contextconor

lots of investor horror stories being shared, but very few are from yc companies

one of the underappreciated benefits of yc is how it puts a check on investor behavior

if an investor treats yc companies poorly they will get bad bookface reviews and hot companies won’t take their calls

if it gets bad enough they can even get banned from demo day

i’ve fundraised both as a yc company and as a non-yc company, it was night and day difference in how we were treated by investors

the smart investors know everyone is watching and are careful to not waste time, not ghost, not break promises etc

the bad investors get filtered out automatically and find nobody will take their calls

have @ycombinator behind inverts the usual power dynamic

2:07 PM · Jun 6, 2026 · 35.4K Views

Sentiment

Users praise Y Combinator's investor reviews on Bookface and Demo Day bans for balancing power and holding investors accountable to founders, while others accuse the organization of bias.

Pos

87.5%

Neg

12.5%

11 comments with sentiment.

Cluster Engagement

Posts from X

Most Activity

Sam Bhagwat@calcsam

@contextconor Bad behavior on Bookface is like the least bad thing that happens

9h6971

LIKES3REPLIES1

Reminisce@Reminiscenlx1

@contextconor Bookface is a highly effective reputation firewall. For founders outside the YC ecosystem, bootstrapping on self-hosted, open-source stacks is the ultimate defense. When your burn is near zero, you instantly gain the leverage to walk away from bad terms.

8h1923

RETWEETS5

conor brennan-burke@contextconor

lots of investor horror stories being shared, but very few are from yc companies

one of the underappreciated benefits of yc is how it puts a check on investor behavior

if an investor treats yc companies poorly they will get bad bookface reviews and hot companies won’t take their calls

if it gets bad enough they can even get banned from demo day

i’ve fundraised both as a yc company and as a non-yc company, it was night and day difference in how we were treated by investors

the smart investors know everyone is watching and are careful to not waste time, not ghost, not break promises etc

the bad investors get filtered out automatically and find nobody will take their calls

have @ycombinator behind inverts the usual power dynamic

12h35.4K17333

Semantic Press@SemanticPress

@contextconor Is YC the Yelp for fundraising?

9h2813

Charlie Dolan@cdolan92

@contextconor @paulg Hmm what famous podcast moderators are banned from demo day?

9h2771

x@xaoticatech

@contextconor Yeah right. No man will stand up for me after Elon took TeraFab or my copyrighted math and physics from my GitHub Xaotica. You literally ignore female engineers.

9h126

brett goldstein@thatguybg

@contextconor I actually always feed my bad stories to yc founders to publish

12h4322

x@xaoticatech

@contextconor So @ycombinator inverts power dynamics by only having 6% of grants go to women, then ignoring me after I created a unified mathematical API and Tulsi Gabbard presents my work to @potus - GitHub Xaotica, cowards! https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMi1jb3B5_5d4f0cd4-1d9f-458a-b746-5304b6f3ae52

9h22