Went to a YC after-party last night, my co-founder was invited. Met some cool people. Also met the usual breed, guys who introduce themselves as "investors" and don't ask a single real question the entire evening. One of them is still bothering me enough to type this out.
This guy was telling everyone he's an LP. Looked him up later. Math PhD student at Yale. That's the full resume. No fund, no investments, no operating experience. Just a guy doing academic research who flew down to India and apparently decided Indian founders needed his wisdom.
He spent a chunk of the evening drilling an ex-founder who had actually built and exited a real-money gaming company. Lecturing him on P&L, unit economics, all of it. Has probably never sat in a room where runway is running out and you're trying to figure out how to pay 20 people next month. But the accent and the volume worked like magic and the founder couldn't get a word in.
The advice he was handing out to younger founders:
"You don't need an ICP, sell to everyone"
"You don't need to raise funds"
The P/E ratio is broken
Real-money gaming is a bad business model
At a YC event. Telling founders they don't need to know their customers. Don't need to raise (which most YC companies literally did, that's the point of YC). Giving Dream11 and Winzo-tier founders a reality check on their model. Read the fucking room.
Then the part that really got me. A young founder in the group mentioned she's engaged. He immediately told her mixing personal and professional is "unstable," it's a "red flag to VCs," she should build alone. Then, very casually, offered to back her himself. Bro. Mind your own business. These are young founders. Some of them will actually listen to this stuff.
What gets me most is how fast we hand out credibility in India to anyone showing up with a foreign school attached. Not even an MBA. A math PhD. Has he built anything? Shipped anything? Made one business decision with real money on the line? Nope. But the pedigree works like a cheat code.
Some of the sharpest operators on the planet are sitting right here. Zerodha, Zoho, Freshworks, Razorpay, Dream11, plus a thousand bootstrapped businesses nobody on Twitter talks about because they're not "scalable" enough for content. Not every great business is a VC business. Not every VC business was right to raise. You decide what you're building, not some guy who discovered India two weeks ago.
If you're a young founder reading this:
Ask people what they've actually built before you take their advice. Watch them fold.
Being engaged or married is not a red flag, it's a life.
If someone's credentials are 100% academic and they're lecturing you about business, they are performing, not advising.
Anyway, we need more people pushing back in the moment at these events instead of nodding along. If you want to brag about being an investor, put it on your Hinge profile. Not at a founder event where people actually listen to you.
These guys aren't HNIs. They're not VCs. They paid $100 for a VIP badge and spent the night calling themselves investors. Stop engaging.
