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This week on The Podcast we talked with Natasha about the Y Combinator Demo Day for the Summer 2022 cohort; the highs, the lows, the new management and whether the accelerator moving to be more in-person-focused is a help or a hindrance to its further-flung participants. Then, ever a crypto-sceptic at heart, I was delighted to get the chance to talk with Anita about the upcoming Ethereum chain merge.<\/p>\n
First, the YC Demo Day. \u201cThe things that have stood out to me so far is that it\u2019s a more Bay Area-based program. YC announced that about 30% of the cohort moved to the Bay Area during the accelerator and about 23% were already in the Bay Area, when they applied,\u201d Natasha said. \u201cWe see a bifurcation being created between the people who could (or already did) live in the Bay Area and YC\u2019s international focus. To me, that\u2019s an interesting tension we\u2019re seeing play out a little bit in the batch metrics.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the blockchain side of things, I was curious if the proverbial wheels were going to come off. Anita didn\u2019t seem too worried.\u00a0\u201cAll of the engineers I\u2019ve talked to don\u2019t seem to be too concerned. This has been a point of discussion since 2016; it\u2019s been discussed, debated and tested a bunch of times. Someone compared it to the moon landing,\u201d said Anita (and explains the analogy in the podcast episode). \u201cIt is this huge, risky thing. It seems like a really big deal. But so much practice and preparation has gone into this process that I personally wouldn\u2019t expect anything significant to go wrong in the process itself.\u201d<\/p>\n