Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham has some bad news for Apple investors: the company is toast without Steve Jobs.

In a blog post he writes:

I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs. His answer was simply "no." I already feared that would be the answer. I asked more to see how he'd qualify it. But he didn't qualify it at all. No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. Apple's revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.

For those that don't know, Y-Combinator is the number one startup school in the world. Graham's an icon in Silicon Valley and very well connected. He says he can't walk around San Francisco without running into a startup he's funded.

He believes that next Apple will come from a startup:

So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup.

