Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

"I did the right thing, she thought. But I’ll never do it again."

Somebody should change that for incubators and YC, being the most forward thinking and advanced one, should be the first to try:

IDEABOLT: Apply to next HN with non-profit startup to care for kids (preschool 2-5) of HN batchmates onsite at YC (with its blessing, taking over a large room or some converted space nearby). Not only this would increase the pool of applicants greatly (really?) it boosts the coolness of HN close to \infty.

The service will be free (9-5) so how to make money? Investigate innovative preschool learning methods using the kids (of course, with parents permission). This target group is perhaps the least served child demographic (no good solutions for something as mundane as poop/feed tracking, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10075191), except mundane stuff like diapers and bottles).

"He even struck up a bond with Paul Graham. Most people either talk down to two-year-olds or ignore them. But Graham took the time to figure out that Adam was fascinated with trains, says Kurnia, and the two of them spent 10 minutes drawing trains on a white board. Graham treated Adam like a little founder, interested in his interests."

I would have expected this! OK, Add to the idea to mine kids for ideas, Big fashion.

If you are serious, you could research how on-site daycare was handled during WWII to entice women into the work force and help them succeed. It has been done before, and very successfully, but only long enough to win WWII and then send women back home in droves to be full time moms -- which they mostly were happy to do, in part because prior to WWII everyone was suffering through The Great Depression and savings rates for a great many de facto 2 income, no kids families during the war was as high as 50%. People were happy to buy a house in the 'burbs and live the good life after suffering through the depression and then the war back to back. But lots of interesting things happened during WWII. As part of your research, you might start by watching historically based movies, such as A League of Their Own.

That is true. Many good things happened in the USA during WWII, and many of those good things were abandoned as soon as the war ended. This was also true of "Total Quality Manufacturing" using the statistical techniques developed by Edwards Deming:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

"Statistical methods were widely applied during World War II, but faded into disuse a few years later in the face of huge overseas demand for American mass-produced products"

Deming ended up in Japan because American companies were not willing to listen to him, after the war. The Japanese companies were very willing to listen to him. And thus something happened that many people thought impossible: the Japanese caught up to the USA, in terms of manufacturing quality.

I was serious, however the scope I had in mind was perhaps different than what you are suggesting in that:

1) The target is not just women, it's founders (men and women), and specifically founders at incubators where the work effort is intense. That way the scope of the proposal is limited to manageable proportions.

2) We're not talking about any onsite daycare but a very specific case.

3) The main goal is not to "entice women into the workforce" or to increase women in tech (although this great benefit may come as a side benefit) but to disrupt childcare for this particular scenario.

So the important questions are: how would preschool childcare be done different, how can kids really create something useful, can a company use this as a sustainable resource, etc.

Sorry, you are hearing things I did not intend. My commentary on how and why things were done during WWII is not intended to define scope of your project. You could just stop at "If you are serious, you could research how on-site daycare was handled during WWII." The rest of my comment is about history, not about your idea.

It's vaguely disturbing to hear suggestions to use children as experimental subjects. It makes sense across a population (eg, all of UK) to do clustered RCTs, but the YCombinator nursery group would be tiny and so the evidence gathered would be weak, which makes (imo, I'd be interested to hear what the ethicists say) it more problematic.

And I'm even more unsure about this bit:

> how can kids really create something useful, can a company use this as a sustainable resource, etc.

Perhaps I'm misreading it? Better Off Ted had a bit where the children in the nursery were put to work. I don't think that's what you're suggesting?

Exploiting kids as subjects does sound repulsive (although using them as subjects with parents consent is perfectly ok for scientific purposes, e.g. see Alison Gopnik's fantastic work and her TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think?...). My suggestion was rather to use this group, which would be tiny as you point out, as a simple "sounding board", e.g. to develop new ways of teaching young children programming. Another way would be to get their ideas and keep them in the loop for development of new products targeting kids. Toy companies, such as Lego, routinely employ kids to test new toys but I think very few involve them in the creation phase.

send women back home in droves to be full time moms My mother told me of that time and she was one that wasn't particularly happy about being told "thanks for your heroic effort, but now back to the kitchen."

Interestingly, women's rights tend to go up during wartime or in very warlike cultures. The Spartans were a very military culture. Other Greek city-states thought the de facto rights of Spartan women were scandalous.

I don't know what the solution is (for how to promote gender equality without, say, a global war), but I am glad I was a military wife for many years.

I was thinking something similar. Seems the daycare industry might be ripe for "disruption" (or preferably, innovation).

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