It's not hard to be competitive with YC. The thing is, nobody is even trying to be.
It's not hard to be competitive with YC. The thing is, nobody is even trying to be.
Note that I said implicitly. There is no explicit age discrimination that I am aware of, but the entire program is structured in a way that makes it horribly impractical for anyone who isn't a bachelor/bachelorette and childless. You must move to the Bay Area, put in family-unfriendly hours, and live on a quantity of money that would make it impossible to live in the Bay Area with a family (assuming you don't have a lot of savings, a trust, or a high-earning spouse). It just won't work for a huge majority of older people or people with families.
The implicit assumption is that all the best talent and ideas can be found among those who pass this implicit filter function. Anyone over 25-30 or who has children is "washed up."
... which creates room for an accelerator to test that assumption. What if -- gasp -- people who have been doing this stuff for a long time are actually better at it?
But as you say, nobody is even really trying to compete with YC within their own segment let alone exploring alternative modalities.
Edit: another one would be to question the assumption that sole founders are intrinsically doomed. They are certainly at a disadvantage, but that'd create an interesting niche for an accelerator that helped them to compensate for their disadvantages if they otherwise had really great skills and ideas.
Did you incorporate in US and move your family to the US? Did the pressure to do long hours cease once you finished the YC programme and got funding?
> Our lives, and the lives of our kids are much better for it.
This implies some level of financial success from your participation :-)
I would actually go so far to say that if you are doing a startup and have kids, YC is by far your best chance of creating a successful startup without having to go through financial distress. In that sense it is the most family friendly incubator. Having done 4 startups always with kids, I speak of experience.
> When you have kids you are more aware of the consequences of failing, you value your time more and are less likely to "play house" as PG calls it, in my opinion.
Yes I agree with this. I think having kids is kind of training for some aspects of start-up life. Definitely in juggling a lot of things at once with limited time.
In terms of success I just wanted to know if it carried on beyond the YC incubator period and it sounds like it has so well done and good luck with it :-)
"It was hard and it required sacrifice." because of the implicit bias brought up by the GP. For someone in their mid twenties, no relationship or dependents, moving for 3 months is no big deal. Good, even.
No, how did you get that? I'm also not suggesting they shouldn't. It's just not at all what I was talking about.
This is the price of the otherwise extremely liberal policies of YC. "Ageism," move to the bay area, etc., etc., maybe---but all of that is coupled with the implicit promise that "We won't fuck you over." And the bar for VC's is sufficiently low that that is a surprisingly rare value proposition---no, it's a breath of fresh air.
I'd love to see a competitor (dozens!) to YC arise and fund, like, capital-intensive bio-tech companies in Africa or something, but that's not really what YC is built for. I don't think that it should have to be.
Startups move to the Bay Area for three months and go anywhere it makes sense to put their startup afterwards. Many companies even move the founder's families over the three months (easier in the Summer).
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9031697 and http://www.femalefounderstories.com/erica-brescia.html
Maybe they just don't need accelerators as much, therefore there's no niche for one that caters to that crowd.
The social capital you get from dinners and networking is all very well. But it's not quite enough to provide that proof in an objective business-case sense.
Who knows? Maybe it's the case that people who put in family-unfriendly hours and live on impossibly low amounts of money are those most likely to survive the rollercoaster of a venture backed startup. On balance, younger founders who have low personal burn / high free time may be better suited to the lifestyle demands.
I'm saying this as a 28 year old, married, solo founder with kids, so this is clearly not always true. However, distributed across 1000's of YC founders and hundreds of startups it's hardly surprising to find a lower age trend.
As someone who went through YC at 27, I think the structure, personal input, coaching, and the community (IMO most important) are incredible resources to increase the likelihood of success for your startup.
When you are creating a startup (defined as company hoping to experience hyper-growth/ hyper-impact), it is so hard that you need to accumulate as many resources and success factors as possible.
Knowledge is a huge portion of that - but YC packages significantly more advantages not only into ~3 months but also into the constantly evolving network it has cultivated.
They've never said, at least publicly, that the best ideas are found among people who are of a certain age or parental status. They have said that they think it's better if all of the startups they fund in a batch are in one geographic location for X number of months. It's a matter of preference, not a moral judgement. Anecdotally, several of the YC partners have families and children of their own. I find it hard to believe that they aren't sensitive to the situation you're describing.
Personally, I think that doing a startup can be very difficult and demanding. It's been known to put a strain on family relationships. I would encourage people with families to think twice and to put in a lot of extra effort in the planning, research and MVP stages. It's one thing for a 20 year old to go through the stress of a startup, it's another when the lives of children are involved. I've seen the experience test people and get the better of them. If I encouraged someone to do that and it caused their family to fall apart, I would feel significantly worse about knowing that negative outcomes are assured for some. That's just me, though.
I don't think that the YC partners see things that way at all. They've found a process that works for them and if it ain't broke, they don't want to fix it.
The reality is that neither YC, nor the startup world in general, will work for everyone in every life circumstance. You will always have a more difficult road when your personal life imposes constraints upon you that your competitors (in this case, other founders) don't have. But that doesn't mean that YC was designed to leave those over 25 out in the cold. It means that people who are able to dedicate themselves to their startup for 3 months, with constant access to advice from world-class entrepreneurs and investors, and the opportunity to pitch their ideas to every kingmaker VC in the tech world, will have an astronomically higher success rate than others.