Does YC ever plan to open a new office/branch in another country (not the US)?
Yes I expect we will, but haven't figured out details yet.
I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
111–120 of 458 posts
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#112Do individuals have the opportunity to participate in funding start-ups via YC? If so, what type of minimum requirements exist for getting started? If not then how quickly can the [unrelated] problem below be solved, algorithmically Unrelated Problem: Given a set of numbers of length n, find a single rule that can map each item x to the corresponding item x+1
You can come to Demo Day and invest in YC startups there! Or did you mean invest in YC itself?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#113I noticed you guys added Food and Farming to the RFS. How did that decision come about?
The same way every other item on the RFS got there--a partner was passionate about it and chose to add it.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#114Why are you primarily looking for >billion dollars startups? I would wager that if you take a look at an accurate distribution of markets according to potential you would find a magnitude more small/average markets (that are untapped) than billion dollars ones. And similarly, I suspect that the success rate for those "boring" ventures is much higher than the exciting shiny rising stars. Question: Why not optimize for…
1) This is where effectively all of our returns come from.
2) These companies are the most fun to work with.
3) It turns out that it's harder than it sounds to capture the full value of a smaller market for a bunch of reasons, and so the failure rate is much higher than expected.
I think the payoff, at least in our case, is well worth it.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#115Is this thread being punished by a flaming war trigger? It is not on front page, not even the first Ask HN page.
It's on front page now as of 2016-09-27 17:30 PDT.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
What matters here is what _you_ deem most important--don't live someone else's life. But for fun, here is my list: •AI •Biotechnology, especially anti-ID and anti-aging. •Energy •Better governance •Education
> anti-ID I didn't know what this was, and I was idly hoping that this was somehow about making biometrics not work. :-) It turns out to be an idea in immunology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiotopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-idiotypic_vaccine (in case other people weren't familiar with the concept)
Pretty sure he means anti-infectious disease
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#117How can an engineer become employee #1 or #2 of a fast-growing YC startup? How important is networking (knowing the right people) vs simply having the right credentials/experience?
What sort of advice does YC offer founders when it comes to hiring early employees?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> anti-ID I didn't know what this was, and I was idly hoping that this was somehow about making biometrics not work. :-) It turns out to be an idea in immunology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiotopes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-idiotypic_vaccine (in case other people weren't familiar with the concept)
Pretty sure he means anti-infectious disease
That's a simpler interpretation, but search engines seem to strongly favor the idiotype interpretation, and it also seems to be the most common in medical research
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#119You've been very outspoken about AI, but tangentially related to AI are intelligent chatbots and more general conversational interfaces. What are your thoughts on chatbots?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of YC Group. AMA
#120[deleted]