Done with YC: Age Discrimination

- it's misleading to cherry-pick a single post. The analysis for all 400+ Launch HNs would look entirely different (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches).

- the type of startups you mention (extending an existing business to a large market) are more likely to be in an aggregate thread than a standalone Launch HN [1], so you've effectively assumed your conclusion.

- you presumably know nothing about the ages of those founders, so bringing them up in a post alleging age discrimination (or more precisely, not alleging age discrimination) and misleadingly adding the word "young" is... dubious.

- you list the founders' names but nothing about their startups. Why? Obviously because they have international origins. Following that with "do you fit in here" strikes me as a veiled slur.

- it's also pretty silly. Why shouldn't YC fund great startups regardless of where they come from? You'll find YC doing exactly that in every category: national background as well as all the others (race, gender, class, and yes, age).

[1] That's because, for this batch, we've been trying to give every YC startup who wants to launch on HN a chance to do so. That requires a huge number of editorial decisions because there are so many more startups than front page slots. I make the editorial decisions based not on the quality of the startup or their market (let alone irrelevant attributes of founders), but on how interesting the HN thread is likely to be to the community here. Mostly that has to do with avoiding repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). In other words, the considerations are completely unrelated to everything you're implying. I explained all this when announcing the aggregate launch threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27877280.

However, that doesn't mean places don't age-discriminate.

Truth of the matter is, I'd enjoy doing Y-Combinator at some point in my life, but I don't think it will every be possible:

- I don't think they'd take someone like me

- If they did, once you have kids and mortgage, you can't relocate

- If you do, once you have kids, you can't do the Y-Combinator lifestyle of 80 hour work weeks, sprints, and ramen

- The offer would be exploitative, for people with more senior backgrounds. Perhaps I can get by this, but 7% is a lot to give up for advising.

Y-Combinator: "We think that $125k is currently the right amount for founders to be able to run their company and pay expenses for around 5-6 months, and sometimes even longer" (https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/)

That's great for a grad student, but I think a lot of people read this to mean "no older people." I mean, I might be able to self-finance or raise capital, but founding team for $125k for 6+ months? That's delusional if you're out-of-school and have expenses.

That might be a consequence from that Dreamworld debacle... Maybe... Hopefully...

Having an obvious scam legitimizing themselves through YCombinator was at the very least very disconcerting.

(Just a random person's opinion)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/dreamworld

Older founders are more likely to make a profitable business (lifestyle business) but less likely to create a unicorn type hot start up. In other words, if one is experienced then one can make profitable business (lifestyle business) even if the idea is bad.