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Or just nootropics. If there's more smart people then additional anti-ageing tech will follow—since all arguments against said tech are fallacious; even if they seem reasonable prima facie!
Not bad. As long as you don't also bring Andreessen. I can't forgive him for what he did to Oculus. Could you bring Mark Cuban on board, too? That would be great.
I have been a bad fan.
There's no way any accelerator can be competitive against YC if Peter Thiel is going to be doing office hours
There's no way any accelerator can be competitive against YC if Peter Thiel is going to be doing office hours
It's not hard to be competitive with YC. The thing is, nobody is even trying to be.
I wonder if having Peter as an investor is a strong enough incentive that if they knew he liked them, a company would change their behavior for the 3 months after demo day.
And so the YC behemoth grows. Congrats, I look forward to being lectured many times about needing secrets and monopolies. And focusing not on being the first product to market, but the last. Did I miss any Thiel-isms?
There's no way any accelerator can be competitive against YC if Peter Thiel is going to be doing office hours
this is not true. an accelerator can do earlier (before team or product or idea); wider (fund literally anyone who can write five pages in English in a timed setting about their idea); lower (take 0.075% for $2k); faster (an SaaS app that wires you a check within 24 hours, after a human lawyer verifies your details and contract); riskier (billion dollar ideas that don't even have the research paper worked out - like…
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.