YC Fellowship

This is a good idea and a great opportunity for many people. And I think it's fantastic that YC is doing this. However, I can't help feeling it really is intended for young people recently out of school, who have no other immediate financial obligations.

I would really love to see an option for people who are not in this group. Let's imagine someone who is married, with a couple of kids and a mortgage. Right away, YC Fellowship is not feasible.

If you really want another ten-fold increase in the number of startups, tapping into an older demographic could do it -- just because it seems to be a largely untapped resource. We're talking about people with years of experience working in the real world, on real products. We're talking about years of domain expertise, in all kinds of domains. We're talking about people with ideas, and the expertise to execute on them. And all this potential is being left on the table because they typically can't afford to quit their jobs for 3k a month (based on a two-founder team in YC Fellowship).

But if each founder had enough funding to be able to handle their financial obligations, and work full time on their startups, for a year, I think that would break open the flood gates, and you'd see a huge increase in viable startups.

There must be a sweet spot in terms of funding/equity for this scenario, in order to make it beneficial to everyone involved.

> I'm not sure if I've ever heard of any such things in the US (other than those related to science research spin outs), so this seems to fill a needed gap.

Many universities have such programs, but they're usually limited to their students.

You don't need a job offer to do OPT. I'm on an F-1 student visa in the US, and just finished a PhD, and will be starting a company on OPT. You even qualify for the STEM extension (you just have to register your business on e-verify). This gives a total of 29 months of runway, which is more time than I have money for.

You don't need any help from YC to do this - talk to your international student office, they process lots of OPT applications. Read the instructions on the USCIS website. They are very clear on this, you can start a company, you don't even need to incorporate to satisfy those requirements (although, this is not legal advice, talk to your international student office, and their lawyers).

The application form was getting hit pretty hard -- it's temporarily offline while the Submittable team migrates it to its own server. Should just be a few minutes -- will update when it's back up!

Edit: The application servers are back up! Look forward to reading your apps :)

I agree that $12K is not so small. I don't remember the exact numbers, but $12K was very close to the money in the first YC batch, IIRC $4K*(n+1), where n is the number of founders.