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Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

ycombinator.com

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Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#111

Post by tomhow »

__loam wrote: post #81
deadbabe wrote: post #76

I think this is oddly predatory, and sends the wrong idea to graduating students who have not even entered the real world. There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.

Putting inexperienced kids with good credentials who are amenable to listening to a board in charge of these things is part of the yc business model.

YC is looking for people who have high agency and can back their own judgement. All the most successful founders fit this profile.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#112

Post by throwawaymaths »

raspasov wrote: post #107
__loam wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting inexperienced kids with good credentials who are amenable to listening to a board in charge of these things is part of the yc business model.

YC doesn't take board seats. edit: removed snarky attack

a "board" presumably like a "medical school acceptance board" and not a corpo board

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#113

Post by defrost »

tomhow wrote: post #111
__loam wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting inexperienced kids with good credentials who are amenable to listening to a board in charge of these things is part of the yc business model.

YC is looking for people who have high agency and can back their own judgement. All the most successful founders fit this profile.

In fairness young people can have high agency, back their own judgements, and have grit, perseverance, et al. and still lack experience and be more easily influenced by perceived mentors than they might be a decade later in their career paths.

With no disrespect to YC, of course.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#114

Post by 999900000999 »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #59
gkoberger wrote: post #4

I loved YC and can't recommend it enough. But if you're going to start a company, please consider working at another company first, even if briefly. (And make it a company you respect and want to emulate.) The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is…

This is partially why the average age of a successful founder is late 30s to early 40s at the time of founding. There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high. Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the lat…

So it's not too late !

Still, I think you need to be well connected, or already profitable for VC fundraising.

Otherwise your just another programmer with hacked together prototype.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#115

Post by jamestimmins »

deadbabe wrote: post #76

I think this is oddly predatory, and sends the wrong idea to graduating students who have not even entered the real world. There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.

These kids are (typically) in some of the best colleges in the world and in incredibly high demand. They have lots of options and enormous amounts of agency.

Hard to buy that "here's another option" is predatory.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#116

Post by vasco »

snowmaker wrote: post #19
cassonmars wrote: post #3

Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again? There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones: - new parents - disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the…

We might, and I'm sure you're right that there are many great founders not applying to do YC because they don't want to move here. But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.

Because a university's ability to charge the prices they do depends on people being on location. Nobody is going to pay 50k or 100k for an online course.

Plus if rich fucks can't buy a building to put their name on that kids will walk through they won't donate money.

You make it sound like it's a decision based on school administrators putting learning first.

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#117

Post by tomhow »

defrost wrote: post #113
tomhow wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC is looking for people who have high agency and can back their own judgement. All the most successful founders fit this profile.

In fairness young people can have high agency, back their own judgements, and have grit, perseverance, et al. and still lack experience and be more easily influenced by perceived mentors than they might be a decade later in their career paths. With no disrespect to YC, of course.

Sure but the founders who will generate the greatest returns for investors are the ones who won’t be pushed around by boards. Facebook’s board advised Mark Zuckerberg to take Yahoo’s $1B offer in 2006 [1]. He was 22 years old. He refused, and Meta is now valued at nearly $2T. That’s the kind of founder that the most ambitious startup investors are looking for.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/an-ugly-truth-mark-zuckerber...

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#118

Post by Maro »

cassonmars wrote: post #3

Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again? There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones: - new parents - disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the…

There's also people who are driven, don't have a real-world situation that pins them to their location, but don't believe that they need to move to SF to do a startup, because they shouldn't have to..

Re: Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students

#120

Post by NetOpWibby »

asadm wrote: post #97
nenenejej wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit riddly. Have a concrete example?

Less riddly: Don't take money if you don't need it. if you have to, take it from people who have values/incentives (with life and business both) aligned with you.

I like this, thank you.
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