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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

#191

Post by skeeter2020 »

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.

>> But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.

This is not true. I know several people at different institutions - decent schools - that have most or (in one case) all of their courses (at Queens) via remote delivery.

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

#192

Post by skeeter2020 »

repeekad wrote: post #82
snowmaker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are plenty of remote schools, always have been, they’re just lower quality and solve a different problem than traditional in person university

In Canada a lot of well-known schools are shifting much of their delivery to online. They're limited by the government how much they can charge/increase while international student visas have been cut dramatically. It's an existentially moment for international-focused schools, but even the best traditional universities are hurting.

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

#193

Post by siva7 »

dvrp wrote: post #129

Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once. Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!

If there is a single advice i would give the young folks here: Don't listen to VC's. Live your life. Startup founder is more comparable to an olympic athlete in terms of what you have to give up to get there - by definition 99% of people who try no matter how brilliant won't walk this path successfully - but both will lose many things on this way without being much happier than before. This is also where most of this community is being very dishonest be it co-founder search or success stories: Only a very small percentage of people is mentally suited (e.g. extreme resilience) to go on with this gamble yet we encourage everyone to try it out here.

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

#194

Post by fud101 »

epolanski wrote: post #152
Maro wrote: post #134

I can't quite put my finger on it, but this announcement gives me bad vibes.

Asking people without experience, skills and maturity to know what they want in their life to commit to YC way before graduating comes off as simply too much.

[flagged]

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

#195

Post by abxyz »

siva7 wrote: post #190
dvrp wrote: post #129

Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once. Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!

> Paul Graham Essay and early YC: live your life, don’t start a company in your 20s. You are young only once. I've been lurking on HN since 2008 and can't remember a time where i got the vibe from pg to be like "live your life" instead of "start a company now and apply". Can you point to some specific essay you had in mind?

https://paulgraham.com/before.html

"Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.

You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people, this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration. If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it. [7]"

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

#196

Post by nivertech »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #187
nivertech wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a 18-24 months cliff would solve it?

you need a way to cause the termination for this to help. IME most things linger in zombie mode forever, they don't explode early.

Full-time cofounder(s) should have the right to fire other cofounders, at least until a formal board of directors is established

The problems start when you fire someone with equity closer to the cliff

Anyway, I don't get the original post, IMO an MBA is not the kind of degree that is worthy of delaying founding a startup

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

#199

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

buubblepoop wrote: post #143
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just the companies are growing. If you get an offer from BigTech with cash + RSUs and the stock stays stagnant, you will still be better off statistically than spending 5-7 years of your life at a startup.

YC is not really advocating you to become a worker at a startup. They want you to become a founder. As a founder you don't need to be a huge success for you to be well off. I'm one of 3 founders currently in a bootstrapped company that has done okay. We are approaching end of year 5. This year we will make 700k revenue, 240k profit and 50% yearly growth. Typically this kind of business is not something a VC would con…

You realize that you’re kind of making my point? Even with your rosy projections, you’re still going to be making much less than a few returning interns I know made in their first three years working at BigTech.

Heck you’re making less than a run of the mill enterprise dev is making in a second tier major city in Atlanta

And as a founder, you still need to do well to do better off than a BigTech employee and statistically you won’t come near.

And on top of that, you’re sounding like every startup that doesn’t realize that they can’t linearly project growth based on past performance. The first cohorts are almost always easier than later cohorts unless it is a platform with network effects.

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

#200

Post by DonHopkins »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #184
DonHopkins wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been thoroughly enjoying re-watching HBO's Silicon Valley, appreciating all the little details and sub-plots I missed during my first watching long ago. It's aged so well. It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.

I love the show and rewatch it often, but if you lived in that world during the show's timeframe you can see it's changed draamtically. It still holds up as the "vision" of what we thought a SW startup looks like, but the reality is these scrappy little altruistic startups are not lead by hands-on tech founders, they're all taking the money today - often from PE - and are already the people from the show we laughed a…

I agree, it's gotten much much worse, especially with all the MAGA/Trump/Musk/Thiel boot licking.

It's prime time for Silicon Valley: AI Bubble. Instead of hiring the original actors or artists or writers, it could be ironically AI animated in the style of South Park, with a storyline about infringing on copyright and intellectual property, and putting actors and artists and programmers out of work.

I wonder what kind of company names would Erlich Bachman come up with on ketamine instead of shrooms?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXqkkpnZDgU

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