YC: Requests for Startups

Most of the stuff on the list is either so far out of achievable reach from its current stages, or just generic America-first proselytizing. What all of them have in common is that they require massive amounts of capital, the kind that most VCs don't have/aren't ready to invest. Those who have the capabilities to start a company targeting these problems are not the YC crowd of young college students and techies under 40 looking for cred - they are either folks who have massive amounts of dry powder to deploy, or have the connections who have that kind of capital to combine with their experience. In both cases, none of those guys are stupid to give away 7% of their company (effective 15%) for $500k.

It's kind of laughable how YC is now requesting for startups in these lines when 10 years back, they rejected us (DefTech) on exactly the above premise. While we didn't manage a multibagger exit, we did manage a non-acquihire exit, which is more than what most YC companies can manage. The right time to invest in these problems was 10 years ago, when all the low-hanging fruit still existed.

> Every week the YC Group Partners meet and discuss the current batch. One common area of discussion is ideas — what kind of ideas are these founders having the best luck with? Which ones are they pivoting away from?

How about: do you have any path to profitability, or you're still on the path to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year or get sold to the highest bidder?

>New defense technology

If you want to build machines that kill people, you should at least be willing to say it clearly. If it makes you uncomfortable to talk about, maybe that should tell you something. And it's not a very good excuse to argue that you didn't build a weapon, you just built something that makes it easier to use weapons.

Arms races are not the way. The biggest threat to the West isn't somebody else's weapons, it's that Indonesia's elections today went to a candidate who doesn't want to align with the West, relations with India are increasingly strained, and even Brazil and Turkey are starting to lean out. Geopolitics is politics, and politics requires appeal. Our brand image is significantly worse than two decades ago, as far as I can see.

If the West can't gain allies on friendly terms and maintains power through the development of ever-more advanced military technology, then what kind of world have we built, exactly?

It's extremely disappointing to see this.

Palantir started with as much "seed capital" as OpenAI did, strong founder reps in tech - the one thing National Intel lacked back then, good contacts in the intelligence community and defense sector, and a practically untamed space back then. Same for Anduril. I don't see how YC's model is applicable to any of these spaces.

Palmer Luckey and Anduril have about a 6 year head start.

I agree that superiority is one of the best deterrents.