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YC Fellowship

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC Fellowship

#91

Post by mattkrisiloff »

tajen wrote: post #86

> $12000 France gives you a lumpsum of your unemployment benefits if you start a business. If you were paid an average engineer salary, 2200€ net pm, it makes 42000€, and it's called ACCRE. The condition is to be fired, and not on our heavy fault. Most of my friends negotiate giving cash to their employers to get fired, so they could get ACCRE. There are other grants (e.g. 6000€ for being a woman) and loans (28000€ f…

YC has already funded a couple great teams from France.

And we want people from all over the world to apply to YCF too. As long as you have a good enough internet connection for clear video chats, you don't have to move here either.

Re: YC Fellowship

#92

Post by mattkrisiloff »

speeder wrote: post #64
mattkrisiloff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a 12k equity-free grant, it lasts for 8 weeks, you can do it remotely, and it's primarily meant for idea and prototype-stage companies. No dinners and no formal Demo Day, but there will be kickoff and end events in Mountain View where teams will present to the YC community. We'll fly out remote teams for those.

Can my company join, aiming to finish our flagship product? My company released lots of products, all of them had critical acclaim and high user reviews, but we ran out of money before releasing our main product, and we never had marketing money, so our sales are nowhere interesting. I am wondering if you consider this early enough or not. (we had no investment beside from extra money from the original founders).

It sounds like you might be doing a company re-launch from the ground up? If that's the case, definitely apply for YCF.

If you still have successful ancillary products and just want to develop your flagship product with YC's help, consider applying to YC W16. Applications for that will open up in August.

Re: YC Fellowship

#93

Post by RandomBK »

Wow! It's good to see YC sticking its neck out to grow the startup community. I have a quick question though: as this is a remote program, will you be willing to consider candidates living outside the United States? My team and I are in Canada, and are currently unable to move to the States.

Re: YC Fellowship

#94

Post by dzlobin »

mattkrisiloff wrote: post #87
robotnoises wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I am 32 years old, have a young family, and a steady software engineering job at a large software company. I have always loved the idea of a traditional YC experience but have never applied because I feel like I am not at a stage in my life where I'd be a good fit. Is it fair to say that this Fellowship experiment is an attempt to examine the "may have a good idea but is not very mobile" demographic?

Yes! That's part of the reason we want to work with remote teams -- to get to work with people who can't make the move to the Bay Area. That said, if you wanted to apply to the normal YC W16 batch after YCF, you'd still be asked to make the move.

Do YCF teams need to apply via the usual application at that point?

Re: YC Fellowship

#95

Post by stormbuilder »

katm wrote: post #2

Kat from YC here. Sam, Matt Krisiloff and I are happy to answer any questions about the Fellowship. You can also send questions to fellowship@ycombinator.com.

Hi Kat.

Two questions:

1) If we are still looking for / selecting technical co-founders, can we apply?

2) Does the entire team need to dedicate itself full time to this? Alternatively, if the "paying bills" job is quite light (2-3 hours per day), and we are willing to forego some sleep, can we still apply?

Cheers

Re: YC Fellowship

#96

Post by katm »

RandomBK wrote: post #93

Wow! It's good to see YC sticking its neck out to grow the startup community. I have a quick question though: as this is a remote program, will you be willing to consider candidates living outside the United States? My team and I are in Canada, and are currently unable to move to the States.

Yes - we're happy to consider teams from anywhere in the world (as long as you have a good internet connection).

Re: YC Fellowship

#97

Post by jhartmann »

sama wrote: post #26
heynk wrote: post #17

The announcement's discussion of 'good founders' led me to view this as supporting individuals, as well as teams. In contrast to YC's stance on only really exceptional solo founders, could this program be more tailored to a solo founder, perhaps still looking for a co-founder?

We will be slightly more open to solo founders because we think at this stage you still have a good chance of finding a cofounder. But the bar will still remain higher for solo founders given all of our historical data.

I'm glad you will be slightly more open to solo founders. I also like that you are open to a more remote experience.

I think this project could be very helpful in my situation, I have a great idea that is progressing (Deep Learning/AI Image Recognition SaaS) but would have a hard time putting together a suitable team that could survive with our current obligations in San Francisco (families, house payments, etc.) Maybe getting myself working on it full time could get it to the point where it could sustain itself enough that YC proper could work out financially for a bigger team. Very excited, I'm definitely going to apply.

Re: YC Fellowship

#98

Post by mattkrisiloff »

chadnickbok wrote: post #80

What kind of progress are you expecting teams to make during the 8 weeks? How greatly do you anticipate this program impact getting into the "real" YC winter batch? Do you expect that after 8 weeks most good startups would be "ready" to be accepted into the winter class? Do you expect that after completing the 8 weeks, teams will be ready to raise funds?

We want teams to make as much progress as possible based on wherever they're starting at (ie for an idea-stage team, it could be building a prototype and getting it into the hands of some users, for a prototype team, launching and getting customers)

We hope we'll be able to help teams a lot -- YCF teams will be held up to the same standards as all other YC applicants though if they choose to apply. There won't be special treatment for YCF teams.

Maybe -- we at least hope they'll apply for funding from YC!

Re: YC Fellowship

#99

Post by MichaelGG »

mattkrisiloff wrote: post #3
katm wrote: post #2

Kat from YC here. Sam, Matt Krisiloff and I are happy to answer any questions about the Fellowship. You can also send questions to fellowship@ycombinator.com.

Hi! Matt here -- I'll be managing YC Fellowship. I'll be answering questions here throughout the day alongside Kat and Sam.

Does YC ever consider ideas that aren't designed to be billion-dollar companies? For instance, if someone was working on a next-gen diagnostics tool for VoIP, they might realistically be able to get to $10-20M, maybe 10x if things go really well. But it's hard to see that becoming a billion+ company under any circumstances.

What advice do you have for such ideas?

Re: YC Fellowship

#100

Post by ValentineC »

x5n1 wrote: post #27
s73v3r wrote: post #23

Any mention of health insurance, or other things like that? One of the biggest reasons people do go to work for large companies instead of starting their own business is things like that. Without them, you're really only targeting the young kids right out of school, most of whom (but not all) don't really need that much in healthcare.

it's 2 months. if you really need it just get travel insurance. that should be do-able in 12k.

It's quite unlikely that travel insurance would cover chronic and critical illnesses like cancer though, which other forms of healthcare would cover.
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