Applications now open for summer 2008 YC funding cycle
ycombinator.com
ycombinator.com
Luckily for YC, it seems all they need to do to get setup is buy a place and get their architect to make it perdy.
Fortunately we can expand in time if constrained in space: just have multiple dinners per week. That would get us 7x without needing to find a new building. I've had my eye out for places in Cambridge, but it would be really hard to beat the current one.
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African americans, latinos, and asians all outrank caucasians in pageviews on paulgraham.com. It also shares with ycombinator.com a slightly female audience, and members who visit also enjoy shopping for horses. ;-)
You forgot "are you a terrorist" ;-)
That question seems to indicate that there will be automated screening out of applications?
PG has said before that traits listed in that question aren't absolutely disqualifying -- I think his exact words were "we'll bend any rule if you're a genius" -- but from a perspective of streamlining the application-handling process, I'm sure they'd like to eliminate the applications from non-genius rule-benders as quickly as possible.
We certainly wouldn't automatically reject a group that answered this question yes. Loopt would have, among others.
"US immigration policy is particularly ill-suited to startups, because it reflects a model of work from the 1970s. It assumes good technical people have college degrees, and that work means working for a big company.
If you don't have a college degree you can't get an H1B visa, the type usually issued to programmers. But a test that excludes Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell can't be a good one. Plus you can't get a visa for working on your own company, only for working as an employee of someone else's. And if you want to apply for citizenship you daren't work for a startup at all, because if your sponsor goes out of business, you have to start over."
Getting a visa isn't always something you have control over. My best friend, having found a job at a YC startup, is currently held up at the boarder. The guards didn't seem to believe it was a real company. I was rejected for my TN visa once, and had to prove that the company I was to be working for was incorporated, along with a plethora of other documentation.
I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to get a visa to work at my startup. The rules for the TN-1 visa (for Canadians, I presume the TN-2 for Mexicans work similarly) say you can't be a controlling owner of the business you'd work for. Could you then get a whole bunch of Canadians together, no one of whom would have a controlling share, and found a company in the US?
I've tried to hunt down an answer to this, but to no avail. By the letter of the law, yes, one should be able to: this means that many college educated Canadians could bypass immigration entirely. But in practice it's up to the whim of the immigration guard, and people are kept out of the US, not allowed to work for completely legit companies.
For Canadians and Mexicans there is a different visa, called the TN, created under NAFTA. If you read the NAFTA proceedings, you'll come to understand that the method of getting verified at the border was meant to make it easier and quicker to get a Visa, for certain classes of professional. The one professional category involving computers, 'computer systems analyst', was so vaguely defined that one could only interpret it was meant as an umbrella term.
But what's happened in reality is that small-minded border guards have been given the authority to simply reject people. They demand all sorts of things that aren't in the law, and they make no apologies.
US law doesn't ban individuals from being international actors. It barely even acknowledges the possibility. But ultimately you're subject to the whims of whichever boarder guard your happen to meet.
Canadians are legally allowed to vacation in the USA for up to 6 months. I'm not sure, but I don't think the law is too specific on not being able to work (the semantics of the word are too tricky), but you need a visa to be in someone's employ. That may leave certain possibilities open.
Do you think there is anything YC could have done to have made your friend's experience better?
Please tell us about the time you, username, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
If you don't already have a copy, you might enjoy Rod Beckstrom's book Brainticklers. It's basically just a book of questions about the year 3,000.
The questions range from
"When we can match or exceed many or all human physical and mental skills with computers or appliances, how will we define our reason for being?"
to
"What will be the most popular baby shower gift in the year 3,000?"
It would probably be a fun toy for the YC dinners.
he who never tries, never succeeds? One should never be afraid of failure or rejection!