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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

Additionally, Amazon is generously offering $5,000 in AWS credit for all participating teams.

This seems really dangerous -- it creates a huge incentive for companies to waste YC's time. There aren't many things early startup founders can do which are worth more than $15000/hour. Sure, you can probably filter out many AWS-credit-seekers via the application process, but that adds more work for the people who read through all the applications.

Have you considered either (a) refusing the credits, or (b) taking a small number and handing them out to the most "deserving" startups at the end of the day?

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Most good founders realize $5,000 in hosting credits in terms of their time and effort is not a compelling reason to do office hours. Office hours provides way more insightful and long term value than some free server hours.

Developers who think in terms of over-optimizing costs probably wouldn't even be picked anyway.

$5,000 in hosting credits in terms of their time and effort is not a compelling reason to do office hours.

Really? Are you able to produce more than $5000 of value for your startup in 20 minutes?

Office hours provides way more insightful and long term value than some free server hours.

For the people YC wants to talk to, sure. But dangling $5000 of AWS credits in front of people may attract people they don't want to talk to.

But it isn't just the 20 minutes, it's the transaction costs of transportation and interrupting your day. What if you choose to travel from a couple hours away, or even very far away?

Well, I'm assuming that people who just want the $5000 would sign up to do this over skype.

> Really? Are you able to produce more than $5000 of value for your startup in 20 minutes?

Hosting credits are not currency. Most startups will never need anything close to $5000 in AWS credits.

Not to mention that AWS basically gives them out like candy. I have several grand in AWS credit just from attending hackathons and conferences.

> Most startups will never need anything close to $5000 in AWS credits.

This statement is not true. It is quite easy to have a $5,000 a month bill on Amazon.

Also, AWS credits usually last 12 months. You can spend $416.67/month at AWS with just one EC2 instance.

It might be easy, but that doesn't mean it happens to the vast majority of startups.

The majority of startups never get any real traction and see only a small trickle of traffic every day.

I suspect that developing and deploying something that extracts value from $5000 worth of hosting will require non-trivial effort. Even reselling them would require some effort for anyone for whom reselling AWS credits was not a regular activity.

We feel comfortable with this

All major hosting companies have a sponsoring programme for startups in incubators/accelerators.

Unfortunately I cannot disclose the numbers and the companies, but they are way larger than $5k

$5k in credit for hosting probably has a marginal cost of $0.

On the other end, if you take AWS offer and start using their services, you'll probably won't leave them anytime soon, particularly if you rely on provider-specific systems (SNS for instance).

Startups get a nice discount, hosting providers get an opportunity to supply a future successful startup and very quickly win back the $5k...

I agree that offering this makes sense for AWS. What I'm not so sure about is whether offering this makes sense for YC.

(BTW, Tarsnap isn't in any incubators/accelerators, but if someone wants to throw a bunch of AWS credits at me I'd be happy to have them!)

You could probably apply for the Amazon accelerate program and get $15K from them pretty easily.

The $15k of credits are only for "startups in select accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces, and other startup organizations".

Hosting companies give away free credits like candy. Don't let the lack of incubator stop you from asking. I've gotten up to $10,000 in hosting credits just by emailing someone and asking for it. No contract or anything, they just added credit to my account.

Pretty much every cloud platform offers a deal like this to pretty much every tech incubator so the actual value of the deal isn't that high, certainly not $5000.

At the risk of sounding too cynical, have you considered that Amazon is likely paying YC as much or more for the opportunity to offer this credit? And that maybe this whole deal is at least partially because Amazon wants to acquire new customers?

Without taking any position on whether YC would be willing to sell their reputation like that (personally, I'd say almost certainly not), I can't imagine amazon would be willing to pay the price they'd charge.

AWS isnt paying us

Startup Weekend regularly hands out $100 AWS credits to all attendees. I don't think I've ever seen anyone (or groups of people) go to SW just for that credit. $5000 is a bit more, but that -that- much more.

I'd argue that a 50x increase (literally 5000%) is significantly more.

I think there's a huge gap between getting $100 for a weekend and getting $5000 for 20 minutes.

You [usually?] get the credits for showing up for about an hour or two on the very first night. No need to be there for the entire weekend if that's what you're there for.

The relative value of 20 minutes with YC partners is significantly higher, so as to make the incentive of the $5000 irrelevant. Anyone who thinks otherwise is missing the real value proposition of the office hours program.

As to OP's concern that it could create incentive for someone to waste the YC partner's time in the sole interest of gaining the $5000 of credits, I think that is not giving enough credit to the YC folks. I'm sure they'll be able to weed them out.

generally speaking as a startup, I'm not hyper-worried about spending 5K in hosting costs and unless you're an entirely social/pre-revenue startup, by the time you're spending 5K in hosting, your business is starting to make some decent revenue.

I'm much more focused on getting and having enough users that I get to worry about spending 5k on hosting.

I think you're missing my point. Tarsnap has no trouble paying its AWS bills, which are well over $5k/month. I'm not worried about spending $5k.

But at the same time I can't think of anything I could spend 20 minutes on which would create more than $5k of value. $1 of AWS credits = $1 less expenses = $1 more profits = $1 more revenue.

It's more than 20 minutes including preparation and travel time.

I understand what you're saying, but my argument is that the 5K in credits are actually of fairly low value to the startups getting office hours, because they don't have real profits/revenue at that stage, at least not enough where 5K makes a difference to the long term survival of a startup.

If I'm a very early stage startup, I'm worried about being alive next year. Yes, 5K may help, but that 5K will likely not make a significant difference in my company's prospects. 20 minutes with an advisor at YC could completely change my company's trajectory.

I'd imagine there are very few companies that apply, and then get selected for office hours, that will walk away from the meeting saying "I'm so glad I did that because I got 5K in Amazon credits." That said, it is still a great perk.

If a founder works 10k-15k/hrs on a unicorn over 5 years its like 15k/hr for every hour they spend on it.

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