Ask HN: Fellowships to work on startup in SF? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Fellowships to work on startup in SF?

9 pointsanishathalye6 comments

I'm a student working on a software (education + ML related) startup idea with a couple friends, and ideally, we want to spend our summer working in SF.

We don't need much money -- we just want money for rent -- we don't need to buy equipment, we don't need to pay ourselves, and we're good with eating PB&J sandwiches for the summer. We just want to be living and working together, and in SF, if possible.

We don't want to give up equity, so we've applied to some fellowships, like Lightspeed Venture Parters and Summer@Highland. But these kinds of zero equity fellowship-style programs seem pretty rare.

Any ideas on how to be in SF for the summer? Anyone know of any other programs that we should look into?

We're doing our own research on this, but I thought I'd ask HN in case anyone here had any advice to share.

Since you're restricting yourself so much, you don't have many options. One opportunity, although a shitty one, is to find a 24-hr gym with treadmills and get a membership, make a platform for your laptop that can hang onto one of the treadmills to use as your work 'desk'(can't get kicked out if you're 'exercising'), you now have a place to work/shower/bathroom, and then you can sleep in your car (which is probably illegal there so find a good parking spot!).

I guess it just comes down to how set on being in SF and not giving up equity you are.

Since you didn't mention it, YC has a Fellowship program.

https://fellowship.ycombinator.com/

Why SF? It's a pretty expensive place in terms of rent and it doesn't sound like this is the kind of thing that requires a specific location. Without a really good reason, I wouldn't want anyone spending money I'd invested in that way.

I hope this isn't obnoxious to suggest, but: give up equity. No free lunch.

Rent is the last thing fellowships want to pay for. They'll give up a living stipend but they certainly want the money to be used on technical resources.

Well, the reasoning is that we all want to be in the same physical location (because working together remotely is ineffective).

And SF is a nice place to be :)

(Yeah, I agree that it's not critical that we spend the summer in SF. But that's where everything is - it's a good place to be, if possible.)

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