Updated Request for Startups | Hacker News Reader

Updated Request for Startups

blog.ycombinator.com

249 pointscraigcannon177 comments

Try to remember that this is probably just a marketing document for YC. It's aspirationally what they'd like people to think about YC startups. There's not much point in debating it. If you have a good idea in almost any field, they're going to consider it.

With 25 categories, their cost to saying "we'd like YC to help end global warming" is zero. As the world's leading early-stage investment vehicle, the cost to them leaving out, say, adtech is also zero: the same people will apply either way.

Baseless cynicism is not helpful.

Technically you aren't false, this could be just a PR thing, but why would you assume that?

"YC requests these startups because they want these startups" is a much simpler explanation than "YC requests these startups as a marketing ploy".

I don't see a good reason to be so skeptical, so I will go ahead and take this post at face value.

Obviously everyone should think for themselves, and if your startup doesn't fit these categories you should apply anyway (as the article says). I'm just saying that assuming they're being honest here is valuable to me, as a guideline for thinking about startup ideas and YC's vision for the future.

Dismissing this stuff (without a good, specific argument) would hurt more than it helps.

I see tptacek's comment as anti-cynical rather than cynical.

Cynicism would be saying, "pff, a YC startup couldn't actually do anything about global warming". Maybe they could, maybe they couldn't; if you can figure out how, maybe you should apply to YC. But either way, the question is irrelevant because YC has good reasons to include it in their RFS anyway, so now we can stop wasting our time arguing about it on HN.

It's always interesting to see how different people read the same text. The sentences I focussed on were:

> "There's not much point in debating it. If you have a good idea in almost any field, they're going to consider it."

And I read them as basically saying (a) if you're working on something cool that's not on this list, don't let that prevent you from applying as it's likely not a list of criteria; and (b) while it might be a jumping off point for conversation, it's likely missing the intent if you spend much time criticizing what's omitted and included.

> just a marketing document for YC

That's true, I just disagree with how you framed it. Some people may genuinely be inspired by it, and some good can genuinely come out of it, even if it "costs zero"

Well, when you factor in how long it took for tptacek to make that comment...

> The world’s financial systems are increasingly unable to meet the demands of consumers and businesses.

I would love to learn more about this. Precisely what needs are the world's financial systems unable to meet?

In my opinion, the main issue with many financial services today is heavy regulation.

This may be good regulation and necessary, but it makes it very difficult for consumers to do simple things like transferring money and setup accounts. Especially for lower income people who tend to have difficulty getting together all the required identification and documentation.

And it seems that any "innovation" in this regard will be companies attempting to skirt these regulations, only to be eventually reined in when they get popular enough to be used for fraud or other nefarious purposes.

The solution to this is simple: allow the USPS to offer banking services to the unbanked. This is what other first world countries do, but for political reasons, we don't do it in the US [1]. Financial regulation is not going away, and the issues you see with cryptocurrency make it glaringly obvious why regulations exist in the first place.

That's what's so discouraging about a lot of these issues. They're hacks around political apathy, the chances of success are low (to this day I still use the Standard Treasury and BankSimple outcomes as what happens when you go up against the banking industry).

Why YC doesn't stop skirting the issue and align with political representatives and parties that are congruent with the values they're attempting to push through funding is beyond me. They've already chosen a side (looking for solutions for climate change, animal welfare, support of the arts/creators, sustainable use of planetary resources), embrace it fully. If YC wants to create a legacy, they should aim to obsolete themselves by working towards public policy that removes the risk inherant with becoming an entrepreneur (funding, health insurance, derisking opportunity cost, etc).

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=usps+banking+services

[1a] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/bernie-...

Full disclosure: I work for a financial utility in risk management.

The USPS lost $2.7B last year, even though it has a monopoly on mail. Why anyone would want to give it more responsibility is beyond me.

> The USPS lost $2.7B last year, why anyone would want to give it more responsibility is beyond me.

The loss comes from having to serve literally the entire country by law. A postal service in cities is profitable - a postal service that has to serve even the remotest ditch in the deepest desert of a flyover state with daily mail will always incur loss. And that is what society is for: to bear the cost of providing everyone in the country with affordable mail.

To add banking services to the unbanked (or those who do not trust the megabanks any more, given their historic lack of customer support and historically low image) is something that can very well be used to offset these losses.

So the postal service loses money because it's mandated by law that it has to serve the entire country. But mandating that it has to provide banking services for the entire country is going to save money? Ok.

When you receive a money transfer does your bank send a truck out to your remote mountaintop cabin to drop it in your mailbox?

Providing basic banking services at a post office is not nearly as big a proposition as delivering mail to every address in the country.

Plus banking services are touched less frequently than mail. I get junk mail every day. I don't know the exact logistics of what they're suggesting, but I have a hard time seeing how it could be as expensive as mail delivery.

Actually, the USPS' primary financial challenge is a 2006 law that instituted unique pension funding requirements. It is otherwise unsubsubsidized.

https://www.21cpw.com/paea-the-most-insane-law-by-congress-e...

These losses are primarily the fault of congress, not the USPS.

ridiculous things like ePacket: https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/11/05/how-the-...

combined with lack of control over their business model and having to meet requirements that other businesses don't: https://blog.boomerangapp.com/2016/10/whats-killing-the-post...

Congress isn't going anywhere though, why would their impact on the ability of the USPS's money to make money banking be any different from mail?

Because physical logistics are labor and capital intensive, whereas banking is not. USPS can deliver banking services in a financially sound manner without needing to generate a profit from it.

Why does the USPS need to make money? Why isn't mail (and possibly other services that the USPS could provide) treated like road maintenance or police or whatever else?

(I have a vague idea that this may be a politically loaded question, so I just want to put this disclaimer here to say that I genuinely don't mean for it to be. I don't know much about the past of the USPS and why it is the way it is, so i'm asking)

It's an interesting question. Obviously the money has to come from somewhere. Mail trucks cost money, and no one is going to go out and deliver letters for free. It's easy to say we should just make up the difference with tax reciepts like we are now.

I think it's less a philosophical question -- is mail like roads or police? -- vs a matter of efficiency. It's obviously possible to NOT lose money delivering much more difficult things than paper. FedEx and UPS do it all the time. But they're private businesses who compete with each other (and Amazon and whoever else), so they have to figure it out or they won't be around.

The USPS, meanwhile, doesn't have to compete with anyone (in fact, it's illegal for anyone else to deliver mail) and has no incentive or need to be efficient because they can draw on the US Treasury whenever they need to. It's not that they're bad people, it's just the nature of the incentives and system involved (and also it's run by congress). These same dynamic would be there in banking though, which is why this seems like such a bad idea.

I don't think competition is the answer here, I think it's more similar to the healthcare debate.

Do you make people hard to deliver to have to pay more, or do you "average" out the cost and make everyone pay roughly the same amount?

With a combination of taxes, flat-rate fees, and delivery-distance based costs, I think it's more than possible to make a system where it's not "free" or extremely cheap to send somewhere hard-to-get, but it's also not prohibitively expensive.

And IMO the postal service is riding that line in a way that i'm happy with. I appreciate that I can send a small box across the country for $5, and I can do that whether I live in NYC or in middle-of-nowhere pennsylvania. And I'm more than happy to pay a bit more in taxes to make up for the difference that the flat-rate doesn't cover if it means that lower-income individuals won't need to pay as much to send mail at all.

I know that there are problems with not having competition, but I think mail delivery is along the same lines as other "naturally monopolistic" things like power, water, sewer, etc...

Sounds a bit like socialism to me. Next, you'll want to be sharing the costs of healthcare so people who happen to have an accident aren't bankrupted and left in financial stress for life...

But competition is a problem in healthcare too. Why do you think health care is so expensive? A big factor is no one has to pay for anything out of pocket, and no provider has any incentive to compete on price. In fact, no one knows what the price of anything even is.

It's a hard problem to solve, but it's not impossible, and I'd argue most are better than the healthcare system we have currently in the US.

Yes, "state sanctioned monopolies" can be a problem, and they have their downsides, but I believe for natural monopolies they are the best solution.

"It's obviously possible to NOT lose money delivering much more difficult things than paper. FedEx and UPS do it all the time. But they're private businesses who compete with each other (and Amazon and whoever else), so they have to figure it out or they won't be around."

They also do not have the requirements to serve the entire country, and they do not have the bonkers pension requirements placed on them like the USPS does.

"The USPS, meanwhile, doesn't have to compete with anyone (in fact, it's illegal for anyone else to deliver mail) and has no incentive or need to be efficient because they can draw on the US Treasury whenever they need to. It's not that they're bad people, it's just the nature of the incentives and system involved (and also it's run by congress). These same dynamic would be there in banking though, which is why this seems like such a bad idea."

Money is far from being the sole motivator.

> Why does the USPS need to make money?

Because it's obviously a service of value, and profitability is what tells you that the net value created is positive. If you're spending more on delivering mail than people are willing to pay, you're squandering resources that could be better put to other uses.

> Why isn't mail (and possibly other services that the USPS could provide) treated like road maintenance or police or whatever else?

It should be; all of these are also services that have value, and should be held to the standard of profitability to ensure that the net value created is positive.

"all of these are also services that have value, and should be held to the standard of profitability to ensure that the net value created is positive"

You've just guaranteed that no roads would ever be worked on in poor residential areas.

> You've just guaranteed that no roads would ever be worked on in poor residential areas.

Why not? I said net value created. That doesn't mean each individual road has to show a profit. It means the enterprise as a whole has to show a profit. If improving roads to poor residential areas gives those people more options so they can create wealth and not be poor any more, that's a profit.

> The USPS lost $2.7B last year

The USPS spent $2.7B more than it gained in revenue from sales of stamps etc. The idea that a government agency is supposed to be profitable, and the use of the business term "lost" is appropriate, is a politicized, partisan one. (The extent to which the USA's post isn't really a government agency any more is also extremely politicized and partisan.)

One way to tell that the profitability model isn't appropriate is, what would happen if the USPS did achieve profitability? The USPS's own press release attributes $1.1B of their "loss" to a refusal by regulators to let stamp prices remain at 49 cents, requiring them to go back to 47 cents. How is a "company" that already has extremely below-market prices and can't even get regulators to permit them to keep a 2-cent increase supposed to maintain profitability, should they ever achieve it?

That's the point though. The USPS costs more then it takes in, by a lot. Yeah, it's due to regulators, but they're not going anywhere. That's exactly the argument against having USPS pick up additional responsibilities like banking. The USPS opens a bank branch in every post office, now those same regulators (who can't even agree on increasing the price of a stamp) are pricing loans and opening checking accounts? What reason is there to believe that would end well, especially when it's a whole new line of business for them?

Not complaining, but the fact I'm getting hammered by downvotes on all of these responses is mind boggling to me. I'm surprised how much of the tech world apparently thinks this is a good idea.

Not that I downvoted, but I think the downvotes are because your statement reads as a criticism of the USPS's internal competence and ability to run a successful operation. "The USPS is required to suck by external forces that we will not realistically be able to get rid of" is I think a pretty different position and one I'm more likely to agree with.

Fair enough. Nothing personal against the people of the USPS. I do think those same "external forces we won't realistically be able to get rid that require the USPS to suck" would also make them suck at banking though.

  The USPS spent $2.7B more than it gained in revenue from taxes.

By taxes, did you mean fees (postage and other fees)?

In analyzing USPS financials, bear in mind that they have to pre-fund all of their potential long-term pension and healthcare liabilities[0], unlike other arms of government.

[0] https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/be-careful-what-you-assume

I did, yes, fixed.

> The solution to this is simple: allow the USPS to offer banking services to the unbanked.

Walmart is basically the banking service for the unbanked. Between Bluebird, check cashing, and bill paying, you got a lot of bank functions.

https://www.walmart.com/cp/walmart-money-center/5433

Great observation. Huge fan (shockingly enough) of the work they're doing in that regard, but I would argue that minimal banking functions should be served by the USPS or other governmental organization (in a transparent, accountable way), as it's basic infrastructure necessary to operate in today's economy as a citizen.

What Walmart giveth, Walmart can taketh away at any time.

I trust Walmart because its really in their best interest. If you are in a poor area on the 1st of the month, you know exactly why they would not screw this one up. I grew up with Indian Health Services (and the 3 operations to correct a poorly done root canal) have taught me that a group with a profit interest is probably going to do a better job than a disinterested government agency.

I can understand where you're coming from. I would say that we should be building processes and systems that enable those who are interested in delivering results to achieve roles in positions of power in government, while disempowering empire builders and self-interested parties.

To your anecdote, would you not trust the US Health and Human Services to deliver national healthcare if the team behind Watsi was in charge? Because that is quite literally what they're doing; building a transparent [1] and ruthlessly efficient [2] healthcare management system for third world citizens. Cleary, YC believes they can do it [3]. I also believe it can be done.

[1] https://usenotion.com/watsi/transparency/

[2] https://venturebeat.com/2017/02/07/y-combinator-and-watsi-la...

[3] https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-research-universal-healthcar...

No, I wouldn't trust US Health and Human Services because the government cannot manage to serve a much smaller population through Indian Health Service without racking up years of tragedy and mismanagement. If they cannot succeed with a smaller group then why would I trust them with a bigger group?

Because a government will always be more accountable than a for profit entity. Everyone gets a vote. Anyone can run for office.

One of the big problems with US government institutions aimed at the Native American population like IHS is that the population they serve is small and diffuse so that it has basically zero electoral power and can impose no accountability.

This, unfortunately, is wrong in the USA. The IHS is not staffed by elected officials.

The Native Americans who need our help, and do not receive it from the government IHS, do not have any way of democratically bringing about a more efficient team to run their health services.

The ONLY solution therefore must be a private one.

> The IHS is not staffed by elected officials.

It's accountable to elected officials in Congress and the White House, OTOH, those elected officials are not in any meaningful sense accountable to the population served by IHS.

> The ONLY solution therefore must be a private one.

The structural problems with IHS incentives and accountability don't mean that there is a better private solution, and private services to Native American communities often are poor, too, because private industry isn't really all that interested in solving problems for people that have very little money to pay for the solution.

People can bring a class action suit against a private company, but the government is much harder and often impossible to deal with in court. The Department of Interior proved that fairly well with their continued incompetence even in the face of a court system.

> Everyone gets a vote.

Yes, but its a majority game. Heck, look at all the diversity news on HN or the diversity reports by tech giants. See any mention of enrolled members of Native American tribes? See any VC funding to solve the smaller problem (might have been a nice place to test all that basic income stuff)? Heck, Google can block one of the tribal community colleges in Google Voice and no one gives a solitary damn.

No, government is less accountable than any private group. After all, they can get away with doing things like this when questioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcgGoAcDXvQ&feature=youtu.be

"People can bring a class action suit against a private company"

Not anymore. I guarantee you that any private company that would try to provide those services would have a "you can't join a class action; you have to go through arbitration" clause.

I pretty sure you can skip arbitration when a company kills people.

That'd be a big ol Citation Needed there, buddy.

Criminal complaints are not subject to arbitration.

The patchworks of demographics, identity, media narrative, alliances, and horse-trading that determine government representation and policy are extremely complex and require immense energy to influence in the smallest of ways.

They are vanishingly unlikely to budge for your pet technocratic issue. Doing surgeries correctly is not, in any meaningful sense, up for a vote, nor is anyone going to win elected office on a doing-surgeries-correctly platform.

Basic societal infrastructure (in this case, universal healthcare) is not a pet technocratic issue. When did we become a first world country in name only?

The irony of such levels of defeatism in a forum that proclaims opportunity is at every turn is astounding. Hope is not a strategy, but chances of success are not zero.

The Indian Health Service exists. The sexy ideological and identitarian battle over whether the federal government should provide health care to Native Americans is already won. But democracy fundamentally lacks an accountability mechanism for pesky little details like the quality of the service provided.

Yeah it would be great if the post office was a bank but the check cashing lobby would fight it tooth and nail. Basically any time USPS does anything innovative or makes money, Congress comes along and guts it.

If you try and change law in the United States, any group of 41 senators can stop you, and so could half of the House of Representatives. If you try and replace the members of the House of Representatives, the state governments have already stopped you by gerrymandering the seats. If you try and replace the Senators, you have to wait up to six years and deal with literally everything else that can happen within that timespan.

Let's say you manage to make your way through all of that. Or at least you get close enough that you can actually pass legislation. But you can't get the legislation all the way through without making some small compromises, at which point your elected officials are going to be branded as "neoliberal sellouts" and primaried by extremists. Then you have to start all over again.

That's something that you can try and do. That's also something that literally everyone else tries and does all the time, and at least half of those everyone else are working directly against you.

Or you could solve the problem through some other mechanism. That seems hard, but solving the problem through American politics is really hard, probably harder in a lot of cases. What happened first: did political activists literally lobby local governments to drop taxicab medallions, or did startups circumvent that problem by introducing ridesharing?

We must still be willing to try. While cute to attempt to hack around politics by breaking the law, it is not a long term strategy to affect change at scale.

We can appreciate the inroads Uber and Lyft have made in disrupting transportation networks that will last well after they've both exhausted their runways, but a sustainable system will need to exist in the future that does not rely on VCs burning piles of capital in dumpsters.

A lot of that is going to have to be the higher-order work of getting rid of gerrymandering, fixing campaign finance, improving voter access, and so forth. Even setting aside the philosophical question of whether government is a good way to solve problems, it’s not going to be one in practice if it can’t even function.

A story related to regulation that I like to tell people is my experience trying to open a UK bank account when I first moved there. As an EU citizen, I expected the process to be done in jiffy – just walk in to any ol’ bank and ask to open an account. Except, my EU passport and an employment contract that said I’d certainly not be poor and national insurance number and what not apparently meant nothing. No, I had to have a UK address. The apartment hotel I stayed at while trying to find an apartment wouldn’t do either – I needed utility bills you see. (For some reason, utility bills in the UK are basically as good for identification as a passport or drivers license...) In order to get a utility bill of course I had to have a place to live, an apartment or house or what have you. Of course, I couldn’t sign a lease without also setting up a standing order (that’s monthly payments, for anyone as unfamiliar with the term as I was) and of course I couldn’t set up a standing order because to do so I had to have a – you guessed it! – bank account. A catch-22 which means to this day I keep a UK bank account, just to avoid the hassle of trying to set one up should I ever need it again.

Can't you have a dual currency bank account (e.g. a pound sterling side and a euro side) from your EU country and then pay from that? Or maybe there's some reason that won't work..

Depends on what employee you got an appointment with. Try the next bank if the first one was an asshole.

You have more than enough documentation.

Moving there from the US, I am so grateful that someone warned me about this ahead of time and told me to go to Lloyds bank.

I think Transferwise now allows you to sign up for a borderless account that has UK-local bank details.

>In my opinion, the main issue with many financial services today is heavy regulation.

Money (which is the root of finance) is incredibly strong stimulus for humans that evokes all kinds of human vices. Sooner or later, anything that deals with finance and mine will come down to the questions of human nature and morale. And these are tough matters to deal with.

I just read a blog post showing how costly and/or complicated it is to move money between countries, when doing internships for instance. I guess that's one problem that could be solved.

https://medium.com/@emilefugulin/money-tips-for-foreigners-w...

Isn't Ripple trying to do precisely that using the blockchain based XRP token?

They are.

I am hesitant to ask this as it seems you only hear about young folks being accepted into YC and succeeding. But I also know that YC thinks differently - so here goes:

I am a 62 year old solo founder working on my fifth startup - all have been bootstrapped and successful to varying degrees. How much does age factor into YC's acceptance decision - if at all. What is the oldest founder YC has ever accepted? Thanks!

You're operating at a much higher level than myself but this is very inspirational: I'm 43 and shooting to launch my first app/business/product this summer.

Good luck!

Can't answer the age factor into YC's acceptance decision, but as a YC founder, I have met many founders in their 50s and 60s in the last few batches.

You should definitely apply to YC regardless of your age, circumstances, etc.

Well, the oldest founder in the 2015 Winter batch (first I could find data on) was 66: https://phaven-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/files/image_part/asset/...

But most are 20-30 ...

And most people who apply are 20-30..

I dont have the data but probably most applicants are 20-30 too.

Age doesn't factor into our decision at all. We've accepted founders in their 60s+. Apply away!

Great - that's very encouraging! Might just take the leap - thanks :)

This list always strikes me as a remarkable assembly of the cultural norms important to the "ycombinator" demographic.

To me it reads as an eclectic mix of academic, governmental, business and technology opinions in the guise of startup ideas. Not that there's anything wrong with that... ycombinator is free to invest in the areas it cares about. But it is very isolated from my own cultural experience of what matters and makes a real difference in the world.

>my own cultural experience of what matters and makes a real difference in the world.

Could you elaborate?

I cannot speak for the GP but there are some from my own cultural norms (which being stale, pale and male will not look wildly different from YC) and some that I can make informed guesses at based on listening to people not like me

- Managing relationships This is a hard thing to do especially for us on the spectrum. one of the most "obvious" things that the personal surveillance of the iphone / echo provide is the ability to get feedback on ourselves. I call this MOOP (Massive Open Online Psychology). I joke that my iPhone needs to be like the MS Paperclip "Paul, you seem to be about to start a fight with your wife. Can I help with that?" But there are huge areas where simple data can improve my own decision making - from personal finance, to how often or quickly i respond to people in my life (am i responding to ones i care about - can you measure that across email, facebook, slack phone calls, text and me just sitting in the living room talking to my kids? Then rank which ones i need to work on this day?

- parenting tightly related to the above is how i behave towards those most important to me. Simple data could be a good start - time spent, tone of voice, agreeing goals or sticking to them. Just make it easy for me to review the day and make more considered decisions.

- Workplace helper so the most likely place to see the above technology is in the corporate workplace. the quality of the manager is a major component in quality of work output. So things that suggest ways to improve a managers relationship with their workers is likely to win a huge amount of value. and it's not just "corporate training". It could be a significant leveller - Weinstein was in a position of unaccountable power and an app won't help that, but most workplace abuse is more tractable.

- Home PA So my house has bad insulation in places - we should fix that, and thermal camera startups will be there. but light bulbs and tvs are power hungry so let's buy efficient ones. and now my room is frankly cluttered - use object recognition to identify them all and then show me where they can go or which ones i have to get rid of, and now get me recipes, arrange a dog walk this weekend with my sister in law and remind me i should get off four stops early to go for a run.

(OK, look. According to Rory Sutherland There are two ways to increase value - either make the Eurostar train run faster between London and Paris or have supermodels serve Moët for free so no one cares that it is slow. My startups are in the category of make life seem better. We are all dead in the long run)

Ultimately I want anti-marketing startups - that give me more deliberate choices in my life - options to choose better.

Not your parent, but I come from a pretty rural area, which is what a lot of people would call the "real world." The people who live there certainly would.

Many startups are 100% irrelevant there. Take huge poster children like Uber, for example: everyone has a car already, as it's basically mandatory. Or smaller startups, like Slice, for example. I live in NYC. I have lots of pizza options. I love pizza. In my hometown, there are two pizza places. You don't really need reviews, you order from one, and if you don't like it, well, you have the other one.

Now, that's not to say that there are zero startups that do; not that Facebook or Twitter are exactly "startups" today, but when they were, they still had a big impact. But a lot of startups are focused on "upper middle class people who live in population centers". That's a lot of people, but it also leaves a lot of people out.

> which is what a lot of people would call the "real world."

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...

80% of the population lives in urban areas, and this fraction is increasing, so it's unsurprising that most companies target them.

I don't disagree. At the same time, the long tail is something startups claim to be good at, generally...

I moved back to the "real world" in the last 6 months and couldn't agree more.

But, I think that the issue is just that startups, by their nature, aren't a good fit to less dense environments. If the focus is to grow, grow, grow, I imagine that the density of major population centers helps that significantly.

Granted, they have a couple ideas on the list that would help:

- One Million Jobs

- Transportation & Housing (I have a dream that the combo of self-driving ai and low earth orbit satellite internet will bring a resurgence of rural opportunities)

- Diversity (I'm reading this generously on the hope that more companies will consider using remote work to bring in non-urban perspectives)

- Future of Work

- Underserved Communities (they're probably not thinking of rural communities here, but they should)

I don't disagree, what I see the parent doing is agreeing with this sentiment:

> I think that the issue is just that startups, by their nature, aren't a good fit to less dense environments.

That's not inherently a value judgement, but also, many people don't want to see the long tail get ignored either.

> That's not inherently a value judgement

This is a great way to look at it. It's not that startups not being more as useful to rural people is bad, per-se. It's just that it'd be nice if there were some alternative set of new, innovative businesses that are good for them.

Though, I'm not really sure what a business like that looks like.

Yup, that’s the trick! I don’t know either.

I think you somewhat hit on this when you mentioned Facebook and Twitter. It seems to me that any business that connects people in more rural areas with the masses is a potential winner (consider how rural areas grow quickly when they're connected directly by rail or an interstate). Maybe some sort of marketplace app or website that expands the reach of rural businesses; Etsy for the best mom and pop shops across the country?

Isn't that true of most businesses that aren't Facebook/Twitter/Walmart size? I agree with what you're saying, but it seems more applicable to the economy in general as opposed to just startups.

> the economy in general

I'd invert what you'd say; it's true of most businesses that are that size, or are trying to get to that size. The two pizza shops in my town are happy to be an individual shop, and a regional chain. They're not getting bigger than that. Same with most of the businesses there, though many of them have died out as the bigger stores moved in within an hour's drive.

Startups explicitly aren't happy being a mom and pop shop, otherwise, they wouldn't be startups.

"Not your parent, but I come from a pretty rural area, which is what a lot of people would call the "real world." The people who live there certainly would."

I have to say, I absolutely abhor when anyone tries to say that one part of the country is more "real world" than any other part.

Sure. That was the framing of the parent, so I kept it. I agree with you, personally.

Sure, I'll try... but will probably ramble as I try to put a finger on it.

People matter. Community matters. Relationships matter. Family matters. Helping people who ask for help matters. Small businesses that provide a livelihood in the context of relationships matters. My neighbors, my street condition, my local stores matter. Work and paychecks matter. I guess one way to say it may be things that don't scale matter.

Suffering is normal. Health problems stink. I love when medicine can help people. Most health problems seem to be difficult and medicine sometimes can help, but sometimes can't.

Putting people on the moon matters. Putting a tesla in space doesn't matter. Fortune 500 companies don't matter. The stock market doesn't matter. Fake videos don't matter.

More concretely on the list, taking "Education" as an example: "Scalable solutions in these areas should now be doable thanks to advances in brain science and technologies such as smart home devices, wearables, and mobile." My immediate thought: No way tech helps more than 3%. Education is "solved", just _very_ difficult to do. Quality families with quality teachers and a good professional support structure (esp for disabilities etc...).

Overall as I looked at ycombinators list, Job's quote comes to mind:

"The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.

That’s going to break people’s hearts.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all."

You have some interesting points, but I want to mention some things where your perspective doesn't make sense to me. I am a tech focused city-dweller for what it matters.

> Putting people on the moon matters. Putting a tesla in space doesn't matter.

Wait, what? The USA didn't just launch people to the moon in one go. They also hauled up hunks of useless metal first. It's a step. SpaceX is going to be colonizing Mars with new families and new biology and a new chapter in multi-planet life. Do you not think that matters?

> Fake videos don't matter.

Sure they do, especially at scale. We are currently witnessing the large-scale attempts at altering American's realities by forceful propaganda from foreign countries. I've been told by the moderators here not to call out any specific countries, but Americans and others are reading false text with false attribution to their rural neighbors and they are getting confused. This helped enable a culture of hate and racism that is rising in the US, and this is not a stable or okay thing. Fake video will accelerate that enormously if not combatted - this stuff really matters, especially if your focus in life is community, family, love, people, and real things of that nature.

> Putting a tesla in space doesn't matter.

Second-guessing a choice of test payload for a new, risky rocket design definitely doesn't matter.

Cheaper and better weather and communications satellites, that matters.

Self-taught non-US teenager here, created this with a co-founder & friend: https://financi.io/ -- we're an open, anonymous, and inclusive marketplace for creators to collect payments for their premium content through cryptocurrencies.

It is currently being used by adult entertainers, which didn't bring in as much money as we expected, so we plan to pivot and add nsfw filtering options (a la Safe Search) amongst other features before applying to YC. Any other tips to improve our application?

P.s. I wrote all the code for financi and will be happy to answer any questions in comments or `mail@${username}.com`.

I find it interesting on the support creators side it is purely about easing getting money. That is certainly important, but I feel like it ignores exploring more ways to ease the act of creation, giving ways to increase rate of creation or improve ability to prepare etc.

We developers create a lot of this sort of stuff to make our own jobs easier, but other types of creatives don't necessarily have the ability to explore the same space for their own work. I think there are opportunities there to be explored, if we can just find the right places to inject possibility. I have one idea I'm working towards now for writers (as that's my secondary interest after dev) but I bet there are ways to help musicians, painters, etc as well we haven't even begun to dream of yet.

The problem in that space has nothing to do with money or reaching fans. It is that to succeed as an artist via online tools, your primary skill must be marketing. All the existing sites bring success not to the best creators, but to the best marketers of their creations.

Or, I guess I should say, reaching fans is the problem... but it isn't correlated with the quality of your work.

Has YC ever provided the data around how many RFS startups get funded? What they attempted to do (starting biz model)? What they learned? Etc. I feel like this would be really interesting information to study.

Was RFS Water removed from the list? I tried to apply for RFS Water last year, and while it was on this list, it wasn't in the application page dropdown when you actually apply. I emailed YC and asked about it, and was told it would be added shortly.

Looking now, I can't find any trace it ever existed. Was RFS Water deleted? The URL used to be http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#water. Thanks!

If you're working on a water startup, and you'd like to apply to YC, you should still do it. You can apply to YC with any type of company -- it doesn't have to line up with an RFS. Our blog post for water startups is still out there -- it's just not a current RFS. As I mentioned in a comment above, this isn't an exhaustive list of the ideas we'd like to fund.

Well, I think there's a lot of promise in weather modification for the purposes of transporting fresh water long distances. I'm probably not ready to apply right now for that idea, but if someone is out there working on that, good job and we should chat.

Looking at shooting silver iodide pellets up in the sky or painting deserts black? Lots of issues with weather modification. Virtual water is the most cost effective way to transport water, by far, unless you have some crazy new product

I'm very excited about this. Happy to answer any questions about Carbon Removal Technologies or Cellular Agriculture and Clean Meat

Do you see biochar as a viable solution for carbon sequestration? If so, at what scale (small farm, industrial ag, consumer gardener)?

Yes absolutely. I think that is one of the most promising solutions next to direct-air-capture

Have you checked out Drawdown [0]? Biochar was #72 out of 80 solutions for magnitude of emissions reduction by 2050 emissions. I haven't gone through their numbers, but they found that biochar could displace only 0.81 GT of CO2 equivalent between now and 2050. Compare that to recycled paper (0.90 GT) [1].

[0] http://www.drawdown.org/the-book/ [1] http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank

Drawdown focuses on use of crop residues as feedstock for biochar. Specifically they cite a figure that represents 50% of the crop residues burned annually as being potentially available for biochar feedstock. For reasons I don’t understand, they ignore forestry waste. It is actually much more efficient to make biochar from forestry residue than crop residue.

Huh. Thanks for the clarification. Have you reached out to them to clarify their thinking here?

What are the efficiency gains of burning forestry waste vs. crop residue? Also, what is the relative size of forestry waste vs crop residue, and how much more/less impact does it have on CO2 displacement by 2050?

I have not reached out to them. Their book was already published so they probably don’t care.

I don’t know the actual difference in efficiency, but from experience I can tell you that:

1) forestry waste is much easier to load into a reactor and handle in an automated way than crop waste. I’ve actually not seen a functional materials handling system for crop residues at the 1 ton per day or greater scale. These are common in forestry waste.

2) Feedstock needs to be bone dry before it will pyrolyze into biochar. It takes more energy to dry crop waste than forestry residue.

Here's a few biochar companies you might find interesting:

http://www.biocharsolutions.com/

https://www.biocarbontech.com/

http://blackcarbon.dk/

https://www.carboculture.com/

http://fullcirclebiochar.com/

(list is from AirMiners, index of companies mining carbon from the air, plus lots of other sequestration tech: http://airminers.org)

The tricky thing is that most (possibly all) of these cos are basically dormant. None has production-ready tech.

Interesting! How are you evaluating "dormant"? Curious to know, their sites look fairly active to me, perhaps I missed something.

Regarding Carbon Removal Technologies, the RFS states

> Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well.

What safeguards does YC have in place to help a company do this without starting unintended consequences and maybe accidentally making the problem worse? A large body of evidence suggests that humans and businesses, overall, do not get a good grasp on how their actions will cascade 20-30-100 years into the future.

Does YC have a plan or opinion at least on how to reduce the likelihood of your startups wreaking uncertain havoc on the other side of the world while engaging in geoengineering?

Edit: I'm not allowed to reply on HN any more I guess, but here is my response to the comment below.

My comment was specifically not about carbon removal, but the "Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well", specifically not talking about carbon removal.

Something most people don't realize is that creating something like a solar panel adds carbon to the atmosphere.

Manufacturing a solar panel does have carbon impact, but the amount of that impact, relative to the total amount of energy it produces over its lifetime, is an order of magnitude smaller than that of coal, and several times smaller than even natural gas.

Ref.: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf

There is a really great article from New Yorker last year that I'd recommend: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio...

Carbon removal technologies are not going to bring us another ice-age. We need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of Carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophic global warming. That is the major risk today and it's very apparent. Problem is that carbon removal technologies aren't good enough or cheap enough to do that.

> We need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of Carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophic global warming.

Only if you believe the predictions of the models used by the IPCC, which have already been falsified by the data. CO2 has been rising according to the most pessimistic "business as usual" model scenario, but actual warming has been less than that predicted by the most optimistic "massive reductions in CO2 have already happened" scenario. This is the huge elephant in the room that is never mentioned by climate change alarmists.

There is massive consensus around IPCC's conclusions within the scientific community. The topic of the discussion here is not if climate change is real or not. You should find another site to discuss that.

> There is massive consensus around IPCC's conclusions within the scientific community.

So what? Science doesn't work by consensus, it works by making predictions that match reality. If the predictions don't match reality, all the consensus in the world doesn't make good science.

> The topic of the discussion here is not if climate change is real or not.

I'll leave that to the moderators to decide. One of the items in the RFS was asking for research on taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. It seems appropriate to ask whether doing that is really worth spending time and energy on when we have so many other pressing issues that need attention.

Oh man I would love to be involved in this. Have you had people apply to YC already with ideas in these areas? I'm not familiar with any in the YC portfolio, so they must not have made it. Can you speak to any technical shortcomings of ideas you've already seen (aside from the general cost/scale issues mentioned on the site)?

I'm surprised that people keep trying to direct-air-capture. I was under the impression that the carbon content (as carbonates) in seawater was much higher than in the atmosphere.

I believe the navy has had some initial success in transforming marine carbonates in to petroleum products, which they will probably use as fuel, but I can't wait for the day when we have reverse oil wells pumping carbon back in to the ground..

>Have you had people apply to YC already with ideas in these areas?

Yes but we would love to see a lot more. We know there are lots of researchers working on this but not enough of them are starting companies.

>Can you speak to any technical shortcomings of ideas you've already seen (aside from the general cost/scale issues mentioned on the site)?

Here is a great overview of current technologies: http://www.centerforcarbonremoval.org/what-is-carbon-removal...

This may be useful to figuring out how to get involved -- here's an index we made of all the existing carbon removal startups and companies: http://airminers.org

I'm surprised you think carbon removal from the atmosphere is relevant.

Just from a physics perspective, a dollar invested into substituting coal burning is likely to be many orders of magnitude more effective than first burning the coal to CO2, diluting it to 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, concentrating that CO2 back to some high percentage, maybe turn it CO2 to some higher density form of carbon again etc.

Every step requires a lot of effort, capital and energy.

The best way to store carbon is coal. And it's already there, in the ground.

I think the transition to near 100% renewable technologies is a foregone conclusion at this point: the economics of carbon-based fuels basically don't make sense any more, and it's just a matter of transitioning away. Natural gas has already basically killed coal and that transition is well under way, and renewables+batteries are now starting to eclipse natural gas peaker plants, transportation, etc.

But there's still 200 years of carbon emissions in the atmosphere to deal with.

Yeah, but if you're going for most bang for your buck, improving and making accessible renewable tech is still better value. I also think you'll have an easier route to profitability with alternative fuel over carbon removal.

Ultimately, I think carbon removal will be a necessary technology if we want to maintain a similar climate to what we have now, but it's farther out there. Would be awesome to see something come out though!

We don't want to encourage carbon removal as a way to continue burning fossil fuels - we want to solve climate change. Solving climate change requires carbon removal to hit 1.5C degree goal. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and we need to get good at it and do it cheaply. Here is a good primer gohttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio...

Although "cheap energy" eventually gets around that. If you had extremely cheap energy, e.g. fusion, you could literally turn atmospheric CO2 and water back into hydrocarbons, and once you've reduced atmospheric CO2 enough, you could run a closed-loop process where you recycle enough hydrocarbons out of the air and water to balance out what's burned for fuel.

It makes sense to do this if hydrocarbons are still more energy-dense than batteries, for instance. If we end up inventing fusion power before we invent an electric jet airliner, for instance.

Cheap energy is critical to massive carbon removal. I think solar might also be the answer

Solar is definitely more attainable on the commercial level right now. On the other hand, ITER so far has cost “mere” tens of billions of dollars, so it’s not unimaginable for VC to fund parallel tokamak research if they’re willing to wait a long time to realize return. Solar power is a lot easier to harvest if you can build your own sun :)

Agree with your logic regarding avoiding additional emissions. The extra piece that this RFS add is, we've got about a trillion tons of extra carbon already up in the atmosphere, how do we mine it?

Woohoo, congrats Gustaf!

Index of startups and technologies for mining carbon from the air: http://airminers.org

We built Air Miners to catalog what exists so hackers can find the gaps in carbon removal and build new solutions :)

Feel free to answer any of the following! Thanks!

  - Any interest in funding commercial permaculture setups?

  - Any interest in small-scale mushroom farmers?

  - Any interest in aquaculture/closed-loop systems that focuses on reducing, reusing, and recycling nutrients and other resources (carbon obvious included)?

  - Interest in non-profits that reclaim abandoned warehouses in urban areas, rehab and function as sustainable greenhouses and employ the "non-employable"?

  - What is the position on marijuana and cannabis cultivation?
    + if the focus is on epigentics?
    + if the focus is on DNA fingerprinting / identification?
    + non-sales, research only, mapping the genetics to cannabinoid expressions?
    + if 100% of profits (minus investor cuts) are funneled back into YC projects?

  - I've already submitted my application but my answers weren't catered to the RFS.  Should I bother editing it to draw focus on the fact that my company addresses the RFS or should I leave the answers a bit more generic? e.g. "How far along are you?" yielded a response focused on business operations, not the technology and its associated R&D which relates to the RFS

It’s really heartening, albeit surprising, to see carbon removal on the list.

It's heartening because carbon removal has to happen. It's surprising because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there is a very small market for CO2. There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using direct air capture (DAC) because it costs an order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$300/T) than its value on the market ($15/T). (Ironically, the biggest market for CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery, which is exactly what it sounds like: it allows more oil to be extracted from oil wells.) So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it?

The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse. On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown outdoors!

For direct air capture to be economically and environmentally sound, there has to be a second step in the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product (so that the product displaces emissions). This means something like converting CO2 to plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in addition to the technical challenge, they’ll have to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels.

The other thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60 GT per year. To put this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally per year is about 5 GT. Which industries are big enough to handle all of that matter?

What is YC’s angle here? Is YC also considering carbon utilization companies? I personally feel like pursuing standalone direct air capture companies is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Of course, direct air removal/carbon capture could just be run at a loss by governments as a public utility, but it's not as cut-and-dried as something like public transit, which provides a tangible service.

Wow, surprised to see “One Million Jobs” still here, from back when Uber was widely praised, and even so it encountered rampant skepticism[1]. Especially curious to see it on the same list as the “Future of Work” which implicitly contradicts its premise.

But hey, maybe there have been some compelling pitches for it. Does anyone have an idea for a One Million Jobs startup that isn’t another transportation company?

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7978163

Education and caregiving maybe?

How many people make a living from YouTube? What about Twitch?

It is not only the people on the screen but people behind the scenes and managers and more.

>How many people make a living from YouTube?

Not many: "96.5% of all of those trying to become YouTubers won't make enough money off of advertising to crack the U.S. poverty line"

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-youtube-stardom-201802...

There's a whole ecosystem around it though - advertising agencies, video production equipment, etc. Then there's things like GoPro exist largely as a side-effect of social media networks like YouTube.

The real effects of YouTube on the global economy are pretty big!

3.5% end up with a meaningful income? That’s probably an order of magnitude more than I’d have guessed! Interesting...

There are 27,000+ partnered Twitch streamers that probably makes a decent amount of money. But the majority probably can't make a living with streaming alone. The top 0.01% of partners like Shroud or DrDisrespect can make millions.

https://www.twitch.tv/year/2017/factsheet.jpg

The mod team is quite important indeed.

https://streamernews.tv/2015/10/28/guest-writer-moblord-disc...

The One Million Jobs request is a farce designed simply to signal "the next uber need apply here".

Why? Because it doesn't clarify full-time vs part-time (example - if I sell an item on eBay for a profit, is that a job?) and it doesn't take any consideration into the creative destruction or shifting of already present jobs (e.g. - Uber didn't create one million net new jobs)

I've bootstrapped the last 3 years. I'm in the "supporting creators" category. 100k happy users so far.

I'm really hesitant to join YC because I feel like the personal touch of having a dozen companies per cohort is lost. Can anyone speak to that?

If you want to raise in the future, go. The stories you read about people effortlessly raising 1-3MM in syndicated convertible note rounds? A significant coefficient of how easy that turns out to be is "got accepted into YC".

Did you go through yc?

I've gone through techstars and I worry the new yc format will be more if the same.

Nope. We were invited for a previous startup but had no plans to raise. But I have close friends who have gone through YC, one of whom actually did something pretty close to a natural before/after experiment re: fundraising.

(Ironically: we have no plans to ever raise for Latacora, but because the YC alumni network is basically our entire customer base, we'd probably do it this time.)

Does this remind anyone else of the FSF High Priority Free Software Projects ?

https://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

Where is the actual updated RFS with descriptions of the new categories?

Bump. The links are broken.

Surprised to see "Supporting Creators" on here too. I thought Patreon (and others) had made meaningful progress on this front.

Patreon works for many kinds of creators, but I think the space could still use innovation.

What particularly do you find Patreon lacking?

A model which works without super-fans willing to pay significant amounts. Something that could work for journalism, and written content of the type that you don't "subscribe" to in any way. I know it's hard, and I know attempts have been made (flattr, brave) in that space. But I think there's still room for more.

Patreon is another walled garden that can become much worse than Facebook if left in isolation. For the investors behind it it would be great, but I don't believe Patreon was a YC company? Which means its a huge untapped industry with only one major player that has consistently moved towards pulling creatives into their ecosystem and keeping them there while trying to increase revenues.

We need, probably more than in any other use case besides general social media, a federated solution to patronage. We cannot let Facebook et al happen again with crowdfunding and recurrent subscription services like Patreon. The kickstarter space has opened up to several options including the original Kickstarer, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, Fig, etc. That is a healthy competitive ecosystem and Kickstarter went public benefit so their general dominance in the market is less dangerous for it.

Patreon sits alone, and has been growing exponentially for years. They acquired their only ever major competitor, Subbable, in early 2015. Kofi is about as close to a competitor as they have, but its not the same thing in the slightest because its not automatic which is a fundamental part of what makes Patreon work.

The mindshare of creators Patreon has acquired should be terrifying to anyone who can see the writing on the wall about how this will just lead to a hegemony of Patreon controlling all the amateur and hobbyist and even some semi-professional small creative / online business ventures. And unlike most companies their revenue is plastered right in their face - all they need is a breakout moment into popular culture, which they really have not had yet - the number of people actively supporting anyone else on Patreon is still a small percentage of the whole Internet user population - but if they got that consumer breakout moment they would be unstoppable and way more directly dangerous and harmful in how many people are now making careers out of having a Patreon.

For completeness Gratipay[0] (formerly gittip) is also dead.

[0]: https://gratipay.com/

One example that YC has already funded is Substack https://www.substack.com/ Writers on there are making more than have ever made elsewhere.

If I have a really good idea, why would I need YC? Starting an ICO will likely give you 10-1000x more money.

You don't even need a good idea! You can just find a bunch of people trying to get rich quickly and sell them a bunch of tokens that will end up worthless!!

Hmm. Just started something in the creator space over Christmas vacation, and its already profitable with over 180 brands signed on... the standard deal fits my budget and needs... but SF is a problem for my cofounder.

Universal basic income, without knowing how YC Research experiment is going locally but assuming it is simply not feasible globally from a financial point of view. How make it work then? Good old collectivism works well with scientism. Not with giving cash in hand then but with crediting day-to-day points onto your ID card to be converted into the bare minimum food & drink to survive, think of a k-ration, from your local supermarket or automatic dispensing machines.

I don’t see health technology in any of these lists. Is it not common in startups? I don’t mean insurance related companies, more along the lines of hardware companies serving the medical or health care field.

I think they are listed in the full list: http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/

"Healthcare" is #14, and it specifically mentions the areas of Diagnostics, Medical Devices, Pharmaceuticals, and Preventative Healthcare. Does that not cover what you're thinking of?

Are current Start-ups cross referenced to this list anywhere? I'd love to check out more of them in the Med-Device space, specifically, but I imagine a listing would be useful for other areas as well.

Curious, what was the thought process behind removing the 'News' and 'Mass Media' request for startups?

Not sure when they were removed exactly, just noticed now.

http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#safeguards

"now I am become death destroyer of worlds" and all that.

It seems blockchain technology and cryptocurrency are purposely absent from this list. Can we assume that YC is not interested in funding these types of startups?

Lots of things are absent from the list. The list isn't what YC is willing to fund-- it's what YC wants to encourage people to start thinking about if they don't already have ideas for a not-so-bloated space.

The RFS isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of the ideas we're interested in funding. It's a list of ideas we'd like even more founders to apply with. We get a lot of blockchain and crypto applications -- and if that's what you're working on, I recommend you apply with it.

Yes

I would say that "blockchain", as a concept, isn't a suitable category, in the same way that "mobile application" or "website" isn't.

Blockchain is a tool. The applications are varied. There are potential applications for blockchain technologies in each of the rfs categories.

Thank you for this answer. It makes a lot of sense. I suppose I was conflating blockchain technology with actual problems that it could solve. The same probably also applies to cryptocurrency.

Would an applicant come off as unfocused if their bootstrapped startup actually hit a few of the items on the RFS list?

Out of curiosity- why is detection of fake videos a hard problem? It sounds like a classification problem that a simple NN with enough data would be able to solve(?)

A lot of the scariest work in fake video lately has involved generative adversarial networks (GANs) whose whole optimization strategy as I understand it is to try to produce videos that can fool classifier/discriminator NNs, which are trained in parallel.

Right, and great point, but aren't the adversaries targeting a specific model? Are they agnostic to setups differences?

Some approaches target multiple models to come up with more general attacks. It's also worth noting that manipulations that will fool humans are starting to pop up as well.

The issue of longevity and aging seems to be one that is given significant attention by super rich people, who for obvious reasons would like a wonderful life of privilege to go on for as long as possible.

It's not just about living to 1000 years old. To me, it's more about solving age-related diseases, e.g. Alzheimer's, etc.

Yes of course to deal with aging you must tackle the many age related illnesses.

But I'm pointing out, with of the vast array of health related issues humanity faces, do venture capitalists care in particular about this one enough to put it in their investment hitlist?

Why, for example does YC care enough about aging to want to find it in particular, rather than say, well any other major field of human health research?

The answer is, "how can we spend our money to get more time on earth because after that it's worth nothing"?

Put another way "we'd like to live longer and we have the money if you can use it to work out how".

Look there's nothing wrong With this, it's human nature. Of course you use the means at your disposal to try to make life better, longer, healthier for yourself in any way. All I'm noting is that this thing about aging is something that the super rich have a particular focus on and that's why it's in this list.

If one of the VC who makes this list had a family member with a particular medical issue we'd likely see that here too as a desired funding area.

I suspect people are uncomfortable about this being pointed out because VCs like to project the idea that their work is to better everything and everyone, in Silicon Valley lingo to "make the world a better place", but this one is self serving, whilst being plausibly argued as being for the benefit of all humanity. And heck being self serving is OK too ... heck it's their money they can do with it whatever they want, no need to apologize for spending on yourself every now and then.

Yes of course to deal with aging you must tackle the many age related illnesses.

Ideally it's the reverse. If you can prevent or repair the effects of aging, those conditions become much less harmful. 25 year olds don't have heart attacks or get Alzheimer's.

Why, for example does YC care enough about aging to want to find it in particular, rather than say, well any other major field of human health research?

The payoff is potentially much greater. Curing all cancer would only increase life expectancy by 3.2 years, because if you don't die of cancer when you're 75 then you'll have a stroke at 78 (https://www.quora.com/If-we-cure-cancer-so-nobody-dies-of-ca...). Eliminating the negative effects of aging would add many more years, plus they would be of much higher quality.

whilst being plausibly argued as being for the benefit of all humanity

Aging is terrible for everyone, rich and poor. Arguably it's even worse for the poor; the increased medical expenses and decreased mobility and ability to work are much easier to deal with if you have several million dollars lying around.

If I may make a suggestion, I think it would help to be more explicit about this. I know several founders of biotech companies treating age related diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, etc who don't apply to YC bc they think YC only wants pills to extend life / parabiosis etc. "longevity" means very different things (and has different connotations) in the "tech" startup world vs the biopharma startup world.

I know a lot of tech VCs are wary of the word "biotech" and related terms bc they got burned a decade ago, but bread and butter biotech is a totally different world the last few years and has been one of the most rewarding areas for startups and investors. The tech funds that lean into traditional biopharma are getting into a lot of great deals while those who try to stay at arms length from traditional biopharma are missing the best opportunities

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