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Comment by flipchart | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what happened to the YC bio [1] track which was announced in 2018 with free lab space and a different investment deal. The details seem to have been scrubbed from the YC website. Did it get shut down? Seems like it was Sam's initiative and didn't survive his departure.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/11/y-combinator-yc-bio-track-...

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We kept the intent but changed the structure. After trying it both ways, we learned that it worked better when we didn't break bio out separately. So we're still super interested in funding bio companies (hence the Ginkgo partnership), but we don't have a different deal for them.

So YC Bio doesn't imply a much bigger investment for 20% equity anymore?

Most bio startups will require a significant amount of capital to bootstrap. It's cheaper now, but still an order of magnitude more than for IT.

Surprisingly, bio is pretty similar to software capital-wise, at least initially and the standard YC deal works well. Jared and Jorge wrote good pieces around this recently -

https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-biotech-startup-funding-wil...

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/09/biotech-researchers-ventur...

Case in point - Asher Bio from the most recent YC batch went from zero to a working molecule & in-vivo data in ~3 months on the standard deal - https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/20/here-are-the-82-startups-t...

I would see this more of a reflection of spend matching the access to capital not that bio is similar to software. The difference between moving atoms and bits is significant.

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