A New Standard Deal

This would benefit a subset of founders - those who are young and single. What if you have a partner? A family?

YC is actively moving away from its roots as an alternative to a summer internship for college students to premier seed / Series A investor for companies with traction. Your suggestion runs counter to where they're headed.

Among other things, I'd expect this is because YC is trying to break free of the idea that the only way to be a successful startup founder is to be a young, single, attachment-free man.

Successful startups are created by all kinds of people in all kinds of different life situations, and YC needs to be careful to be inviting to as broad an array of people as possible.

At the same time, I agree that dorm-style living (along with other nontraditional styles of living like mulitigenerational or multifamily units, cohousing, coliving, etc...) is a great idea and our culture should work to be more supportive of experimenting with housing. Especially, as you said, in areas with severely impacted housing markets.

Providing employees with some kind of inexpensive nutrient slurry would also be a great way to help mitigate the high cost of living.

(a) It's not clear why YC could run an apartment complex better or cheaper than the many companies who already do it (including some YC-funded startups like https://zeusliving.com)

(b) Founders tend to be independent-minded people who like to do things their own way.

Liability. Someone slips and falls, someone is (sexually) assaulted in the dorm, etc...

It would probably be exceptionally helpful for a lot of YC founders I imagine, but in addition to the liability, the optics are kind of creepy in that certain SV culture kind of way they likely want to avoid.

Founders may find & cluster in such spaces, themselves. Once upon a time, an SF high-rise got the nickname 'Yscraper' for all the YCers there:

https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Justin-tv-to-get-boo...

And, there have been dorm-like living spaces throughout the Bay Area often favored by founders & young transplants. See, eg:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-gr...

I'd expect YC might informally be able to point out such places, or formally invest in some with the right vision, but would not necessarily get further into managing housing themselves. And, too much density/interaction with disparate teams might at some point become counterproductive, compared to the classic "intense founders of the same entity living together to the exclusion of other distractions" model, or the rising capabilities of mostly-remote teams.

From the beginning, YC was opposed to the incubator model, which that idea would be more aligned with. Even having startups share offices was never something they were interested in. That was partly because they had no interest in managing offices, or managing at all (or offices, for that matter). But there were deeper reasons: the sense that great startups develop in environments of their own creation, a suspicion of scenesterism, and ultimately the fact that they wouldn't have liked to work that way themselves. They strongly approved of saving money, but were more the kind of people who would work out of an apartment (as Viaweb indeed had). The incubator model comes more out of a business-managerial way of thinking. Words like 'synergy' come to mind.

Maybe because the plan is to ditch Bay Area in the future? Why would people come to a specific place to found an internet company?

Boost.vc does this.

Because only a subset of a subset of founders would tolerate living like that?

I wouldn't. Even if I wanted to live like that, this starts seeming... a bit offputting. 'Come live and work at nerd camp..."

Rents dropped 9%

but landlords are also offering 8 weeks free

Which really means an annual lease has dropped 25%

quite steep, you could probably offer something closer to 38% lower.

Non-AMPed link: https://sf.curbed.com/2020/6/2/21277355/san-francisco-rent-p...

Pray someone does not kill the joke further. Whoops...

But they are saying that they now want to bring 3000 more companies to demo day, which dilutes its value.

> In this case, why would you be interested in YC? What would it offer you?

It's a fair point. The irony is that because our startup is doing well, we'd rather spend our time talking to customers and building the product than pitching to investors. Maybe what we're really looking for is a next-gen take on capital that would look something like this:

* Minimal time needed by us to reach a decision on whether they'd like to fund us

* Known good terms (preferably open source) that we don't have to spend time digging in

* No board seat

* Minimal equity take

* Minimal reporting requirements. We already share financial statements and KPIs with the whole company. We're happy to share those but don't want to spend a bunch of time writing an "investor update."

* Minimal distraction from running the business

* Access to advice from credible individuals

* Access to resources that can help us do things like recruit, setup security policies, etc.

In other words, we want reasonably priced capital, support and advice with the minimum possible overhead. We're happy to share in the upside (by granting equity), but want to spend our time with customers, not investors.

See my reply to sibling comment for what we're looking for. Re: debt, we've considered it, but our goal is to expand knowing the economic environment might hit us harder than expected. So equity feels like a better fit.

In the end, we're looking for advice, support, and cash.

This reasoning would be true only if YC was the only investor in town. In truth, the options actually are a superset of:

* Do not raise

* Join YC at a very low valuation and justify it with the nebulous value of the "YC network"

* Raise from any other investor at an appropriate valuation and benefit from the nebulous value of their network.

Another way of thinking:

Would you exchange 7% of your company forever to join the YC community that might have diminishing returns after several years?

As my sibling poster posted: There is more than one path to success and you make it sound as if YC kinda guarantees success and that all of this is a total no-brainer.

I appreciate when someone asks such questions as a post here saves 50 readers googling. Also it might start an interesting discussion.

Fair. Point still stands. My (misinformed) perception was that they were doing like 15 hot deals a year.

While that's true, it's rare that a YC company at the founding stage is so unique that only the founders can do it. It's not about the simplicity but rather the fact that the founders are basically putting in unpaid labor that provides the moat, because for someone who wants to clone your business, they need to be convinced first that it's worth investing in.

The founders are convinced, and hence are the ones doing the free work.

That doesn't seem right.

In what timeframe?

By looking at plenty of the "Show HN:" posts we can see many examples of more than just "simple" services that were made on a much smaller ( or $0 ) budget.

Please don’t listen to this. You can hire great developers all over the world for far less than $100k.

Using YC’s $125k to hire a few contract engineers to help you reach velocity and deliver a V1 is an incredibly smart move.

Not every YC company is a developer tool or something complex. In fact, looking at the most recent batch I’d say the majority are fairly simple in their technology approaches.