Comment by sinker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sinker | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This all makes sense, but at some point you have to consider that startups are a privilege, not a right. Those that tailor their lives to be able to consume risk make tradeoffs like moving to a remote location, living single, minimizing expenses, forgoing healthcare, choosing to spend less time with friends, not getting that dog you always wanted, not having children, not getting married, not buying a house, etc. Narrowing your life for success takes tremendous sacrifices. It sounds like you want the benefits of having made those sacrifices without incurring any of their costs.

There's nothing wrong with choosing to have a family and raising kids, but that is a choice. No matter what conditions are set, the person who makes the necessary tradeoffs is going to be in a better position to succeed and YC as a business entity can do nothing to level the field for people who are willing to go all-in versus people who prioritize a comfortable home life.

Again, startups are privilege that form out of the security of societal infrastructure and excess of wealth. Nowhere in society is it prescribed that everyone should be able to forego having a job and drain their savings to gamble at a chance at massive wealth. How is it reasonable that we've come to expect this as some sort of entitlement?

The top comment makes a dismissive remark about "rich white men," and YC being against inclusivity and diversity. The natural response to this is that YC is not racially exclusive, but that they exclude based on those who can assume risk. Yes, but white people are rich so they can consume risk and black people are poor, therefore YC is in reality discriminative against blacks. The simplification of this kind of argument and its decontextualization from reality should be self-evident. Unfortunately, it's emblematic of the kind of emotionally reflexive and broadly appealing arguments we see thrown around instead of practicing any form of intellectual sophistication or nuance. It's far easier to make a glib side-remark suggestive of racial privilege. It's even easier when this is politically and socially trendy, even expected, and the individual making the remarks is protected from backlash by the insulation of a particular ideology.

This is not (for me) about having kids+family vs startup.

It's about number of people who can take risk of having zero income for N months. That is such a small group of people, and this narrows the pool of people who might found a startup that could change the world (or part of it). It means that all the ideas for startups are coming from people who have (at least) one thing in common. Maybe it's not the optimal thing to have in common?

ps. I did the startup thing with a wife and a daughter. These days you know it as Amazon.

I didn't state it strongly enough. Startups are for the rich and privileged, by the very nature of their mechanism of success. Lottery tickets, playing blackjack, rolling dice, are things which should only be done with what you have in excess. I don't think it's YC's responsibility to even societal odds. They are downstream from that position and simply consume and profit off those who have more than they need.

YC is a business entity not a non-profit organization dedicated to wealth distribution. You're asking it to do a job outside its core responsibility (profit, survival). If you want to make the argument that YC should up it's funding, that argument has to establish itself as being strongly in the interest of YC, otherwise it doesn't make much sense.

Well then I guess I didn't state it strongly enough: society does worse when the startup process is only accessible by the rich and priviledged.

YC isn't under an obligation to do the best it can for society. But if it wants to do that, or even to approximate it, the filter functions it uses implicitly and explicitly need to be considered carefully. YC has said a variety of things that indicate that it does have some desire to trend in this direction, at least in the past.

It seems like YC has grown large and successful enough that it can shed some monetary value for the sake of greater social benefit. It has zero effect on me if they grant 25k, 50k, 100k, 200k to groups. My argument and position is not that participating companies shouldn't receive more money. That I don't care about at all. My concern is that it's being expressed that YC should be acting in accordance to perceived social justice rather than as what it is and always has been, a startup incubator. The argument is that an amount of money like 25k is equivocal to YC practicing racial exclusivity because it's not enough money to cover the needs, expenses, and risk calculations of a financially and socially impaired person. In that case, what amount of seed money is not considered to fall under the practice of racial exclusivity? I think the accusation is flimsy in the first place, and no defined amount of money would allay those kinds of allegations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com