Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sukotto | Hacker News Reader

I am not willing to grant anyask the ability to modify my twitter profile and post as me so I'll just ask here.

1) Age-wise, what ratio of accepted YC applicants are over 35? 40?

2) What ratio of them fall into the "married with kids" category?

My impression of YC is that you strongly (exclusively?) prefer under 30 people who are unattached or, at least, are married with no other obligations.

Can you dispel that impression or is it close to the truth?

(I hope this doesn't come across as trolling or as an accusation. If you think it is, I welcome suggestion on how to word it better)

View on HN

I'd have to guess, but maybe 4% and 1% respectively.

What percentage are married and/or have kids I couldn't even guess, because we don't ask and it's not the sort of thing that comes up unless it's related to what they're working on.

All we care about is whether the startup seems likely to succeed. Think how stupid we'd have to be to miss out on a great startup because they failed to meet some arbitrary constraint.

What percentage are married and/or have kids I couldn't even guess, because we don't ask...

Is this something you don't ask because you don't think it's a useful question, or because your lawyers told you to not ask it?

I would expect that "what does your significant other think of this" would be an illuminating question where relevant, both in terms of demonstrating an ability to recognize problems and demonstrating an ability to overcome them. Certainly if a startup founder was planning on moving across the country and answered "I haven't told her yet" it would be a big red flag to me.

IANAL but I think it would be legal to ask; we're investing in people's startups, not hiring them. The reason we don't ask about such things is that we don't care. Interviews are only 10 minutes long. We need to spend that time talking about the startup.

We need to spend that time talking about the startup.

Huh. Given how much people keep talking about how the team matters more than the startup idea, this surprises me.

Or is it that talking about the startup is the fastest way to learn about the people?

Exactly.

Like with female founders, the apparent predominance of <30 single males is probably better explained by number who apply than the proportion selected.

>>2) What ratio of them fall into the "married with kids" category?

There were at least 14 founders from our batch (W2010) that were married or engaged and about 6 of those had kids. I think there were about 65 total founders.

I recall seeing a spreadsheet of ycombinator graduates (sorry, can't seem to find it now - will link it when I do) and noticed that a significantly large percentage of its founders were ivy league/1st-tier school graduates. I bring up this point because you seem to think age is a factor that brings you down... but the statistics would have it that even a candidate in his mid-20s from a non-prominent school could not get accepted to yc.

It's a large percentage, but probably less than half (at least in our batch). Also most weren't fresh grads. It seemed like the median age was 25 or so. Most had had jobs post-college.

So, basically a mid-20s candidate from a non-prominent school is closer to the median than a fresh Ivy League grad.

I was 29 and my co-founder 34 when we went through; we both went to good, but non-elite universities and I didn't ever feel out of place.

Note that Paul and Robert were 31 and 30 [1][2] respectively when they founded Viaweb and Paul has written on how elite universities are a bad predictor of success [3], so it's unlikely that what's being seen is causation rather than correlation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(computer_programme...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html

By "graduates" do you mean "people who have just graduated"?

This was the case early on (when YCombinator was marketed using the whole "drop out of college and do a startup meme).

I believe they have stated that the age distribution is much wider now. Having said that, it's probably easier to live on the YCombinator investment if you are young don't have kids than if you do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com