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Comment by cassonmars | Hacker News Reader

Does YC ever intend to revisit doing remote batches again?

There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:

- new parents

- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled

The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?

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We might, and I'm sure you're right that there are many great founders not applying to do YC because they don't want to move here.

But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.

There are plenty of remote schools, always have been, they’re just lower quality and solve a different problem than traditional in person university

I agree, to add on - I think places like Open University are absolutely fantastic for folks who want to learn but have other "real world" responsibilities. The last time I heard a out OU was when a new parent was happy having being able to get a degree from there (while I think studying at night).

In Canada a lot of well-known schools are shifting much of their delivery to online. They're limited by the government how much they can charge/increase while international student visas have been cut dramatically. It's an existentially moment for international-focused schools, but even the best traditional universities are hurting.

The bigger problem for Canadian universities is that they have never had their funding restored to pre-austerity levels by the various levels of government.

“By the early 1990s, combined federal, provincial, and local spending had peaked at more than 50% of GDP.”

You mean those spending levels?

Because a university's ability to charge the prices they do depends on people being on location. Nobody is going to pay 50k or 100k for an online course.

Plus if rich fucks can't buy a building to put their name on that kids will walk through they won't donate money.

You make it sound like it's a decision based on school administrators putting learning first.

So much emotion! I graduated from a fairly shitty (and getting worse) state school and I started my own company. Which failed!

Then I started another. Horrible failure! Then another. And another!

And now I own a successful company built off all my previous learnings and failures. The “rich fucks” work for me now!

I like how other than being triggered by the word rich fucks your reply has nothing to do with universities being remote or in person, just you bragging about personal accomplishments? I mean congratulations, but universities are still going to charge more by requiring you to go on location.

I was triggered because people rationalize why they fail because of “other people”. But the reason you fail has nothing to do with universities

Universities are still a scam though, that was the point of the original comment

>> But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.

This is not true. I know several people at different institutions - decent schools - that have most or (in one case) all of their courses (at Queens) via remote delivery.

Because San Francisco is a truly singular place that drastically increases your odds of success in starting a venture-backed company by simply existing there (even temporarily).

There's also people who are driven, don't have a real-world situation that pins them to their location, but don't believe that they need to move to SF to do a startup, because they shouldn't have to..

To be fair, it is a 3mo batch. The better analogy would be a long business trip or on site project, not a remote vs. in office job.

Moreover, for better or worse, the all day every day work culture typical of venture-backed startups isn't really compatible with being a new parent etc. anyway.

People in those situations can and should start companies without an accelerator (or at least without this one). The joke around the SF scene is that even a founder with a boy/girlfriend is a sign of a startup doomed to fail, and YC doesn't seem particularly invested in changing that culture.

I don’t usually wear my ring day to day because it’s poorly fitting, but I wear it to meetings with private equity because I want to filter out anyone with that mentality.

This doesn't resemble anything I've ever heard at YC in the many years I've been here. People don't think or talk that way at all...they're far more normal and decent than that.

Unless your girlfriend is your laptop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmFoNXkQTt8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkZ8MAk2oH4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z-_py5WgOM

It’s a form of self selection. YC (and silicon valley at large) isn't interested in founders with pesky things like real life responsibilities or anything else that will prevent them from focusing on their startup 24x7.

This is too flippant.

YC is so early on some of these deals that the primary gauge is team - which means personality of founders. Very hard to measure remotely.

I'm in a group, not as big or famous, that does early checks. We're 95% remote. IME, it's so hard to make those judgement calls through web-cam.

Agreed that founder focus is a big factor and that life gets in the way (of deals). However, if you don't like YC conditions there are 100s of other places to (attempt a) raise.

Except that all acceptance via YC is actually done remotely. They don't meet you in person until after they have already wired the money.

I think you are talking about phase-1 and I was talking about a phase-2 of the process (of N phases).

We're just addressing different steps.

Phase-2 being what? demo day?

Would you invest in Australia?

A lot of other places are just YC-lite/-wannabes and have either niche focuses (this is good) and/or not enough innovation-seekers (this is bad).

Check out https://tinyseed.com/

Doesn't TinySeed require some measure of traction already?

From "Ask HN: How to Price a Product" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41180492#41220971 :

> Asset Value = Equities + Liabilities

> /? startupschool pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=startupschool+pricing

/? site:startupschool.org pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:startupschool.org+prici...

> Startup School > Curriculum > Ctrl-F pricing: https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum

YC Library: https://www.ycombinator.com/library

/? YC Library : pricing: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/search?query=Pricing

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