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Why should YC be involved in areas where it has no experience?

The money YC gives is minimal, so the main benefit for YC involvement is experience. If YC has nobody who has expert knowledge in biotech, it would be waste of everyones time to get involved.

Another thing is money. Most science startups need more than just people with PhD's willing to live with ramens. They need lab equipment, samples etc that cost tens and hundreds of thousands dollars.

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I agree. There are other incubators with domain expertise for hardware products (Bolt, Haxlr8r, Highway1, RGA), robotics (Grishin), biotech (Harlem Biospace). These places can also offer shared facilities and lab space, which is hugely important as YC's $20k investment would barely cover, for example, an electronics lab, which could also take months to set up.

This is a noble goal and I'm glad that YC wants to invest in these sort of companies, but they need to do a lot more work to convince startups of this sort that the value proposition makes sense for them.

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