Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

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I would really love to see an option for people who are not in this group.

I'm sure many people would. Your proposal appears to be that YC do this exact program, but with a 200k+ grant instead of 12k. This is obviously not feasible, given that these grants are being awarded for little more than an idea.

Founding a startup is a huge risk, there's no way around that. If you're at a point in life where you can't afford risk and instability, it's going to be tough to start a startup.

Frankly I don't really get the "startups are only for young people with no obligations" problem. You have a wife, and kids, and a house, and hopefully these things bring you great joy - the prototypical obligation-free startup founders have none of them. Should we be looking for ways for young startup founders to do the family-building stuff they are missing out on? Maybe set up a fund to give them a down payment for when their startup fails and they could have been saving up with a paycheck for a few years? It just seems like...sometimes in life you have to choose one thing or the other.

You're leaving something out of your analysis, aren't you?

The type of experienced professionals that GP is talking about aren't going to waste $200k.

They currently add value to whatever enterprise they are engaged in.

> sometimes in life you have to choose one thing or the other.

Sometimes in life, you don't know that you could take the widget industry by storm until you've consumed a thousand variations of widgets yourself.

...Gah, no wonder the "get off my lawn!" thing exists... :/

They currently add value to their current enterprise. That doesn't mean that they will also add value to some other enterprise, i.e. a startup.

The percentage of experienced professionals why waste the grant might be smaller than the percentage of just-out-of-college teams who waste the grant, but the difference might not be as large as to justify $200k.

"This is obviously not feasible, given that these grants are being awarded for little more than an idea."

A patent is an idea, sometimes worth nothing and sometimes worth 10's of Billions.

Some would say that the fact that a patent is sometimes worth 10s of billions is a flaw in the current legal system. While true, I don't think YC is in the business of funding patent trolls.

A patent being worth billions is absolutely not a flaw of any legal system.

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