Most great startups would not exist if not for the work of some critical helper in a position to help.<p>Apple had Mike Markkula, Facebook had Sean Parker, Airbnb had Michael Siebel, and Viaweb had Julian Weber. The list endless.<p>The ingredients are: great founders + great products + great helpers.<p>It's easy to say that great founders with great products will attract great helpers, but that ignores how few great helpers there are and how inefficient the "market" is.<p>YC is the <i>greatest</i> helper of startups in the history of startups, and expanding that help to a wider group is a great thing for the world.
Can any focus be given to rural communities? For example the coal miners of Kentucky. <a href="https://medium.com/backchannel/canary-in-the-code-mine-903884eca853" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/backchannel/canary-in-the-code-mine-90388...</a><p>As someone who grew up in the rural South I'm saddened by how overlooked it's communities are. Poverty is wide spread but services and activist groups are lacking. No one cares about rednecks.
I put down Skype on my application because Mountain View is a 12 hour drive from here... but now I'm wondering; does Skype vs in-person have an effect on whether you'd be accepted?<p>... 'cause I'm pretty sure I'd make that drive for the chance to meet with the YC partners if it made any difference :)
Just applied for the veteran opening and very excited about the prospect! It's encouraging and helpful to see a few initiatives like this spring up.<p>TechStars has been running a sort of primer on entrepreneurship for veterans (<a href="http://patriotbootcamp.org/" rel="nofollow">http://patriotbootcamp.org/</a>) for a few years now, but that's aimed at people just trying to figure out what's going on.<p>The YC opportunity seems more appropriate for those of us who are all-in and already building great companies. A nice evolution, and an important gap filled- thanks YC!
<i>Additionally, Amazon is generously offering $5,000 in AWS credit for all participating teams.</i><p>This seems really dangerous -- it creates a huge incentive for companies to waste YC's time. There aren't many things early startup founders can do which are worth more than $15000/hour. Sure, you can probably filter out many AWS-credit-seekers via the application process, but that adds more work for the people who read through all the applications.<p>Have you considered either (a) refusing the credits, or (b) taking a small number and handing them out to the most "deserving" startups at the end of the day?
Kat's great! Easily one of the most competent people I've met and she went out of her way to sit down with me in New York.<p>Bonus: For some reason Twitter now sends me a notification every time she tweets about Rick and Morty.. I'm mostly ok with it!
This is an excellent strategic move to improve YC's pattern recognition of alternative signals coming from "diverse" marginalized groups.<p>Continually impressed.