With YC China in the works and now interviews being held in India, it looks like YC is making a strong push to get a solid foothold in two obviously huge markets that have fairly weak Western presence. Seems like a smart move, it'll definitely be interesting to see what YC looks like 10 years from now.
Interesting!<p>I'm a big fan of pg's essays. From my pov, it was the "golden age" of blogging^. Essays like "black swan farming," "high res-society" were fascinating, and tied abstract ideas aabout startups, investing and the world to the parcticalities of how YC works. I found it fascinating.<p>PG did address startup hubs, why "YC of _place_" was a problematice idea and other reasons why YC is centralized where it is.<p>But... PG wrote about a lot of ideas. Some might lead you to the opposite conclusion, maybe increasingly as the startup industry has grown.<p>Ramen profitable, for example, could be a totally different proposition in India. "High resolution" is an idea that I think at some scale needs to happen outside of SV.<p>Since those essays, YC has scaled. That could put new possibilities on the table. Many of the reasons startups hub are fixable with scale.<p>I realize this is just interviews, but I reckon that "just" is not just a just.<p>^Another great example was joel on software and the stack overflow podcast. You could watch Joel and Jeff's abstract ideas about (eg) "social user interface" and such be implmented in software.
Good to see YC expand. I’m curious, though, if innovation ramps up in the startup space in both China and India, will there be a decrease in demand for immigration to the states?<p>My own experience across the visa spectrum is some want to move here permanently, some want to make their stake here and return back to their home country, some want to come here and build new businesses.<p>I don’t mean it as A discussion about immigration but more about one of innovation.<p>We keep hearing, despite obvious growth in other regions, SV is still ground zero for new companies.
Great initiative! This should encourage more Indian/ SE Asian founders to apply, since they no longer have to think about the time spent on the arduous US visa application process - and can instead keep the focus on building their company. Kudos to YC!
For any company based out of India, working on solving problems for Indian consumers, I see very less value in applying to YC. First of all their advisors have very little or no idea about how does it work in Indian context [because haven't done startups in this area], which mind you is very different and more complicated then valley.
VCs and Angels have picked up investments in India [0], and as a result, as far as India is concerned, YC has missed out on Unicorns, though, Razorpay/Cleartax/Meesho could be Unicorns in time.<p>[0] <a href="https://trak.in/india-startup-funding-investment-2015/" rel="nofollow">https://trak.in/india-startup-funding-investment-2015/</a> (URL says 2015, but the data is latest)
It's amazing to see how people are fighting over city names on a YC thread. Just amazing! When we have problems like climate change and global warming to solve, please by all means let's first decide the name of the city!
I don't quite understand this move? Was there a big issue with founders getting accepted for an interview but then not being able to travel to the US for the interview?