Would YC consider subsidising child care costs for participating founders? At present, the infamously high cost of child care in the Bay Area makes YC out of reach for most founders with young children.
We used to give founders $20k. Part of the reason we upped it to $120k is so that founders with higher personal expense structures could do the program.
But we're an investor, not a company. It's important to us founders run their own companies and make their own decisions, and so we try not to build too much of our own infrastructure.
I've wondered about this for awhile. Obviously it's been a bit since I've been involved, but you guys have such scale now that solving some obvious problems for founders might be beneficial. Housing being the big one. It was merely annoying back in '07, but now I feel like it'd be a significant distraction and expense for anyone not from the bay area to find a place to live there. Maybe an official Y-scraper would make economic sense!
YC's done a lot to take the legal headache out of starting a company, raising funding, granting options, etc. I don't see how other things are philosophically any different.
This is also one of the big reasons why someone might choose to work for, say, Google X instead of found a startup. Google's famous for taking care of every detail of employees' lives - food, laundry, haircuts, oil changes, dry cleaning, gyms, social events, and child care are all available on-site, and it seems like they may soon offer housing soon. Many people who are highly proficient in their fields like to concentrate on their fields, rather than on extraneous details of their lives. When I've approached former coworkers about whether they'd be interested in founding a startup, usually the top answer is "I can have more impact at Google, because they take care of all the stuff I'm not good at so I can concentrate on what I am good at."
Something to think about, particularly if you want to fund more hard-tech. For soft-tech founders (marketplaces, delivery startups, etc.), it's often good to do the routine chores of life yourself so you know where the pain points of potential customers are, but for hard-tech, you really want to be able to concentrate on the technology.
It's definitely true, but anything you to make a startup feel like an undifferentiated cog in a machine (in the extreme case, throwing everyone into a coworking space) is really bad. We just want to be super careful not to break the important parts of what makes YC work.
