Ask PG: Applying to YC Winter 2012 as college freshmen

I'm not PG, but let me describe the trajectory of a successful firm at YC:

1) You bust butt for 3 months.

2) You continue busting butt for several years. During this time, several major life events happen to you. One of them will be signing contracts the size of a college textbook. On the signing of these contracts, one or several houses worth of money will show up in your business' checking account. You'll have plenty of things to spend the money on, like making sure the families of your employees eat on a regular basis and have access to healthcare.

Does the trajectory of a successful YC startup sound like something which is easy for you to swing when cramming for second semester sophomore finals? No? Then you should probably expect a question like "If it looks kinda likely that you have a shot at being one of our successful startups, are you all going to drop out?" If your answer to that is no, or if YC perceives that your answer to that would be no, YC is wasting time with you.

Unsolicited advice: Get the degree, come back in a few years. YC will probably still be here.

We're reluctant to fund people who are still in college. Especially freshmen. Even if you can start a startup successfully at that age, it's not necessarily a good thing for you.

Sam had just finished his sophomore year. That's different from having only 1 semester of college.

Startups take over your life. For most people it would be a mistake to jump into one thing so completely before you even know what all the options are.

You guys might want to talk to Peter Thiel. He's trying to start an incubator by funding high school graduates.

http://www.thielfoundation.org/index.php?option=com_content&...

I just misread "frenchmen" and was thinking, "what on earth this has to do with anything?" My sitcom mind.

On your website http://tonychen.me/ you mention that http://www.looks.gd had "1.8 million pageviews, 560,000 unique visitors and growing". Yet the compete.com data shows trivial traffic (now) and it hasn't been updated since eoy 2010. What happened with that? As you have found with that site you can't run something and be dedicated to school at the same time. Stay in school.