I have been thinking about the principle Paul Graham used in Y combinator to improve startup funding:
all the things [VCs] should change about the VC business — essentially the ideas now underlying Y Combinator: investors should be making more, smaller investments, they should be funding hackers instead of suits, they should be willing to fund younger founders, etc. -- http://www.paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
What would it look like if you would take this to its logical conclusion? You would fund even younger people. Students that are still in high school, maybe. But you wouldn’t fund them in the same sense. By going younger and earlier, you have to relax more and more constraints and look at earlier proxies.
Y Combinator replaced the legally complex venture funding with a simple SAFE. And they looked at founders who were relentlessly resourceful and real.
What would “funding” high schoolers mean? What would you look for? I think you would give them money unconditionally just for knowing what they do with it. They don’t need much to get started. In the same way that Y Combinator went from 5 million to 50 thousand, you could go from down further to 500. And your proxy is that they have anything to show at all. Your value would be learning how they think about future ideas, and how they approach the them. To be close to the future they already inhabit. And to be there when they do become founders and already know you.
A version of college replacement I’m super interested in:
Find the smartest and most driven 18 year olds in the world, and give them ‘tenure’—say a decade+ of salary, resources to work on whatever they want, and a smart peer group—in exchange for small % of future earnings.
I have been thinking about the principle Paul Graham used in Y combinator to improve startup funding:
What would it look like if you would take this to its logical conclusion? You would fund even younger people. Students that are still in high school, maybe. But you wouldn’t fund them in the same sense. By going younger and earlier, you have to relax more and more constraints and look at earlier proxies.
Y Combinator replaced the legally complex venture funding with a simple SAFE. And they looked at founders who were relentlessly resourceful and real.
What would “funding” high schoolers mean? What would you look for? I think you would give them money unconditionally just for knowing what they do with it. They don’t need much to get started. In the same way that Y Combinator went from 5 million to 50 thousand, you could go from down further to 500. And your proxy is that they have anything to show at all. Your value would be learning how they think about future ideas, and how they approach the them. To be close to the future they already inhabit. And to be there when they do become founders and already know you.
Funny, just saw this tweet from Sam Altman:
Also this Scholarship.
I think these use the startup founding model. But I think scaling would work better with more but smaller payouts.
A related concept: https://twitter.com/mnovendstern/status/1495911334860693507
I’m not sure what the relation is. That seems to predict revenue from startup financials.