
YC S20 Remote Batch - coolswan
https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-s20-remote-batch/
======
GraffitiTim
I think people will be surprised how well this works.

There are a lot of great startups that will be born in these times. Many of
them will be "remote native" \-- operated remotely, remote YC, and potentially
tackling problems that have arisen due to the remote world we're living in.

After this crisis is over, some things will go back to normal, but a lot of
the changes will endure to varying degrees.

I think people are used to the power of in-person connection and physical
reality, and most of us are craving it. But an incredible amount can happen in
digital reality, and we are only just beginning to scratch that surface.

At _minimum_ it is an interesting and necessary experiment.

~~~
eloff
I'm watching it all with some amusement. I've worked remote my whole career,
first because it was the only option where I lived, and then later by choice
after I returned to the developed world.

I'm trying to start a company, and I wouldn't dream of doing it any other way
than remote. There's advantages and disadvantages, but I don't want to be
paying SF office rent, SF salaries, SF benefits, and competing with the
unicorns and tech giants in the area. I'd rather draw from a global talent
pool and focus on how to minimize the drawbacks and maximize the advantages of
doing so.

Plus neither my wife or I want to live in SF. We much prefer Vancouver. I'd
move if it were really necessary for the business, but I'm glad that doesn't
seem to be true.

~~~
xrendan
What are you working on?

~~~
eloff
Kind of a zapier thing, but aimed at developers ( so different power vs ease
of use tradeoff). Will be at apimate.com when I launch it.

Interestingly zapier are a remote company.

------
ThePhysicist
If they now would be able to invest in foreign companies like GmbHs or UK
Limiteds it would be perfect. I understand why they don’t want to do that but
I think for a lot of companies to which YC could be interesting (us included)
it’s simply not possible or very difficult to do a flip to a US company.

~~~
kick
That increases complexity drastically for what's basically a third and a sixth
of the reward, if even that. I don't think it makes that much sense.

~~~
ThePhysicist
Not sure I understand what you mean by "a third and a sixth of the reward",
can you explain?

~~~
kick
Population of Germany and the UK, respectively, compared to the United States
(probably a little fuzzy because it was recalled from memory, though). Not
only smaller pool of applicants, but also smaller markets.

~~~
jedberg
The market of "Germany" is actually the entire EU, which is bigger than the
US.

~~~
kick
Only slightly bigger, much of it is dramatically more poor, and a sizeable
portion of it can't understand English, much less German.

~~~
xchaotic
Where do you get the dramatically more poor from?

~~~
bpodgursky
Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece have a lot of very smart and hard workers,
but they are not (yet) wealthy countries. People in eastern Europe simply do
not have the disposable income that Americans or western Europeans (usually)
have.

~~~
ccozan
Have you been lately in Romania? You would be surprised how much disposable
income people have there.

The country is one of the biggest cereal producer of EU, a major car industry
player and has big reserves of oil and gas.

Anecdotally, since turism/horeca services is really a minor part of the GDP,
the COVID-19 will not affect it too much. Whereas in West going out is a major
activity and has much influence.

~~~
nl
The average yearly income in Romania is US$8100 per year. The average income
in Mississippi (the poorest state in the US) is $42,000.

That's a fair difference in available disposable income!

(Having said that, I've worked with some Romania developers and they were
great. I'd hire there, but there are better markets to sell into)

~~~
ccozan
Agree, but the average income does not give any indication of the said
disposable income to the respective income ( in % ). Also averages reflect
quite poor the distribution of income, since some outliers can move the point
quite drastically.

But, yes point taken, there is of course a difference. Corruption is a main
point. Also due to the gray or black economy I suspect that the above $8100
are likely double.

~~~
nl
Additionally lots of corruption and a large black economy do not make a
country an attractive target for startups to target.

------
quickthrower2
Nice, you can now capture that talent pool that would otherwise not want to
relocate to California even for a stint. Hope this becomes a trend once normal
life resumes, with YC and other investors.

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drazvan
Applications for S20 ended on March 16th, haven't they? I wanted to apply but
definitely could not travel, this change makes it interesting/possible again
but I'm not sure it's not already too late to apply.

~~~
dolftax
"And we’re still accepting late applications if you’ve always wanted to do YC
but couldn’t move out to the bay area" \- Aaron from YC.

[https://twitter.com/aaron_epstein/status/1252267533555470338...](https://twitter.com/aaron_epstein/status/1252267533555470338?s=21)

~~~
foreign-inc
How many companies from those late applications get accepted every batch?

~~~
gscott
Now that ycombinator takes over a hundred startups it does seem more promising
to get in, eventually.

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Four8Five
I wonder if this changes the number of companies that can be accepted. I also
worry that this will turn into Startup School 2.0.

------
oliverx0
I understand circumstances are forcing this to happen, but if online batches
are now a possibility, the FAQs should be updated:

"Can we do it without moving to where you are?"

Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the
rest. What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a
favor by not making them come to YC events in person.

However, you don't have to be in silicon valley 24x7. If you have a business
that requires that you be somewhere else, we will work something out so you
can participate in YC events while also being attentive to your business.
Usually the founders will rotate between locations, or fly back and forth.

Of course, after the 3 month program, you can go wherever you want.

~~~
TTPrograms
It's sort of crazy to make such a sweeping decision based on one case -
especially when remote collaboration tools are improving on a quarterly basis.

Of course statements like this are just rationalizations - not arguments
employed to arrive at objective conclusions.

~~~
vikramkr
Yeah, looking back at it there's definitely a question raised by how it was
just one data point, especially considering that this also means there likely
wasn't a lot of institutional support on YC's end for the one remote startup
as well. It wouldn't be deliberate but if you've just got that one remote
startup you aren't going to be really trying to make remote programming work
and making all the resources remote-friendly.

For other experiments, YC has discussed publically (fellowship, accepting
people with no idea, early decision) there were what seemed externally at
least to be well-run experiments with multiple accepted and some longer-term
tracking to see how that worked. No remote seems to finally be getting that
proper experimentation and treatment, I guess we'll see how that goes.

There are a lot of benefits to in person, I personally prefer working on
things in-person to remote (in biotech, in-person really matters), but it'll
be an interesting experiment this batch to see how much room there is for
fully remote startup development across all the sectors they invest, both in
terms of the batch itself and the companies individually.

------
mangoman
I've worked remotely for the past 3.5 years. As one of two employees at a
small statup, at a startup that started remote friendly and then revoked it,
and now at a startup that is moving towards being remote equal (25% and
rising).

Not that long compared to others here, but long enough to have seen things
that work and seen things that don't work, and with sufficiently varied
approaches. I think there's reasons why this will work, but I also wonder if
they would have screened the startups slightly differently if they knew they
were going to do the whole batch remotely. Working in an all remote
environment require different communication skills than working in an office.

I also wonder how easy it'll be for founders to put in 16+ hour days while
working from home. It's easy to 'stay late at the office', but I think it is
harder to contain myself in my office while doing that. Maybe that's just a me
thing, but I think it can be a real issue... I wonder if founders will simply
hole up in the same living space somehow during quarantine; I could see that
working, that's basically I've seen friends who've been in YC do anyway. It
just might be harder to do in this environment.

~~~
sudosteph
> I also wonder how easy it'll be for founders to put in 16+ hour days while
> working from home. It's easy to 'stay late at the office', but I think it is
> harder to contain myself in my office while doing that. Maybe that's just a
> me thing, but I think it can be a real issue...

Yeah, I think that's just a personal preference thing. I've always found
offices to be much more distracting, and actually I tend to put less time in
overall when there's an office involved. Mostly that's because commuting (even
if it's a relatively easy commute, like a 15 minute walk) takes extra time,
effort, and planning - and because there are more auditory and visual
distractions to tune out in an office, which makes me fatigue more quickly.

I also felt just emotionally on edge from going to the office every day. For
example, I would feel very resentful when I was phoned outside of work hours,
because I felt that my limited time to enjoy myself and re-coup my energy with
my family was being threatened. Now that I've been working primarily remotely
now for about 3 years, I don't feel bothered when I need to step up and do
extra work outside of normal hours. I'm less grouchy in general because I
control the environment I work in and don't have the overhead of a commute
looming over me.

I think most of the YC Founders will be able to do fine, since learning to
work effectively remotely is a skill like any other. From my experience too,
remote working is 10x better when every person involved is remote. The worst-
case scenario is to have a split group of people (part remote, part in-
office), because it leads to the in-person group having side convos that leave
out the remote people, which harms the remote people's ability to bond with
the in-person group and generates resentment when the remote workers
inevitably get left out of a conversation that matters.

------
rw2
Looking forward to this if we are accepted, I think on the company's end, a
lot of us worry about transmission of covid 19 and this just provides a safer
environment.

This crisis is a test of a company's flexibility, since the lockdown started
we had to do a hard pivot from onsite to remote services and we're just
getting traction.

Remote work is here to stay and so is remote services. It's a new
frontier/market to explore.

------
dt3ft
I'd love to apply for 20-things.com. Would this be a waste of time, given the
interest YC board has in Reddit?

~~~
snowmaker
You should apply. Whether there are companies we've already funded doing
something similar is not a factor in our decisions.

~~~
dt3ft
Thank you, glad to hear it, that helps a lot!

------
cvaidya1986
This is good for the world.

------
ilikehurdles
How is VC sentiment during the pandemic? My first assumption is that they're
more hesitant than usual to invest, but I've heard from peers that some VCs
are now working even harder to make sure their most promising companies have
the resources to survive past the crisis. Something about lessons learned from
the startups that came out of the Great Recession.

~~~
oliverx0
Currently fundraising. From what I have been hearing, VCs are mostly doubling
down on their portfolio and reducing the number of new companies they invest
in. Sentiment is strong for companies enabling remote work though.

------
juped
Good! I have a potential job that I am quite interested in taking, so I may
not end up applying after all, but should that fall through I'll be applying.

------
shreyshrey
We have specifically built airsend
([https://www.airsend.io/](https://www.airsend.io/)) to solve remote
collaboration use cases like this (especially if the use case involves
collaboration among multiple teams across organization boundaries). We will be
thrilled if YC could check us out. AirSend will be a great addition to YC's
online platform, video conferencing and founders forum.

------
sdan
As a Bay Area native I wish this hadn’t happen, but sometimes radical change
creates radical results.

~~~
AYBABTME
Why do you wish so?

~~~
xwdv
It erodes some of the Bay Area’s attraction for new talent and new companies.

~~~
immy
As someone who doesn't yet own property here, I'm okay with that.

------
MagnitudeFC
What are the odds of this being reversed mid-batch if covid isn't as big of a
deal in say July?

------
kebman
Thanks for all the great work! Keep it up, and remember to wash your hands! :D

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brittpart_
Emails out?

~~~
transitivebs
Yes

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ahmedaly
One of the best things about YC is being there at the silicon valley.
Otherwise, it would lose one of the most important benefits it offers!

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alias_is
Save your time and do not read this rant:

If they know the application is sure to be rejected, why don't they reject it
fast? I really don't understand why can't people reject things fast enough!
University takes 5 months to reject the application, interviews take 2-3 weeks
to reject. If they just happen to know, reject immediately. This whole process
is too slow.

~~~
sudosteph
The thing that gets me is the whole "apply early to have a better chance" is
almost certainly not true. My team's unlisted video had all of two views from
mid-february, when it was submitted, and that's it. The world is a very
different place today due to covid, and I regret not waiting til closer to the
deadline to submit so we could factor that into the plans.

Edit: Also because we made a lot of progress between February and March, and
while I was able update the application with some of the biggest stuff, I
recognize that the initial impression was still the important one. If and when
I apply to the next batch, I might start he application early again - but I
don't think I will submit it more than a week before the deadline.

