I never said it in the essay, but we have actually been thinking it at YC. One of the hardest things we have to do in the selection process is filter out people who are smart but uncommitted. (Smartness is much easier to judge than commitment in a 10-minute interview.) And now the economy is going to be doing it for us. So frankly I'd prefer to be operating in a mild recession. Unfortunately this one sounds like it is scheduled to be a few notches above mild.
My tiny startup has a small but stable amount of funding. In our case, it's enough to provide a two-year runway to finish development and iterate the product a couple of times before reaching break-even.
Up until this month, I've had trouble finding A-list programmers because I don't offer a large salary and benefits. This month, I've suddenly found it easier to attract high-skill employees and I expect it to get easier still as the recession deepens. Many are involved in loss-generating startups which they anticipate will soon fail as funding dries up. (Not all these experts choose to return to grad school...some, for instance, are too old for that culture shift or don't have liquid assets to sustain them.)
As you discuss, the recession may make it easier or harder for startups depending on their value proposition and their reliance on additional investments. I encourage you to write on how easier access to expert programmers changes the equation. In my case, I must decide whether to commit our resources to, say, hire another brilliant programmer because it's now possible OR to hold at our current headcount to maximize survivability.
Another variable is whether brilliant hires in this economy are likely to stick with the company when the economy improves in, say 12-18 months. An HR expert who's weathered a few of these cycles pointed out that while it's easier to hire good people in a recession, some of these hires are more likely to jump ship when the economy turns around. I think the description would be "fair weather hires".
Intuitively that makes sense but I'm not sure if it's actually true. It's relatively easy to convince someone who would otherwise go into hedge funds to instead do a web startup with you. It's much more difficult, however, to convince that person to do a startup to the field of, say, ethnic pharmacology. That doesn't mean the hedge fund guy would necessarily make a bad partner for a web startup though. (Stereotypes about finance people aside.)
Also, I know pg says that not being able to find a cofounder after a certain point signals a lack of competence or a bad idea, which is generally of correct, but also realize that in some areas finding a cofounder is literally 10x harder than in others-- independent of the merits of the founder or the idea.
