YC is awesome and I remain a super big supporter. I owe half my career and most of my friends to what an awesome family YC has become. What I realized was just that I could help companies the most in that 9 to 18 months you have after YC is done. I have a pet theory that in the next ten years, you're going to see the YC alumni turn into the most powerful set of investors in tech, and that'll be a good thing because we have a pretty strong shared culture around being good to founders and helping, and frankly doing no evil, which seems like it should be a basic thing for early stage investors but really isn't.
We have no specific mandate for US-only, and we think startups are absolutely happening everywhere and we want to help them.
An investment thesis at the early stage is really hard to do because we don't know what people are going to start when they're just a few people starting out. E.g. it would have been impossible to write an investment thesis that would include Coinbase early on because nobody was thinking about cryptocurrencies.
We have no specific mandate for US-only, and we think startups are absolutely happening everywhere and we want to help them.
An investment thesis at the early stage is really hard to do because we don't know what people are going to start when they're just a few people starting out. E.g. it would have been impossible to write an investment thesis that would include Coinbase early on because nobody was thinking about cryptocurrencies.
Thanks so much for your questions Oo!