A quick thought on having a YC-style programme and taking risks on more junior talent:
Domain expertise is important—I think YC would agree on this. If taking on a deep tech startup they would look for someone on the team who had domain expertise in the field.
I think early YC Internet startups like Dropbox or Airbnb make it look like domain expertise is less important and it’s more about just getting stuck in. The difference is that when Dropbox started there was no expert in “files on the internet” so the founders could basically become the world experts just by getting stuck in and working on it.
The difference with Longtermist areas like AI and Bio is you can’t just become the expert by working on it and (yes, you guessed it) the downside risk means we don’t want to take bets on people to just go for it and try it out (unlike Dropbox where it doesn’t really matter if it fails catastrophically).
A quick thought on having a YC-style programme and taking risks on more junior talent:
Domain expertise is important—I think YC would agree on this. If taking on a deep tech startup they would look for someone on the team who had domain expertise in the field.
I think early YC Internet startups like Dropbox or Airbnb make it look like domain expertise is less important and it’s more about just getting stuck in. The difference is that when Dropbox started there was no expert in “files on the internet” so the founders could basically become the world experts just by getting stuck in and working on it.
The difference with Longtermist areas like AI and Bio is you can’t just become the expert by working on it and (yes, you guessed it) the downside risk means we don’t want to take bets on people to just go for it and try it out (unlike Dropbox where it doesn’t really matter if it fails catastrophically).