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YC funds the company with $150K. You're expected to pay yourself out of that. If you're in Mountain View or Sunnyvale (next to the YC offices), minimum wage i

YC funds the company with $150K. You're expected to pay yourself out of that. If you're in Mountain View or Sunnyvale (next to the YC offices), minimum wage is $15/hour = $30K/year. If you really scrimp that's enough for ~2 years, though I think most YC companies are expected to raise more at Demo Days. It's not a lot of money, but it's more than many grad students make. Also, most of the colleges that YC presumably recruits out of (Stanford etc.) are free to people whose parents make < $100K/year. You typically don't hold a lot of debt coming out of these elite institutions - either your education is fully paid for by grants, or you come from a social class where your parents will have had assets to pay in full.

juped 7y ago
There is a vast gap between "parents make < $100K/year" and "parents have assets to pay in full".
- nostrademons 7y ago
  There is, but the financial aid formulas are sliding scales, not sharp cut-offs. They just like to publicize the zero-tuition cutoff because it makes for a good press-release. The formulas (and sticker price, and median income) were pretty different when I went to college, but I had about 2/3 of my tuition paid for by grants when I went to Amherst, almost 2 decades ago. My parents were an elementary-school teacher and a househusband, so we were far from rolling in it. It was expensive, but ultimately affordable. If you're in the situation where it'll cost $100K in loans to go to college, you should shop around, and potentially also try to negotiate them down. Amherst gave me roughly double the financial aid that Middlebury did (ultimately a large factor in deciding where to matriculate), and then tacked on an extra couple grand when I said I was deciding between them and Williams.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
> Also, most of the colleges that YC presumably recruits out of (Stanford etc.) are free to people whose parents make < $100K/year. Maybe that's a bad thing?

juped 7y ago

There is a vast gap between "parents make < $100K/year" and "parents have assets to pay in full".

nostrademons 7y ago
There is, but the financial aid formulas are sliding scales, not sharp cut-offs. They just like to publicize the zero-tuition cutoff because it makes for a good press-release. The formulas (and sticker price, and median income) were pretty different when I went to college, but I had about 2/3 of my tuition paid for by grants when I went to Amherst, almost 2 decades ago. My parents were an elementary-school teacher and a househusband, so we were far from rolling in it. It was expensive, but ultimately affordable. If you're in the situation where it'll cost $100K in loans to go to college, you should shop around, and potentially also try to negotiate them down. Amherst gave me roughly double the financial aid that Middlebury did (ultimately a large factor in deciding where to matriculate), and then tacked on an extra couple grand when I said I was deciding between them and Williams.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

> Also, most of the colleges that YC presumably recruits out of (Stanford etc.) are free to people whose parents make < $100K/year. Maybe that's a bad thing?