I personally see YC's equity stake as a "fee" companies with young or un-networked founders will pay to gain law/financial/sales-lead networks to leverage. In

I personally see YC's equity stake as a "fee" companies with young or un-networked founders will pay to gain law/financial/sales-lead networks to leverage. In a vacuum, the trade works best for young founding teams and the value decreases as the team gets older (age typically does correlate with your leveragable network size).