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I was in an accelerator program a few years ago alongside a peer company who had a new process for refining carbon nanotubes. It was founded by a university che
by pjungwir 13y ago
I was in an accelerator program a few years ago alongside a peer company who had a new process for refining carbon nanotubes. It was founded by a university chemistry professor, and he basically had a working implementation in his office and wanted to scale it. That was not a very prestigious accelerator program, so he really seemed out of place alongside the other crazy startups. Maybe that's an example of a "world-changing" idea that YC could fund.
- _delirium 13y agoThat could work, although I see that as a somewhat different class from what this post is talking about. Academic spinoffs are one semi-established way of managing the issue of long lead times and research risk: you do the up-front risky research in academia, and then start up a company once you have something close to a prototype. That way your time-to-product in the company is not so huge, because you have a prototype or close to one at t=0. But I read this post as suggesting that YC wants to fund companies that are themselves doing new research, rather than looking for companies that are doing spinoff/commercialization of established research labs.