[ericd]

It wouldn't make sense financially or otherwise for them to try to trick people who aren't well suited to doing startups into doing one, which is what the parent seems to be implying.

Also, the parent says that it's a terrible financial deal for most founders to do a YC startup, which is laughably wrong. If you succeed, there are few better ways to become very wealthy. If you fail, the most common failure mode I've seen is that the team gets a much better than average signing bonus at one of the big tech companies. We've all heard horror stories about people going deep into personal credit card debt to keep their startup afloat, but that doesn't seem to be representative for YC founders.

And whether you end up cashing out for gigabucks or getting acquihired for vested equity megabucks, while you're running it, if you do it well, you get to work the way you like on problems of your choosing with people you like rather than letting your soul die slowly doing pointless tasks and sitting in pointless meetings at a big corporation. People should really not forget that part while they're harping on startup salaries. Startups can be a lot of fun, and you really can have an impact. Unless you join a pointless startup that loves pointless meetings, those exist too. But if you're the founder, you're free to try to run a low-bullshit company.

Anyway, that's all to say that you're trying to find the silver lining of a turd of a comment.

[Applejinx]

"It wouldn't make sense financially or otherwise for them to try to trick people who aren't well suited to doing startups into doing one, which is what the parent seems to be implying."

Yes it would, because luck plays a role. So long as would-be startups handle some of their runway themselves, of course it suits Y Combinator to have a larger pool of possible candidates.