[elihu]

1) Does YCombinator only invest in companies with a plan to become $1B?

2) What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in the long term. Sometimes it makes sense to create a simple product with a smallish market that people use now, and adapt over time to address or create a larger market. This other discussion today is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16334035

[orb_yt]

I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

> What you're doing right now isn't necessarily the thing you end up doing in the long term.

What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?

[elihu]

> I think it's a pretty well known fact that YC tends to invest in companies that have the opportunity to be billion dollar ventures.

"Tends to" isn't the same as "always". I expect they'd rather invest in unicorns, but maybe they're willing to invest in a few more modest endeavors for various reasons.

> What sort of opportunities do you think a company like Buglife could focus on?

Beats me. I wouldn't have guessed that Amazon was going to become a cloud provider back when they were just an e-commerce site. I think Paul Graham has said that sometimes YCombinator will accept founders who have an uninteresting idea if they seem like the sort of people who are capable of generating new ideas and changing course as the situations demand.

[schukin]

Flamethrowers.