[slededit]

YC seems very oriented to Software and other businesses where iteration costs are low. In hardware you have to spend some money to test product market fit. The only way to not lose your shirt is to follow a waterfall approach with more traditional planning. From an external view it seems like the antithesis of the YC approach.

[tlb]

YC started with software companies, but a substantial fraction of current companies are building hardware. See https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-winter-2018-stats/ and the links to company descriptions.

Waterfall means different things to different people. I think the key to success is getting several iterations in front of the customer, and being able to make major changes based on their feedback. That does usually mean some duplication of effort, but that's better than building something complete that nobody actually wants.

Also, there's a new funding deal for biotech companies that provides more money: https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-bio/.

[aaavl2821]

I think the issue for biotech isn't just you need more money -- you do to get initial POC (the most analogous concept to product / market fit), but can actually get to exit with less than tech co's nowadays -- but that you have to spend your initial money right. product / feedback cycles are orders of magnitude longer / more expensive, so you need to do more planning to make sure you do the right experiments. this is the hard lesson that the experienced biotech VCs have learned, that generalist VCs have struggled with and why you dont really see many generalist tech VC backed biotech co's succeed (except stemcentryx)

more money without better planning = more money wasted

[whb07]

Yes, but you’re also doing the typical apples to oranges comparison here. Just like the ol’ “China is light years ahead in mobile payments!”. Well sure, because we have a mature credit card system that works well and the Chinese never had a credit card in the first place.

Long story short, because the economies are at different stages, the issues that China has now perhaps the US had 50+ years ago.

You’re not going to sell a product to a 40 year old the same way you do to a 12 year old.