[evan_]

can't really do that if your parents share an 800 square foot public housing apartment with your sister and her kids. or if they're in prison, or dead, or abusive, or they threw you out for not conforming to their religious choices, or disowned you for not being cisgender and heterosexual, or or or

[chrisco255]

Of course not, and that might be the case for 10-20% of the population. But you don't have to be some privileged trust fund kid for your parents to give you a place to stay in the event of financial hardship. That's not rare and let's hope that never becomes rare because I'd shudder a world where parents by and large would not do this for their kids.

[baddox]

> But you don't have to be some privileged trust fund kid for your parents to give you a place to stay in the event of financial hardship. That's not rare

I think the point is that it is rare for people who don't have this fallback option to put all their time and resources behind entrepreneurship (the same applies to post-secondary education), because to do so is actually risky for them. It's not that they're worse at business or have less ambition, which is an extremely common sentiment expressed widely in the US.

[evan_]

Here's the reason I think it would be a problem for an imaginary, abstract incubator (because I don't think YCombinator actually does have this) to have a rule "To apply here you need to have alive parents, who like you, with a spare bedroom".

I think that the 10-20% group you are talking about is likely to have more than its share of not-white people. Maybe it's a small divergence, if we imagine the population of the US to be 50% white and 50% not white, maybe the group of people who can't go back and crash with their parents is 49% white and 51% not white.

OK, so imagine there's a different imaginary incubator with a rule that every applicant has to roll a 100 sided die. If they're white they have to roll a 50 or higher to get in, and if they're not white they have to roll a 51 or higher.

I wouldn't like the "roll a die" rule, I think a lot of people probably wouldn't, but it's ultimately not a heck of a lot different than the "crash with your parents" rule. You are still more likely to fall afoul of both rules if you are not white- or (if you change the dice game) gay, or poor, or marginalized in other ways.

(yes the probabilities are different, not the point)

[mercer]

How is 10%-20% not a problem? Not to mention tens of percentages above that where staying with one's parents is incredibly difficult and/or uncomfortable.

This is the right time to shudder, much as I'm happy that you're in a situation where it seems hard to imagine (or empathize with).

[blub]

No, but then again in those situations of extreme poverty one probably has bigger problems than not being able to get a start-up off the ground.

And of their parents threw them out or don't otherwise like them that's just bad luck. Some people will not have an easy life, I don't see why we have to make those with loving families feel bad about it.

[jakelazaroff]

No one's trying to make anyone feel bad about their loving family. We just don't want it to be a selection criterion for entrepreneurship.

[blub]

That's exactly what's happening: diminishing others' achievements because they can move back with their parent.

It's not their fault that there's so much misery in the world, nor do they have an obligation to fix it.