[bls]

The easiest and fasted way to lose at negotiating is to ask "is this negotiable?". When you negotiate, you are supposed to be convincing the other side to give you what you want on the terms you want. If, instead, you come into the negotiation looking powerless, you are going to end up with no deal or--worse--a bad deal.

You get 15 minutes or so to present your idea. One minute of that presentation should be about how much money you need to get started. I would not inflate that number, but I would not artificially constrain it to fit the "fixed" limit that YC has. I can't speak for YC, but I would guess that they aren't going to turn down a deal just because the founders demonstrated a need for $7500 per person instead of $5000 each, or whatever the details are. Similarly, if your idea is the best idea they've ever seen, then are they really going to be so rigid about the percentage? Especially if you offer a percentage before they do?

I realize PG said flat out "no" above. But, doesn't Mr. Graham strike you as somebody that has a "rules are meant to be broken" mentality? Don't you think that this is exactly the type of arbitrary rule that is easily broken without too much fuss?

[rms]

With 15 minutes, you don't have any time to justify a 50% increase in money and less than an order of magnitude seems negligible anyways. I think most people that actually have a need for more money are encouraged by YC to work on a limited subset of their initial problem before raising more money from another investor, which is easy enough to do for a promising YC startup.

[dhouston]

i wouldn't bother trying to push the $5k+$5k*n . i think that precedent is pretty much set in stone. and even if you tried, the extra cash wouldn't matter much, and you'd more likely piss pg off than anything else.