[tehansen]

Do you think that YC could ever invest or advise startups / founders that can't move to silicon valley for 3 months for one reason or another?

Is there something inherent in the in-person experience that cannot be overcome by technology (in general too i suppose, rather than just the type of work ycombinator does)?

Personally i believe we're not quite there yet. I have some hope, that within our life time communication and collaboration tools can become both sophisticated and intuitive enough to make physical presence for most type of work completely irrelevant)

[sama]

There is for sure something about in-person interaction that cannot be replaced by any current technology. Alan Kay recently told me he thinks it's something biological.

Our model just doesn't work well for people that can't move to the valley for 3 months.

Remote work is good in many cases, but early-stage startup advising is not one of them.

[tehansen]

Thank you for taking the time to answer :)

I have no doubt its biological, but biological processes are inherent to any human activity and are ultimately based on physics as well. Consider even just the absurd number of extremely complex biological processes involved in typing a reply as we essentially communicate telepathically thousands of miles apart right now.

I'm daydreaming about having a captivating discussion with you and Alan Kay in which I manage to convince both of you to help me replace current technology with something that would change this and the world with it.

Any advice on how to make that happen?

I'm leaning towards "stop daydreaming and get to work building it" being the best advice toward that end myself...but then there is all the other things I need to get done as well.

:P

[jfarmer]

There's evidence that babies acquire phonemes when "taught" in-person differently than via video: http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius... (this topic starts at about 7m08s)

[tehansen]

wow, very awesome link. As someone who grew up in Germany, speaking Danish at home, then moved to the US when I turned 19 to go to college, and is now getting to watch my 2 pre-schoolers learn absolute insane amounts of things in such short timespans this definitely resonated!

In a lot of ways, startups are like parenting I guess. Certainly parenting is another example of an activity that depends absolutely on physical presence :P