I Applied to YC with An Idea

Are the days of "I applied to YC with an idea" gone? It feels like the expectations on founders and their companies have grown exponentially in the last 2 years.

I met a founder earlier this week. He's still working at his day job but wants to go full-time. The problem? He (like most of us) needs income to pay his bills. Traditionally, that means finding funding. Yet, preseed investors are expecting more now than ever before. Where's your product? Where's your revenue? Who are your design partners? How much are they paying you?

Preseed used to be the "I back a founder and idea I believe in." But it's easier to build today than ever before. Investors (rightly so) expect the top 1% of founders, the ones that will return 10x+ to their fund, to go above & beyond from the beginning. That means building a real company and real product on nights & weekends, not just brainstorming ideas and having market research conversations.

The problem I have with the escalating expectations is that when it's easy to build, WHAT and HOW you build is way more important. Building the right product for the right customer to solve the real hair-on-fire problem isn't easy. And the reality is, humans are very bad at multi-tasking. If a founder is still working their day job, there is some fraction of their brain that is not fully focused on their startup. I accomplished more for Clearly AI during week 1 of full-time than in the previous 4 months combined. When you're someone who can't afford to go without a paycheck, how do you get the full-time focus early, in the idea stage, when pre-seed investors expect more and more from you?

Options include: angel investors, friends & family, using your vacation time at your full-time job, and applying to an accelerator. Yet, as far as I know, YC gets more than 20,000 applicants every batch, with only about 100 companies accepted. And when most of the applicants have products or revenue, what chance is there for us with just an idea?