With less than a month left to the deadline, its really challenging to build a decent MVP with some traction in one of these fields. And I think that seem to be at least the minimum requirement to get into YC.
You should. I was under the apparently mistaken impression that people who get into YC at least have a functioning demo, and generally have users already. So when my friend and I were applying, we limited ourselves to ideas for which we could create a semi-functional demo in the few weeks before the application deadline. We ended up getting rejected because of the idea that we chose, and rightly so, but I wonder what ideas we would have come up with if we had not felt so time constrained. (I am glad that we were rejected because I don't think that we were ready to start a company yet, but I am curious anyway.)
please do. in the last few years, the model for seed funding seems to have moved largely to having an mvp, if for no other reason than demonstrating technical ability.
Maybe it's a marketing stunt? I mean, they're in for the money, so they have to fund stuff, that pays out later. BUT they have to appease their critics, who say "all you fund is the next snapchat!!".
With this list, they can say "Oh we wanted to cure cancer, the people who wanted funding for it just got no skills!"
Yes their last batch startups were targeting pretty serious problems. I remember 2 of them were around nuclear energy so definitely relevant to the list.
