You cannot take money from friends or family in an incubator fund, though some people call a fund that has yet to accept non-friends or family money an incubator colloquially. That said, with current batch sizes, we're still talking dozens of such companies. Observationally, there were probably more companies in our batch that were idea-only or marginally beyond idea phase than you would expect, but it is still a minority of the batch. So it's on you to demonstrate evidence to YC (and VC's generally) that you are not merely a wantrepreneur waiting to be given capital before even trying to do something, as that's a negative pattern match to success. Those are people who have some fundamental misunderstanding about what starting a company entails/what is in their locus of control/miscalibrated bias towards action. I know a lot of people that have had some "idea" for years, or some minimal MVP that doesn't improve, that nonetheless hunt for accelerator or VC funding (and in all cases, unsuccessfully). Ideas are cheap and plenty of people have them, and most people who have ideas but never build companies lack the simple but profound and hard part - the competency/conviction/desire/etc to actually, you know, turn that idea to action (and useful action at that). ![]() There would need to be compelling and believable rationale as to why it is merely an idea at the time of application and not more. A list of ideas, I would hazard, is not such an application The rest of your application needs to be really good and have a strong thesis - which is already generically true of all accepted apps, but probably even moreso here. ![]() I.e., if you're a founding team of an engineer + X both from venture backed startups, ideally with some amount of recognitability (not necessarily success), or classic tech stalwarts like FANG, I'd guess that's a more likely "idea only" team than, say, a solo entrepreneur who is non-technical, or two people coming from a legacy instution or consulting backgrounds. Related, but such teams tend to have "startup-like" founder profiles that demonstrate technical proficiency. I think a static UI page would be below par but for YC alums with some degree of prior success re-applying and/or extremely strong founding teams. ![]() even the code you should be able to ship between now and application deadline, or the wireframe flow you should be able to assemble between now and then can be relatively substantial. They find creative ways to demonstrate technical proficency and ability to build product quickly for the demo i.e. YC S21 alum here that got in with just an idea - yes, YC will accept companies that are pre-product and basically in glorified idea stage, but observationally, a few things tend to be true for such companies:
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