Doesn't it defeat the purpose of YC if you have to raise enough money to pay yourself market salary before you can enter the US to participate in YC?

I think you misunderstand. It's easy to get in to the US for 3 months, so getting to YC isn't hard. Then you raise, and raising helps you stay long-term.

Ah, that makes far more sense. Thanks!

Is it also easy to get into the US for 3 months, and work legally? What kind of visa (or visa-less thingy) would you use?

What do you mean by "work legally?"

If you mean do a program like YC, it's fine. The reason it works in this situation is because you aren't making any money. The INS does not care if you are "working" if you aren't actually making any taxable income.

If you mean draw a regular salary, it's harder to do that legally but I have a friend in France who runs a 1-man consulting firm that does short term contracts in the USA and he's figured it out. I don't think it was easy in terms of "no work" but it was just filling out a bunch of paperwork.

You are allowed into the US for business on the visa-waiver or the B1 visa (which is easy to get and is the default for non visa-waiver countries I think). But you can't _work_ there. It's a subtle distinction, and I suspect it relies on how the immigration official is feeling that day. Meetings, conferences, meeting investors, networking, etc, are all OK.

Doing the job you normally do isn't allowed, but it seems like it's pretty obvious that people do that.

Thanks for enlightening me!

Perhaps, but not necessarily; the YC project is about going big, ultimately -- after all, that's the only way YC is going to make some money.

It is possible to bootstrap a company in such a way as to plateau out at, say, 3 people, each of whom gets a decent market salary. However, that company may not have further room to climb for various structural and/or marketing reasons, lack of appropriate connections, funding opportunities, etc. In principle, the purpose of YC is to address that specific gap irrespectively of how much short-term revenue the startup may be generating.

On the other hand, I agree that the amount of funding they provide per se is not particularly useful if you are already generating enough revenue to pay yourself(ves) a market salary.

I wasn't so much thinking about the funding provided by YC; but rather that if you've reached a stage where you can raise enough funding to hire yourself into the US, the fact that YC provides connections to angels and VCs is probably not tremendously useful.

I think you have the order of events wrong. The connections (and other value) YC provides help you get that funding which lets you hire yourself into the US.

As pbiggar points out above, there's no problem (at least for EU citizens) getting into the US for three months of YC - it's staying there long term that's hard.

I assume for visa waiver countries those 12 weeks can be done in a 3-month visa-free visit, with the purpose of "seeking investment" or so. Otherwise you'd have missed the cycle after going through the "annoying and long" process of getting a visa.

I've heard about a startup that had to relocate to London after the YC 3 month phase and then wait a substantial time for the INS to work out their papers. That sounds like it could break a company?

Yes, I was wondering about the YC process as being involved in a London start-up, the dream is obviously to take it to YC and the Valley.

Has anyone here on HN got into YC from London?

Snaptalent, Heyzap, Raportive, Songkick + a couple of others were from london. I think guys from most of those companies are on HN.

http://www.songkick.com/ are a london based yc company

I suspect that's the norm rather than the exception. And as such, it can be planned for. It'll certainly slow your expansion (hiring people is hard when you don't know where you'll be located N months from now) but it shouldn't break the company.