It's not a lot of money, but it's more than many grad students make.
Also, most of the colleges that YC presumably recruits out of (Stanford etc.) are free to people whose parents make < $100K/year. You typically don't hold a lot of debt coming out of these elite institutions - either your education is fully paid for by grants, or you come from a social class where your parents will have had assets to pay in full.
The formulas (and sticker price, and median income) were pretty different when I went to college, but I had about 2/3 of my tuition paid for by grants when I went to Amherst, almost 2 decades ago. My parents were an elementary-school teacher and a househusband, so we were far from rolling in it. It was expensive, but ultimately affordable. If you're in the situation where it'll cost $100K in loans to go to college, you should shop around, and potentially also try to negotiate them down. Amherst gave me roughly double the financial aid that Middlebury did (ultimately a large factor in deciding where to matriculate), and then tacked on an extra couple grand when I said I was deciding between them and Williams.
Maybe that's a bad thing?
For talented graduates in computer science, electing to start a technology company is an extraordinarily dangerous financial decision. In many ways it's transferring technology risk from larger companies to graduates at their expense.
Graduates from top CS institutions command salaries and liquid stock in the $200K-$500K range within their first decade in the workforce, which is a guaranteed payout of $2M-$4M, compounding as their careers advance.
Starting a technology company necessarily involves lower salaries, but also substantial compensation in your own company's equity, which is inherently illiquid compared to larger companies. The vast majority of startups end up going to zero, even those started by top graduates, and you never make back that missing $1M-$2M in your career.
I also see a lot of resumes of people just out of college who were rapidly catapulted into some incubator / start-up camp etc.
They often have had endless bullet points about “running a business” for ~2 years basically just burning someone else’s money.
Do they know the first thing about working 40-50 hours per week grinding through Jira tickets and code review? I don’t believe it.
A completely pure new grad who never tried to run a start-up on zero life experience is frankly a lot more likely to put energy and enthusiasm into the basic, unsexy realities of working a real job.
I think if they were managing other engineers for an extended period and solving difficult technical problems as well, you could make an argument for hiring up to a team lead / senior engineer. Perhaps manager, if they have more extensive experience. Of course at most FAANGy places you will need at least 4-6yoe to be hired into these levels too.
I think the people sending you those resumes probably don’t understand that they should tailor their resumes for the type of job they’re applying for. And yes, if the startup was truly “does-nothing” that’s absolutely a red mark regarding how valuable their experience was. But it could be somewhat valuable for product work, at least at the entry level
When I visited the Stanford campus recently, it seemed like many students had the opposite of debt: massive savings indicated by personal electric scooters, Mercedes/Tesla/BMW/Audi in the student parking lots, combined with several FANG internships, it's fairly common for a CS undergrad to have $100K+ in savings when they graduate.
Whether it's family money or not, debt doesn't seem to be the big of a problem for these top students.
Also lots of Stanford students have parents who are just rich af, those are probably most of the ones with really nice cars
I had 1 FANG internship, 1 near-FANG internship that paid the same, and 2 not-near FANG internships.
I didn't end up close to that, at all. Pretax for FANG internships is like ~$25k each on the upper end. Even if you do 4 of them you're still under $100k considering tax.
Now if you go to Waterloo and do 6 FANG internships, then maybe but only if you save everything.
I didn't pay for undergrad but I came out with a pretty mediocre positive net worth, unfortunately :/
https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/25/tuition-financial-aid-0...
It's really important to understand that the elite non-profit private education system functions differently from mainstream higher ed. Elite private schools are already socialist: they jack up sticker prices for high-income parents and solicit their wealthy alumni for donations so that lower-income students who get in can go free. If you get in, you will probably graduate in fairly decent financial shape, particularly considering that many local companies give good internships to Stanford students.
The folks you hear about with six-figure student debt figures are typically products of mid-tier private colleges. These organizations don't have the endowment or wealthy tuition-payers to be able to subsidize lower-income students the way elite institutions can, and so they just put everybody in debt. Then their graduates get out into the working world and are indistinguishable from any other mid-tier private college graduate, and so they get indistinguishable (i.e. low) wages.
It really pays to be elite in America.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I would wager that most people interested in this would have strong support structures of family & friends who can bankroll them while the company gets on their feet. I was in this position when I graduated, and so were most of the people I've met throughout my tech career. I still chose to go for a salary, as did most of my friends & peers.
But I think it's incorrect to say "most people interested in this..." when it's really "most people who can do this..." Few children of even middle income parents could do this.
But, also, maybe YC just knows that 95% of these investments won't yield huge returns, $150k is pennies, they like the PR, and maybe 1 or 2 of them will actually go big and make it worth it.