It’s not that yc cares about the age. It’s that the whole ecosystem that funds startups prefer younger and (till recently) single male founders.
One side of this is that startups are hard and demanding a lot of time and energy. Startups with other people’s money who are on a tight time frame to get a return on investment makes startups even more harder and even more demanding. Just by simple physics younger founders are better positioned to win on the demand vector. It’s about probabilities. Now an experienced founder who may have more obligations on their time and energy may still “win” on the demand vector but they have to skin the cat with some other ace up their sleeve that allows them to meet the time compressed demand needs of a startup.
So yea. It’s not about yc it’s about the whole system that thinks a certain way. Human psychology plays a big factor in this as these people in the funding side are no more “smarter” than the the average person and are hence susceptible to the same biases.
I say build something that people are willing to pay for and then bootstrap your way. If it’s a good product or service these same people will line up to you and you have the upper hand when taking their money which allows you to dictate your terms.
> We help founders at their earliest stages regardless of their age.
> 52% of YC's billion dollar company founders were under 28 years old and the oldest founder was in their 50s