Thank you for a detailed reply! It’s sad that we don’t have a good VC scene. I suspect all the money is being poured into the housing market instead :p I am not actively pursuing start up life atm as I’m trying to adjust to life abroad in Japan. But I might actually apply to this batch as you’ve suggested, just to have a crack at it anyway!
If your startup is business oriented, then for YC you need to aim to capture a big juicy market: credibly aiming for a business that will be worth at least say a billion. To understand why, scroll down to “The realistic case” in https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/the-meeting-that-showed-me...
The NZ government has programs to help businesses, but honestly they look pretty unlikely unless you have some “valuable” University IP to build upon (fecking wonks mostly invest in complete shit from what I have seen).
If your idea is B2B, then personally I strongly suspect bootstrapping is the way to go. In NZ if you can bootstrap, then just do it, since your financial struggles are likely to be less than your investor struggles. That was our experience (we never got funding, and it worked out great).
Personally I think most founders are mad: the rewards do not pay enough for the costs/risks. See https://80000hours.org/2014/05/how-much-do-y-combinator-foun... and median return is complete crap (average is insanely skewed by two outliers - the article is very very poorly written but the data is interesting). The key line: “[3 out of 4 founders] probably earned little more than their (low) salaries”. Of the other quarter, many would have also earned nothing for their common shares or options due to liquidation preferences. Also read http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html where you can see PG has a woody for high growth companies, and in http://www.paulgraham.com/richnow.html he doesn’t really address the median loss that founders get as their reward! The rewards are simply not there for your risks. Although the few lottery winners do seem happy enough!
If you are in Christchurch, then I have a couple of investor contacts. Reply with an email address (maybe temp) to contact you and I will.
