I'm not sure what benefit this would have to the YC partners, unless they have an unwanted barrier to funding more applicants because of lack of money, which I doubt. While it may be fun (and profitable) to crowdsource-fund at the seed level, why would YC give its services to a company they have no stake in for the sake of making the HN community money?
I'd see more value if the HN community itself were to pool together money and invest in the various classes, though this benefit may be completely negated by what the Start Fund does.
The benefit would be the return on investment, just like any other start-up they fund. In this case, their investment would be the time and effort they put into mentoring their companies and the legal fees they put into launching the crowd-funding. The return would be whatever they wanted it to be. The HN community would mostly have the capital at risk, not YC.
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I'm not sure what benefit this would have to the YC partners, unless they have an unwanted barrier to funding more applicants because of lack of money, which I doubt. While it may be fun (and profitable) to crowdsource-fund at the seed level, why would YC give its services to a company they have no stake in for the sake of making the HN community money?
I'd see more value if the HN community itself were to pool together money and invest in the various classes, though this benefit may be completely negated by what the Start Fund does.
The benefit would be the return on investment, just like any other start-up they fund. In this case, their investment would be the time and effort they put into mentoring their companies and the legal fees they put into launching the crowd-funding. The return would be whatever they wanted it to be. The HN community would mostly have the capital at risk, not YC.