Buy Your Teen's Way Into Y Combinator
This weekend, Bing Nursery School, an elite institution for precocious little 2-to-5-year-olds, is holding its 25th Annual Harvest Moon Auction with all proceeds going toward student scholarships. As you might expect from a nursery school where Stanford University connections count so heavily, a handful of the items from the online auction are awfully startup-oriented.
There's the "Y Combinator Dinner for Your Teen" valued at $1,000—the perfect humble-brag for any entrepreneurial millennial, as well as a more adult-oriented Singularity University Executive Program, valued at $12,000. The auction also includes a chance to "Talk About Your Entrepreneurial Endeavors w Chamath Palihapitiya," valued at "priceless" but has a current leading bid of $600, which sounds like a price to us.
This is how the auction site describes the chance to meet with the unapologetic unicorn lover:
Here's a chance to spend 45 minutes at the Social+Capital Partnership office, talking startup strategy (or any other topic of your choice) with a Silicon Valley luminary. Chamath is the Founder of the Social+Capital Partnership, a venture capital fund based in Palo Alto. Want to talk about scaling your business? Chamath was a longtime Facebook executive, widely credited with Facebook's rapid user growth. And if you love basketball or poker, ask Chamath what its like to be an Owner of the NBA Golden State Warriors and participate in the World Series of Poker.
There's less of a countdown clock on the Y Combinator item, although it sounds just as precious:
If your teen has an interest in startups, give him or her this rare opportunity to see what goes on at Y Combinator! During the funding cycles (Winter & Summer 2014), YC hosts dinners at which eminent startup people are invited to speak. Your teen will get to talk with Paul Graham and other YC partners, meet the guest speaker and mingle with 100+ founders from around the world who are working on launching new startups. To see a list of past guest speakers go to: http://ycombinator.com/speakers.html
Bing Nursery School, where tuition can cost up to $10,700 per academic year, prides itself on awarding more than "$250,000 in scholarships every year to more than 20% of our 450 children." According to its website:
The school has a strong multi-cultural make-up based on the inherent diversity of the University community and on our continuous outreach to the surrounding communities in order to include minority children.
When the right pedigree is the easiest way to guarantee funding for a startup, it's never too early to make sure your kid is in the proper cohort.
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