25-30 year olds smart enough to build their own business wouldn't waste their time with YC. Most of the information and knowledge YC provides is openly published for free online. Aside from that the partners are always open to emails and communication. So why waste your money?
A lot of the value that YC provides is in the network, brand recognition, and mostly importantly, demo day. Depending on the circumstances, I would say just demo day itself is worth doing YC for.
Sorry. That was perhaps a poor choice of words. I mostly just meant that older folks might be more inclined to skip YC based on the existing YC knowledge that's freely available.
The knowledge is freely available, widely shared, and well covered/ commented on by many.
As someone who went through YC at 27, I think the structure, personal input, coaching, and the community (IMO most important) are incredible resources to increase the likelihood of success for your startup.
When you are creating a startup (defined as company hoping to experience hyper-growth/ hyper-impact), it is so hard that you need to accumulate as many resources and success factors as possible.
Knowledge is a huge portion of that - but YC packages significantly more advantages not only into ~3 months but also into the constantly evolving network it has cultivated.
Also, if you're a 25-30+ year old tech worker, and aren't financially incompetent, you probably have some savings and can use that as your seed funding instead of needing to join an accelerator.
That and the fact that you can bootstrap _most_ startups either by maintaining a full time job or consulting part time. The options for creating a tech business are endless but the Silicon Valley hive mind has done a good job of convincing a lot of people that you need to do it a very specific way.
Another niche worth targeting (that VCs wouldn't bother with) is a business that has potential revenue of $200k-$1M per year. That isn't the home run that VCs would want, but it is enough to support a team of 1-5 people.
