Well first, "I could just bankroll myself and save 7%!" is not how risk management works. Second, the level of privilege in this comment is astounding. $500k is a lot of money if you didn't grow up elite.
That’s not fair and I didn’t mean to come across that way. But a good portion of people who worked 5-7 years in SV (or in other tech hubs such as Boston, NYC, Seattle/PDX) have $$$ in the bank.
$500k is a lot of money but arguably not enough (for most things not strictly SaaS). So either the idea is small enough that it seems you don't need $500k and could probably bootstrap yourself or you're too big for YC and will never happen anyway.
The privilege is assuming that your experience with SWE projects maps to everything worth doing.
