Paul I know that YC has a very minor direct role in company funding, but YC is extremely influential - where YC leads many (blindly) follow.<p>I see this effect here in Australia where founders and startups are trying to follow the YC model to success despite the ecosystem here being really different. The thing I really love about YC (apart from HN) is that you guys are trying to do things differently - the last thing the world needs is a 1000 YC clones all following your lead and nobody trying different approaches.<p>I too would like to see a literal moonshot. I have thought a lot about this topic over the years and I think everyone is stuck because they have been concentrating on the wrong area. The cheapest component in the whole process is the humans - the way to get a real moonshot off the ground (sorry for the pun) is to put risk back. There are plenty of people willing to be heroes so why not optimise everything around that - the engineering costs go way down if you are willing to tolerate a high failure rate.