Who'd maintain & administer it? As I understand it, YC is not in the business of providing business services to its portfolio companies. They setup the network and information, but they don't really have headcount or hiring expertise to bring functional roles in-house and then rent them out to portfolio companies for cheap.
It's an interesting question whether there's a market for an investment firm that does do this. One of the things that appealed to me about Google under Eric Schmidt was that it basically functioned as a venture capital firm that had shared technology infrastructure, server maintenance, legal, PR, etc. but let you choose what to work on and come up with your own product ideas, with the one caveat that Google would own any business you built. It'd be very interesting to see a VC firm that did the same - cover all the functional roles so that entrepreneurs could focus on pure product development. I hear a16z is sorta shooting for that, but they cover more of the human-capital stuff like recruitment, executive search, etc. rather than the technical stuff.
It's an interesting question whether there's a market for an investment firm that does do this. One of the things that appealed to me about Google under Eric Schmidt was that it basically functioned as a venture capital firm that had shared technology infrastructure, server maintenance, legal, PR, etc. but let you choose what to work on and come up with your own product ideas, with the one caveat that Google would own any business you built. It'd be very interesting to see a VC firm that did the same - cover all the functional roles so that entrepreneurs could focus on pure product development. I hear a16z is sorta shooting for that, but they cover more of the human-capital stuff like recruitment, executive search, etc. rather than the technical stuff.