Question on YC Application
3 of us are students at a top 5 university in the US. We have been pretty good friends and worked together on things for over a year now. And 6 months ago my uncle who has a very strong technical background in a tech related but non-tech space had a good idea that addresses his field of work, and is only recently possible to actually address because of new technology that has come out in the past year or so. And luckily, all three of us have either experience in this direct tech field, or adjacent skills necessary to tackle the problem. The three of us have already agreed to an equal equity split amongst us technical founders, and my uncle is fine with a lower equity split since he's not doing any of the actual technical work. His value stems from the fact that he has a really good understanding of what the user would want since he is from the field. And he is high up in his firm and has lots of good relationships for us to use for testing the product, and getting customers. So we have no issue with his equity stake and even want to give him a royalty since his additional value stems from his ability to get us customers. The problem though is that he does not want to leave his job, and quite frankly we don't need him to nor want him to. YC requires founders to leave their jobs but him leaving his job would not really help us since we want to test it on the people at his firm. Moreover, he isn't coding so we don't really need him full time. And he also works remote for his job so the amount of time he can commit, is in line with what we need. Would YC accept this from a founder? He's kind of a unique case since his value is actually increased by him staying at his job.
He's not a founder, he's an advisor. Advisors at that stage typically are granted 0.25% - 1% depending on what's expected of them. More than that would raise eyebrows. He is not a founder though.
Treat him as an advisor, don’t give him founder-level equity (the idea by itself is not worth a bigger chunk of equity) and instead give him a bigger sales bonus that depends on how much business he can close for you.
From watching the YC videos on YouTube, it seems like they don't have rules as much as tendencies and guidelines, other than building a VC-backed company vs bootstrapping.
So I think the advice you would get from them is to apply and if you get an interview, make sure you can make a compelling case that you could still succeed without your Uncle being on board full-time.
It seems like their general guidance is "When in doubt apply".
If you gwt no answer, try sending an email to info@ycombinator.com