Students: yet another summer founders program (due 4/19): Highland Capital Partners

People can copy what's out in the open, so the important thing is to make sure that you're the one who's constantly setting the pace.

While there's some overlap, Lightspeed and Highland aren't directly copying YC in the same way as the complete plagiarism of Techstars.

Lightspeed and Highland are doing this more for marketing than profit. They're not even taking any equity. It gets their name out to entrepreneurial students at colleges and that's about it. Anyone that gets a grant will pitch future startups to the VC that helped them get started. To the VCs, it's worth spending a mere $150,000 to build a strong relationship with some of the best young entrepreneurs. Sure, most of the startups will go back to school after the summer program instead of dropping out and being successful but they'll come back to Lightspeed or Highland for funding after they get their degree.

Highland also funds biotech and provides lab space in their incubator. Neither one is targeting the same uber-hacker that YC prefers.

I think you should be flattered you began this trend of micro-investment. It's a great idea. I'm grateful because it's better for all us young entrepreneurs to have as many options as possible.

there are some other signs they don't really get it, as far as dealing with students. the most obvious one to me is requiring teams to be on site in lexington. first, commuting from boston or cambridge is a pain if you don't have a car (there's certainly no T or commuter rail, maybe bus or bike if you're extraordinarily motivated), and second, the hours of a VC certainly aren't compatible with the hours of a startup hacker unless they plan to have kids roaming around the office park at 2am (right..)

it'll be interesting to see how these summer programs continue to segment themselves to accommodate niches that are generally excluded by yc (techstars/single founders, highland/students, etc., ) most amusingly the "mistakes" :)

I am guessing though, that choosing to tell students that they are all worthless may have a chilling effect down the road.

"..Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown." - Copy What You Like, by Paul Graham

This money doesn't necessarily have to be divided up. The dramatic increase in productivity from these people creating startups instead of just working for a large company should cause there to actually be much more money in tech fields. Right?