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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Good God, another one. At least these guys didn't copy our application form.

The funny thing is, both Highland and Lightspeed are copying an aspect of YC that we later realized was a mistake: focusing on people currently in school.

People who copy you always end up copying a slightly old version of you. I noticed that with Viaweb. That's one reason all these imitations don't freak me out too much. Viaweb must have had at least 10 of them-- many of which copied stuff nearly verbatim from our site.

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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.

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.

"..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

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.

I don't think the point is that all students are worthless, but rather that colleges aren't this huge source of untapped potential that they are popularly imagined to be. This shouldn't really come as a surprise; most brilliant hackers/entrepreneurs know this, which is why they want to leave.

Think about it. All I want is to be surrounded by brilliant people working on interesting things, which college can't provide. Which is why I want to leave. But this same logic shows why funding college students isn't really an arbitrage opportunity. Even if you could figure out who the brilliant ones are, which is difficult, there are too many social and systemic forces pulling in the wrong directions.

(N.B. I'm not claiming to be brilliant myself, only that given the choice I prefer working with others who are.)

Spot on. Most of the people taking computer science at my university dont care about hacking away at interesting problems. They're all here because they know that they can get a high paying job in The City when they graduate.

The problem is not the students themselves, but that their circumstances make them a flight risk. If you encourage people to start a startup as an alternative to a summer job during college, they won't be very committed to it, and commitment is the most important thing in a startup.

The moment someone graduates, this problem goes away, because then all the social pressure switches to encouraging them to work on the startup, instead of encouraging them to go back to school.

From my two years at university, I've had interesting conversations with friends specifically about starting something.

Here's the problem: from what people hear in the media, college folks have this idea that START UP = GET-RICH-QUICK. And on that basis, it is not hard to get someone to be your cofounder. Of course, then I explain to them that while this could make us really rich, it also has tremendous risk and that I start start-ups FIRSTLY because it is my passion before anything else. At that point, almost everyone I know just finds it easier to maintain their good GPA instead of risk their GPA and degree for a start-up.

A good test I have is asking someone what they would do if they are taking an exam and find out midway through that their high traffic server and website is down.

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