Launchbox, a YC clone, is now ready to take applications
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I just don't get it. If people are going to make YC clones, why don't they do it in the Valley? There's a large enough market here, that I think it could handle 4 or 5 YC clones and still not saturate the market. The only competition that YC has in the early, early stage funding market are angel investors and credit card companies/savings accounts. Charles River Ventures program doesn't really count because it's a loan with strings attached based on Series A funding.
Granted, there's a lot more angel capital floating around in the Valley, but you have to be here, and know people before you can have access to Angel funding. It's hard for people hoping to move here and start a business right away. That's one of the things that YC has going for it. It attracts applicants from all over because of PG's writings and this here site, and it helps them hit the ground running.
Paul and Jessica are always saying how they regret that they have to turn down so many great groups of founders. They get roughly 600 applications per round, and they are only able to fund 10-20 every 6 months. If another YC clone came around, and tried to sort through the 580 applicants left out of each batch, I still think that they'd probably do pretty well.
And, if it was based here, they could run groups twice a year here in the Valley and they wouldn't have to be Bi-Coastal. YC's roots on the East Coast has got to complicate things a bit for them.
So, there you have it. Someone take the idea and run with it, but if someone picks the idea up they owe me a few shares of common stock.
1. cost of living, though DC is still pretty expensive, the outskirts might not be so bad.
2. proximity to Virginia where there's some tech business out there
3. proximity to where all the VC of this fund are, AOL being McLean, Healthcentral being Arlington
4. that it really doesn't matter where you dev, it only matters when you pitch
They do have a pitch day scheduled in Silicon Valley, which puts them a step above the other YC clones.
Where do we say this? We often turn down groups with good founders for some other reason (they can't quit their jobs; there's only one of them; their idea isn't quite there yet) but we've never turned down a group that had everything right because of lack of space.
they are only able to fund 10-20 every 6 months
At current rates we fund 42 startups a year. But that number has been increasing by about 50% a year.
If anything I was referring to the first part of this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70062
Please don't take it personally, because most of the proposals we rejected, we rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the applicants.
And this post: http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2007/10/what-no-means.h...
specifically, this part:
Please don’t take a “no” from us to mean anything more than there happened to be other applications that interested us more. We get a lot of applications and it’s always difficult to choose who we’d like to interview in person. We admit that our review process is “fraught with error.” I’m sure there are many people that we’ve passed over for funding that went on to start promising companies—and there will be many more.
I wasn't aware that space was not a limiting factor. I'm actually shocked that it isn't with as much press as YC has been getting. I figure you'd be overwhelmed with applicants by now.
I was primarily trying to make an observation that the market for would be founders seems to be heavy on the supply side these days. And, while YC is certainly the alpha dog in early, stage funding, it seems like the supply side of the founder equation is rather large, and getting larger. I could be wrong.
Personally, I'm not quite sure why relocation is part of the deal, either for YC or Launchbox. Seems like a way to exclude people who are not in the US, people who have strong family commitments, anyone who happens to like living where they are already. It would be interesting to see if this kind of thing could be done using modern communications rather than physical proximity, but maybe it has been tried already.
Hats off to YC for starting it all.