With Own Incubator On Hold, Facebook Befriends Y Combinator
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
Under the fbFund incubator program, we won a $25,000 grant, and that was the sum total of their support for us. After that, all follow-up consisted of admins with no entrepreneurial or programming skills, demanding documents in the middle of the night. At some point, I got some support from a Facebook developer, but he only replied to one email, and then ignored my follow-up. The whole thing was run like a marketing campaign, and they tended to focus on getting us to go along, rather than engaging us as a partner and trying to help us succeed. I have no hard feelings about this, because the money let us write a lot of code and practice at starting up, but we might still be focused on Facebook if we had more technical and marketing help. Meeting Zuck would have been a good sign too.
Even with YC to look at for guidance, they didn't understand what made YC tick - uniting a community of the best and brightest, under the tutelage of a a great entrepreneur. If you have ever been down to YC HQ (I have once), you would know what I mean. One of the primary reasons we haven't worked on the Facebook aspects of our company for a while now is because of the experience we had as an fbFund company. Also, at the time, the API was extremely immature, as were the docs. I remember just giving up on sending out notifications many moons ago, and I never looked back. I also remember getting tripped up because I tried to follow the rules and not store user names to show in comments, but everyone else was breaking the ToS and Facebook turned a totally blind eye.
I knew some other fbFund companies from later rounds (we were round 1 I think), who got support instead of money, and they seemed to think it was worthwhile. But, I don't know that any of them has a successful business today, so they were still missing something key.
I should apologize, because Facebook helped us out, and this is a bit critical, but I think it's honest and worth posting. The program certainly had good intentions and good financing, but it was poorly conceived. Of course, they know all of this, and Facebook has a reputation for measurement and changing quickly, so that's probably why they are taking these steps to fix things now. They certainly picked the right partner in YC.
Throwing money at the problem could have worked in this situation: they could have just acquired an incubator :)
However, it does not mean that the startups will be skewed towards facebook (i.e. are glorified facebook apps). Rather, I see them as using facebook the same way as companies use blogs, messaging, message boards, maybe even a billing system (if facebook introduces one).
If the integration is tight and this happens on a large scale, however, it does mean that the balance is slightly against them being acquired by google!
I'm not sure why, but few people seem to remember that YC has (what appears to be) pretty much the exact same partnerships with Twitter[1] and JustinTV[2]. Both of these partnerships were announced, if I remember correctly, around this time last year as a part of the W09 applications. So far, I haven't seen any startups which have launched that take advantage of either partnership.
Given the seeming propensity of startups which leverage Facebook to get acquired, this could be a completely different ballgame though.
I doubt reading the Facebook RFS is what triggers someone to apply to YC.