Yet Another YCombinator Clone | Hacker News Reader

Yet Another YCombinator Clone

startupmeme.com

Sounds like good news to me. YC can't pick every good team, and can't be the right fit for every good team. Highland seems to be specifically seeking life sciences and what looks like some more techie (non-software) ideas.

They seem to have their dates confused in the article, though. How can this program have "just launched" if the application due date was 11 days ago?

Not only can't YC pick every good team, but they have a bias towards certain types of start-ups: fairly simple websites (reddit, octopart, pollground, etc.).

CRV loans up to $250k which opens up a wider range of start-up possibilities. E.g. if you are working on something involving hardware; remember Apple really got moving with a $250k line of credit backed by Mike Markkula (consumer price index says $250k in 1977 is about $855k in 2006 dollars).

Actually we'll take any promising startup, and some of the most promising we've funded weren't "simple websites." Particularly Loopt, Xobni, Textpayme and an as-yet unlaunched database startup.

Though frankly, Octopart isn't exactly a "simple website" either. It's a search engine, and in some ways more complicated than Google. Is Google a "simple website?" (If so, bring 'em on.)

Running a search on a few catalogs is orders of magnitude less complex than searching the entire web. I don't know what tricks they may have up their sleeves, but it looks like a normal keyword search.

For example, use the suggested "red led" search and compare octopart to newark. With newark you select criteria that apply to the part; with octopart you "keep quoting" "keywords" "to:narrow" "it down" and you can't select a range -- like a range of voltage, for example. I'm not sure if you can even "or" a few keywords together to get a range.

There's nothing wrong with it, I'm just saying it isn't that complex. Reddit is cloneable in a weekend (remember all the "reddit in 20 lines of Lisp" posts after it switched to Python) and most likely owes its popularity to you personally; it had a good foundation because its earliest users were your readers.

Obviously it was a smart investment. I'm just saying it wasn't a hard technical problem. The barrier to getting a large (smart) audience was solved by having a PG to promote it. You're (personally) essentially a catalyst, like start-up yeast.

Ok, now respond to the first paragraph. (Reddit is harder than you think to write, but did I say anything about it in the comment you're replying to?)

Wait a minute, you aren't one of my investors, I don't have to ;)

If you re-read the OP, I said YC has a bias towards a certain type of start-up, not that it was exclusive. If you list all the YC'dlings it may hold true for the majority.

As for the exceptions you mentioned, Xobni hasn't released anything, nor has the unlaunched unnamed start-up, so I'll have to take your word for it. I don't have Boost so loopt isn't something I can even use yet. As for TextPayMe, it reminds me of the pre-web Paypal, and a natural extension of what Paypal's doing now: adding an SMS option. (Perhaps less clunky than using your phone's web browser to go to paypal.com.) However, sending and receiving text messages is not exactly rocket science and the barrier there is really in handling the money and dealing with the applicable regulations, then having a large enough network to be useful. Paypal already has the hard part done, and I can think of numerous reasons to add SMS capability in-house instead, but eBay has so much cash they might just decide to acquire you. (I'm personally impressed with TPM's gumption in dealing with what I imagine is quite a lot of red tape.)

Was implementing Reddit harder than I think? I think the original route was circuitous, fighting a buggy CMUCL and lack of web frameworks.

The consumer price index might hold true for hardware but how will you justify it for software ??

This isn't news; it was posted here several weeks ago.

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