Meet YC This Fall

I was at the Stockholm evening two (?) years ago when they visited the company I worked for then, Wheelys Café. It was certainly an interesting evening and a fun event, but I would not have travelled a day to attend.

Went to a similar event at Harvard some years ago. Was interesting but if you are a HN regular you probably get as much out of blog posts following happenings online as at the event.

YMMV if you are a better net-worker than I am.

I've gone to office hours and I thought it was very useful, although I'd imagine it would vary very widely based on who you actually end up talking to, how much experience/insight they have into your sector/product/(even better) the specific problems you're having, as well as how interested they are in what you're doing.

The people from YC (at least the few I've met) spend a crazy amount of time around startups and have a lot of insight into all kinds of random problems that startups have that they see from being so deep in the startup world, so if you can talk to one of the people from there who's in your general area, and you have specific issues that you're grappling with how to approach and how to avoid pitfalls, they might be able to add a lot of value pretty quickly based on having seen people go through similar kinds of problems.

If you just want to go to the general Q&A, already are around hackernews and are already in startup school, I'm not sure it would necessarily be worth a whole day of travel. The Q&A is necessarily pretty general, and you probably are already getting a good general footing from startup school, although I second the other guy's exception of if you're really good at networking, since there will be interesting people there.

Agreed but they also say "We’ll be adding to this list in the next couple weeks." So time will tell.

So is anything between the coasts other than Chi-town.

So is Seattle.

YC is missing out on 2 of the 3 largest US tech hubs.

I'm not sure if that is deliberate or accidental, but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.

Much as I love NYC, we can't be everywhere at the same time.

Also, we were in NYC a month or so ago for FFC and want to make sure we get to visit as many locations over time as we can.

Austin, TX as well...

See you there.

What kind of whiskey?

As much as I love Kansai, it’s prudent not to include it in this list, imho. At least not on the first go-around...

The potential scope and scale of what can happen in Tokyo, especially regarding startups, is much larger than anything Kansai can currently deliver.

Any of the creative business/economic activity that Kansai is famous for will probably find its way to Tokyo if it wants to scale to maximum potential... at least for the time being.

I have a feeling that Tokyo-level scale will be what VCs are looking for. Maybe once the Tokyo market is more established, Kansai will get a serious look, but I don’t think the VC-level Japanese startup scene is developed well enough to warrant that at this time.

That’s just my 2 cents...