Alternate YC Summer 2011 Class - let's do it ourselves | Hacker News Reader

Alternate YC Summer 2011 Class - let's do it ourselves

ycreject.com

113 pointsallanscu39 comments

Or, you can start showing up at cool hacker spaces like the Hacker Dojo or Noise Bridge.

Get a stack of business cards, and hang out at Hackers & Founders </shameless plug> or 106 miles and make a point of having coffee with a couple of cool new people every week.

Join one of the dozens of cool co working spaces in the area. (Avoid Plug and Play).

Spend $9 on the "Pitching hacks" ebook. Best money you'll spend as a founder.

Work on building:

   team with at least one technical founder
   workable product
   refined pitch
   gain some traction
   preferably find one or two people to be your advisors (aka social proof)

And then apply to Angel list.

You need demo day for "social proof" in front of investors and to get a press bump. Demo days aren't essential for funding any more now that Angel List has turned funding into an API.

There's an open ecosystem in place for this, and it's improving. There are still a number of places in the early stage ecosystem that really suck, however. And, that's why incubators are still able to charge 6% of your equity for fixes to that.

But, some of us are working on fixing these problems. You'll be hearing more from Hackers & Founders about this in the near future.

At Hacker Dojo, I'm running a very small in-person solo-founder's support group. Yes, it's like an A.A. meeting, but for solo-founders. Going at it alone is well, lonely, as anyone who's done it can attest. But solo founders can support each other. Email me for details.

And if you're looking for a co-founder in Silicon Valley, I recommend FoundersHookup.com. In the valley, there's an overabundance of business people with just an idea who are "just looking for an engineer". With FoundersHookup, biz folks are thoroughly screened first (and charged). Free for developers. As a technical founder myself, I do believe that if you can find the right biz cofounder, you'd may just never do another startup without the right biz cofounder first. I didn't use to think this way. (note: you could also find a technical cofounder at FH)

I've been to a lot the H&F events and other events in the Bay Area. They're great, but they do not empower the individual groups. They're good at getting speakers and creating a forum to get to know each other. With YCreject.com, I want to complement those efforts and take those organized groups to the next level. YC does a good job at putting their companies on a pedestal and tell the world to "look at us". Given this small grassroots project over the upcoming summer, I'd like to take 5 groups and place them on a similar pedestal so that investors and the press can see who they are and foam at the mouth.

Just curious, what's wrong with Plug and Play?

It's all about incentives. Plug and Play's business model is people paying for office space. So, they take anybody who comes and is willing to pay their prices for real estate, and they try to call investors in so that the people paying for office space can present to them.

Investors want to see a bunch of qualified, filtered startups. So, the incubators/accelerators that provide "good deal flow" for the investors have the best reputations with the investment community. Plug and Play doesn't provide that.

Does everybody here live in SF? are there any operations like these elsewhere?

A word of caution about the name and approach. You'll find when fundraising that branding yourself as "ycreject.com" will make it very hard to raise funding. VCs and Angels are going to think, "if YC wouldn't give them money, why should I give them a much larger amount of money?"

I don't think it's controversial to say that most angels and VCs suffer from group-think and an over-reliance on social proof. That's why finding your first investor is the hardest.

This concept will be perfect for boot-strapers, but not good for someone looking for funding. You'd be better off avoiding all relation to YC and branding yourself as some sort of unaffiliated startup co-op.

Doesn't this show determination? Paul Graham's number 1 trait in a founder?

It shows determination in the same way that showing up on a date and telling him / her that 'I'm having a lot of success in the dating world, I just got turned down for 3 dates' projects confidence. Sure, you're out there getting names and numbers and seeing what happens, and that's great! But what's the story you're telling to potential investors / spouses?

The name YCRejects can tell a lot of stories. "We had an interview, but we weren't the right fit for the program, so we're building the product / finding the market ourselves" is one story. But the name YCRejects says "We didn't get an interview, but..." and puts you [in my mind] in an awkward position where you're apologizing and making excuses for applying to something. That's not right.

If YCombinator brought this idea together [as it obviously has], why not build on that? YCombinator — Summer Batch 2.

You're a group of founders, brought together by YCombinator, working together to build awesome things. You're a skunkworks incubator. You [probably] have no funding, but you have passion for your ideas and a burning desire and determination to get this show started.

You aren't rejects. You're founders.

Determination towards the startup? Or determination towards being in a group of startups?

This may be a really great idea, but it seems like a distraction for the person running it.

While your advice makes a lot of sense, I think they can definitely get some traction with this idea.

Here is a wrinkle that I think could work. Limit it to everyone that got an interview but didn't get in.

Then, this would disqualify the author of this post because he didn't get an interview.

Yes.. then I would be DQ'd.

I'm sorry it DQ's the OP, but this idea is a winner.

It's just a name by itself for now (for SEO purposes as well). Of course I wouldn't go around to investors and say we're 2nd tier groups that PG didn't want.

Right now, I want to keep it very small. Find out what everybody wants and go from there.

Dissociated from YC could totally work!!! Also find mentors to answer questions at the dinner, and have each team do a 5 minute quick presentation regarding their progress that week. Also, don't judge people on any other criteria outside of a) launch date (to be sure you're all planning on lunching something substantial around the same time) and b) potential to become profitable soon.

I don't know, with the way things are going for YC some prominent group of angels will be pledging to invest $150K in these guys any minute.

I was in YC, and I think this is an awesome idea. You can replicate lots of the value, even if you don't have PG giving office hours. However, five isn't enough. Lots of the value from YC was to hear lots of different ideas and opinions and feedback, and you won't get that with five.

What's the downside of taking 30? You're not taking investment, not providing mentorship; there's no cost to taking more.

You're going to want to arrange stuff for you to do, right, speakers for example? So you should split the effort of getting angels to talk, between the companies who join.

Finally, no-one is going to want to give talks (very high value) to five groups, and there will definitely be no demo-day (ultra-high value) with 5 groups.

With five groups you'll gain very little (some, but little). I'd urge you to accept as many groups apply, to a limit of 30-ish at least.

You bring up good points especially with getting speakers and getting angels. I do plan to leverage the groups by having them contribute in setting up speakers and finding qualified angels.

I'm more concerned about scaling this (that's the engineer in me thinking). At least five groups is somewhat manageable especially when it comes time to finding space to meet once per week.

Book hacker dojo in MV. (Actually, that's right beside YC)

What will happen to people rejected from YC reject? Will they form a YC reject reject group?

:) Made me smile

There's no reason to not start their own group. But you have to stay laser focused.. otherwise too many cooks spoil the food.

Launch.is

You can only be rejected from YCReject if you consequently reapply to YC and get accepted.

It's rejects all the way down.

Yo dawg, I herd u like rejects,…

[Alternatively, dream-within-a-dream reference]

Good idea, but:

(!) You should invite more people. I can't figure out why you wouldn't want as many as possible

(2) You should change the name. Not only is it not good to label yourself as a "reject," there may also be people who have independent funding (I'm a contractor and make good money that way) that don't need YC money but would still be regular participants. What about "Indie YC" or something like that (perhaps related to a different math theorm)?

(3) Why do you want people to fill out the YC app again?

(4) And why does only one person (yourself) get to decide who gets in or not? There would need to be considerably more trust involved before people are just going to just let you make all the decisions. I tend to think it is better to say, "My co-founder and I will be at this place at this time every week with our laptops and free food." Once you have 3 or so committed startups you probably have traction enough to continue.

That said, I'm moving to the Bay area next month to work on solo ventures. I'm in if something is going on.

"We have to keep this group small in this first batch to make it successful."

I feel bad for anybody rejected by the rejected...

That would simply lead to this: rejectedbyycreject.com

I actually like this as a concept, though iamelgringo's advice is probably better in practice. But you could run this social group in addition to taking his advice. Good luck!

Be careful with using the name YC around here though, one of the rules of Hacker News is that you can only use "YC" if you are actually affiliated with YC.

Hmmm. Wonder if that's why my post got killed yesterday? I posted for people who weren't accepted this round to check out Startup City in Baltimore and some info and links about Baltimore neighorhoods. I'm not affiliated w/Startup City in anyway and am unsure why the post was "deaded"?

I dont think there are many downsides to letting in more people. If you want to keep the quality high, maybe crowdsource and let the YC community vote on who gets in. But 30-40 just like YC is a good idea. It also increases the odds that someone coming out of the group will actually be successful

I suspect as the person organizing you wont have time for your own startup as you will need to keep the thing organized, get speakers etc. but you may be able to get funding.

maybe a name like abiogenesis - spontaneous formation of life would be better than yc rejects

Also I suspect you will immediately be able to get press as everyone loves the underdog

i have been rejected from ycombinator multiple times over the years probably because i am a solo founder- its hard to find other guys to work with that i get on with in my local area..

my startup is yrecruit.com - someone mentioned am i ripping of ycombinator - its more a play on words

What is your local area?

YC isn't the end all and be all of your startup hopes. There's awesome accelerators like TechStars, etc. out there.

... and IO Ventures, 500 startups (whose demo day also featured on Techcrunch [1]), and many, many more[2, 4]

Also, you can take 37 Signal's advice that Outside money is plan B

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/08/the-seven-most-interesting-...

[2] http://blog.shedd.us/321987608/ From Steven Blank's list[3]

[3] http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/

[4] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569687

[5] http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Fund_Yourself.php

Nice idea! Here's something similar we tried in Brighton, UK in 2009: http://bootcycle.com

I think being in the bay area and basing out of somewhere like Hacker DoJo would have made a huge difference.

A bunch of people will push forward regardless: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2422145

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