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Comment by yholio | Hacker News Reader

I think following any of those links and comparing them to the https://www.ycombinator.com/deal/ page is a good illustration of how these programs fail. The bureaucracy for applying is daunting. The Accelerator will not fund pure startup ideas, rather technologies that have reached TRL 6-8, so not just a proof of concept demo, but a functional system in real life environment. The European Innovation Council will fund prospective technologies but only in well specified areas of interest.

Most recent unicorns will simply not thrive in this environment, it's more catered to the professional grant seekers or already successful companies, that can absorb a financing round of 500k-2.5 mil €

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Well on one hand you have public money that have to be dispensed with fairness and in an accountable manner, on the other hand you have a random guy and his friends playing bets with their spare millions of dollars.

It's clear that there has to be some bureaucracy. If anything because you might want to do some auditing in the future.

PG and friends mostly spend their own money and they're free to do as they please, follow instinct or whatever.

You can't do that (thank god) with public money.

Efficiency tend to be sacrificed on the altar of fairness though. Israel's Yozma initiative seems a usable compromise.

We've been funded by various research grants from EU as well asEU VC money.

Grants are bureaucracy, sure, but if you understand how you navigate it - and every entrepreneurial person shoud - then it's really free money with a bit of strings attached. But it's primarily used for seed purposes (vs. series A, B...) in new companies or as a suplement in existing companies.

EU also does investment matching (one of our VCs had half of his fund matched by the EU). Based on my experience, this is an even better model, since it derisks investmens for local VCs - the biggest problem in investing here is not the lack of funds, but insane risk aversion. It really feels like everybody is looking for stable and good performing businesses and not for investment opportunities that would be moon shots.

That's an interesting discussion to have

From the 1st link there is https://ec.europa.eu/easme/en/news/deep-tech-europe-report-k... which claims that companies that received EIC funding have attracted 5Bi in private funding (the program is new so this is apparently a couple of years, maybe more)

By comparison: Total money raised by all YC companies: >$7 billion https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-stats/

I think companies would apply for EIC later than on YC hence it might be apples to oranges but it's an interesting metric nonetheless

Well, comparing those grants to YC is a bit of apples to oranges. That being said, I don't think it's wrong for medium to large companies to apply for these grants, and the US also does offer grants.

The point is, that the grand-grand-parent proposed these programs AS a substitute for YC. Which they are not. Sure they may have other merit, but that is beside the point.

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