Introducing Arc: Outliers Wanted | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Arc: Outliers Wanted

sequoiacap.com

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These are the nine questions on the application [0]:

1. What is your company name?

2. Where is your product in its lifecycle?

3. What does your company do in one sentence?

4. What problem are you trying to solve?

5. Why does the old way no longer work?

6. Whose life will your company change?

7. Why now?

8. Why you?

9. If everything goes right, what does the future look like in 5-10 years with your company’s product?

[0]: https://arc.sequoiacap.com/app

I love the "in one sentence", as it presumably is meant to shunt marketing-babble and see if the applicants can get to a coherent point.

Applied. Why not. Got rejected 5 times by YC, still raised money. Based in London. Maybe it'll be interesting. Will report back if it happens.

An aside: This site has a horizontal scroll bar (which I assume is unwanted) in Firefox and Chrome on Windows. Might want to have your frontend person take a peak at the CSS.

FYI

> If you are a seed-stage founder building a company headquartered in Europe, we want to hear from you.

> A US cohort will launch later this year.

What happens to a startup that goes through Arc if Sequoia doesn't give them a term sheet for the next round? That seems like a really bad signally problem. Why would an investor back an Arc company knowing that Sequoia is picking the top companies for themselves?

I'm curious what the terms for the $1m are, though I suspect it's similar to YC.

I feel like if it was supposed to be at a specific valuation it would be listed. My guess is that it's a commitment to invest a million but the amount of equity might vary over a range as large as from X% to 2X%

Meh. Falling out of love with VC so maybe I'm not the target here. How does this provide value over the traditional arrangement?

It's really hard raising a million dollars outside Silicon Valley and this first cohort is aimed at European based startups only. European investors are notorious for being risk-averse and their investment terms are laughable at best. ( I know of some European University run incubators which offer less than $25,000 USD in exchange for 5% equity) American VC's on the other hand won't bother talking to foreign founders unless they incorporate as a C-corp in Delaware.

While you're right about European investors being risk averse, it's not generally true that American VCs won't talk to European founders. I'm an early employee at an early stage company (1,5 years old), incorporated in The Netherlands and we have raised a $2M pre-seed round and recently a $10M seed round both led by American VCs.

I shouldn't have lumped all American VC's together. This is clearly changing and this Arc initiative is proof of that.

What is an "outlier" here?

This is the topic of the first week https://arc.sequoiacap.com/#main ;-)

So once you've learned what an "outlier" is, you can decide if you'll apply to take the course that teaches you.

Presumably, an "outlier" already has the necessary chronological variance capabilities.

This site could use improvement with the marketing copy. If you want outliers, be sure you're casting a wide net, not just one that catches people who are tuned to be receptive to that type of copy.

The page explains the “terms” as: “Sequoia will invest $1M in the form of equity to participating companies at the start of the program.”

I guess that’s neither the terms (I mean, that’s all?) nor are they investing “in the form of equity”. Or does my startup get $1M worth of shares? That would be novel.

Some big names there: both in companies and people. Let's see if they stick around

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