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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Oy, another one. Its advantages compared to YC:

1) it is a collective rather than an individual initiative by members of the VC community, serial entrepreneurs, mentors, and angel investors and 2) it incorporates the challenges specific to European entrepreneurs in starting up businesses.

Number 1 is not an advantage. We're entrepreneurs, mentors, and angel investors. The only thing we're not is VCs. But including VCs in a seed funding operation is a bad idea. It means any startup that doesn't get a follow-on funding offer from those VCs will be marked as a loser to all other VCs. Techstars has the same problem.

I'm not sure what number 2 means exactly, but it is unfortunately worded. "Incorporating challenges" sounds like they mean it will be more difficult for a startup to succeed in London than in the US. That's probably not what they mean, but it's probably true.

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Paul seems to have a negtive attitude towards every one of the recent crop of YC clones. (Of course, perhaps I'm simply misjuding his tone due to insufficient use of emoticons! ;)

Is he worried they will crowd the marketplace and diminish the success rate of YC companies? Does he think they are so poorly constructed that they will harm the young people who get involved? Or is it just a spirit of competetiveness?

Judging by his essays, Paul is clearly for more startups, not less startups.

But you have to admit that, e.g. YEurope is just a cut and paste from YCombinator: from the name, to the website (same Heysan rolling stuff!), the amount they offer, the percentage they take, the application form, etc.

Seriously, who would want to be funded by guys who just copy and can't create even their own ideas and thoughts? It may explain why european startups are just copying US startup concepts to adapt them to european markets...

Since PG and company can't really scale past a pretty small number of startups, I don't really get what the problem is. The more the merrier, until the bubble bursts.

I'm not against the idea; quite the contrary, the more the better. The problem is that most of those copies of YCombinator aren't even started by hackers and they just basically copy their model while at the same time pretending they know the "european way".

In terms of knowing a thing or two about Europe, they probably do, because they are successful European businessmen (and women?).

If they aren't hackers... well, I suppose that just leaves space in the market for someone to go them one better, no?

Basically my point is: as good as the original? Probably not. Good enough, and better than nothing for some people? Probably.

Really? How much can YC scale? We ourselves aren't sure of the upper limit.

One thing I've learned from being around technology for so long is never to bet against the possibility of scaling things.

I'm not betting on anything, I just got the impression you guys were close to your limit:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29072

As far as I'm concerned, "it's all good" as they say. YC seems like a cool idea, so if you guys manage to scale it, great! If other people do something similar, that's good too from my point of view.

I'll defer to your longer involvement with technology, but YC is inherently a people operation, rather than a technology operation. I think technology scales more than people in some ways, but like I said, you guys are doing something good, so it's all icing on the cake, I guess.

I'm thinking they're going to bring on successful founders as YC partners and break YC up into teams. All the applications would go through each team, and any team that wants to accept the application is responsible for mentoring them. That will scale beautifully, because more teams lets them accept more applications which will result in even more teams.

But that's just my guess.

Before you know it, they'll be going door to door;-)

Sounds like a reasonable guess, and it might work, although it must be said that PG took something like 10 years to go from viaweb to YC, which is probably healthy in terms of gaining experience.

Oh well... should be interesting to watch in any case!

That's very true, but if the YC teams are made up of winners, it's likely that they'd be able to create winners. They'd guide applicants to do what they did.

Plus, they'd have a financial stake in the applicants. One reason the YC teams would be composed of successful startup founders is because successful founders have money to invest, and $15k is pocket change. With that kind of self-sustaining cycle, there is no upper limit! Before you know it, they'll be creating a thousand companies a year. Ten thousand! Imagine that for a moment. Sure, most of them may fail, but if just one in ten succeed with returns of more than ten times their investment then it's a net win. My god.. This might turn into a viable alternate life path for the average Joe. It's hard not to be excited.

But I shouldn't count chickens before they hatch.

Once you start behaving like a factory - suck em in and spit out the unprofitable ones - public perception will quickly swing against you. Your position is one where every few months, you have a large number of people pissed off at you for being rejected. Tread carefully, Rumpelstiltskin.

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