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Comment by jwilliams | Hacker News Reader

See pg's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528924

"The root of the problem is that people think seed funding is regional. They think they're starting the YC of St. Louis, or wherever. Then after they get started they realize that in fact the seed firms are all drawing on the same national applicant pool, and that the default fate of the nth seed firm is not to be the YC of St. Louis, as they'd expected, but to be the YC of the nth quality bucket."

Not that I know anything about this venture yet, but the regional-centric commentary immediately made me think of this comment.

Edit: Seems Michael Arrington concurs: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/25/atlanta-gets-its-own-y-...

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In what may be heresy here on HN I am going to partially disagree with PG. Regional YCs may indeed be of the nth quality bucket, but that does not necessarily doom them to failure anymore then not attending Stanford or MIT dooms a hacker to failure.

The proof as they say is in the pudding. TechStars seems to be doing just fine so far. Let's see what Shotput's births before we call their babies ugly.

YC ignores a lot of good ideas because it's really focused on BIG ideas. YC wants to build Paypal, not 37signals. They lean toward ambitious infrastructure ideas which also have a higher failure rate. But there is a huge number of great ideas with lower risk/reward ratios that will still make stellar companies. I say bring it on... it's a great time to be in the HTML writing business. :)

We'd be happy to have funded 37 Signals. We funded Wufoo, which is very much like 37 Signals, and we'd be delighted to fund more companies like that.

But Wufoo still deals with a Big Idea: namely, something that's creating a large infrastructure on the Internet. 37signals is a private, internal service: they make things that appeal to closed niches. On the other hand, Wufoo is something that's more public, in a sense.

Maybe it's just a matter of what YC companies get named more than others, but the ones that immediately come to mind are big-problem companies. Reddit for finding news online. Disqus for comments. Scribd for document indexing. Wufoo for forms. There aren't as many niche sites (versus something like TechStars, which had a cooking site) - or am I just missing lots of niche YC sites?

even the smallest niche can be huge.

Absolutely. Furthermore, niche users tend to be more fanatic about the sites they use if they're done well.

Many of us Atlantans have a lot of respect for the people involved in Shotput. As some others here have said, I'll wait to judge until the first class of Shotput companies graduates.

I think Shotput is happy to draw entrepreneurs from all over the US, and this is good for our region.

In general, Shotput is important because there is almost 'no such thing' as seed funding in the southeast. A typical comment at an entrepreneur's round table here would be, "get to $1 million revenue, then someone will fund you." So this is important for the growing startup ecosystem in our region.

I wouldn't venture to disagree - comment was mostly based on the spin of the article.

It is disappointing to see Michael Arrington in the comments dumping on the article and the program.

Why is the assumption that these funds get the talent based on the order in which they were launched?

Its not that so much as valley elitism - the idea that if you aren't there, then you're not serious and are unlikely to succeed.

But I agree with you. Also, don't investors back companies they understand? Doesn't this mean a variety of seed-stage programs will back different startups? Isn't this a good thing?

Considering the philosophy behind YCombinator, I really don't get all the hating on the clones that happens here every time one comes up.

Why you reading this as hate? It's a very similar model to YC - why wouldn't there be references and comparison?

I don't mean to say that your comment was particularly spiteful, but in every thread on a YC clone, and in the Techcrunch discussion in particular, there is much valley-hating. It gets old.

They only do by default. If one were significantly different, it could do better or worse than that, depending. So far none has though.

Here's an idea for being different:

-$5K to $10K goes much further in many other countries than it does in the valley and most entrepreneurs there don't have the option of moving to the valley because of visa restrictions. Potential investors there should consider this. This is one advantage some locations have over the valley.

Speaking from personal experience, the challenge for doing this in developing nations is that the hard part is being connected enough to a market to know if something can be built in three months that people will pay for. If you're in a developing nation intending to sell to America, you're probably not as close to your users as you need to be because products tend to change rapidly in the early stages of a startup and you need to be interacting directly with potential users and learning from them.

But the money does go 10 times as far, so the idea could have potential. $25K can roll a startup for a year or more on the cheap in Bangalore.

Good point. On the other hand countries like India and China are already at a point where there are successful startups serving local customers.

Also, a startup that's doing something like, say Reddit, may not need to be physically close to users to be successful.

Serving local customers is key, but even if you're Reddit, I think that ideally you are immersed in a community of people doing similar things. You need that feedback and energy.

reminds me of microloans. It's a growing trend in Africa. I believe there are websites that connect you to farmers in Africa and you actually make good ROI.

The difference is that I am talking about funding in amounts larger than what microloan sites like Kiva allow (Kiva's top loan amount is ~2K) but more importantly, provide mentoring like YC does. Therefore, it has to be done by experienced entrepreneurs who guide these new entrepreneurs closely.

Love this idea. There are already incubators and seed funds doing this in India and China. And I suspect the trend will accelerate.

There may be truth to this, however, I think the roles of the seed funding companies remains to be seen. The Philly venture for example seems to be different in that it pairs roles to create companies. I don't think this makes sense for our team, but the Philly venture may be right for someone.

It would be hugely beneficial to have a website where people sign up and indicate when and where they've applied (after the fact), maybe even indicate their beta site if it is available. Not only would we be able to see the breadth of applicants but also the history and results.

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