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Comment by brandnewlow | Hacker News Reader

This story is really frustrating and sad to hear, but I have to say, in the three years I've been working on my startup, never once has anything good happened from paying for access to any type of person (investors or customers), using any currency (equity or cash).

We did YCombinator, which could be described as an "access" play, but apart from that, every time someone has offered us access to something in return for something else, we've always politely declined and then just gone and won the business or relationship on our own merits.

Gatekeepers suck, and doing business with gatekeepers leads startups to doing sucky things and pulls them down as well.

The minute I read him deciding to do a second accelerator so he could get access to "his vertical" I started getting a sinking feeling in my stomach.

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I agree, very often we have these average gatekeepers who imagine themselves as top level power brokers at an elite world, and those should be avoided.

But the best "gatekeepers" are not the ones that guard the gate, they are the ones who can show you where the gates even are, it's just very difficult to be able to distinguish the real valuable guys from the "hustlers" without having a lot of experiences yourself.

One of the great things about the SF/valley startup scene is how the whole gatekeeper dynamic doesn't work so much. The best VCs are all just a tweet or HN post away if you're really working on something great that they'll get excited about.

I find this viewpoint very confusing, assuming you see YC as a good experience... unless you are trying to tactfully say that YC was a bad experience and I'm just being dense.

"never once has anything good happened from paying for access" ... "We did YCombinator"

YC is the prototypical model for this.

My point was to say that while we've done things to get access, like YC, which was wonderful and a massive exception to this rule, just about every other time we've explored an access opportunity, it's been a big miss.

Sorry to harp on the pedantic point, but your parent's point still stands: you said you never once paid for access, when in fact you seem to have exactly once paid for access, which is different. The point that paying for access makes sense only if it is through YCombinator may be a good one but it's a significantly weaker one than you were originally making. Instead of an unequivocal "no", you're saying "no, but...", which is more complicated.

Unfortunately life is complicated and does not fit into sound bites as well as we'd like.

I like my comment as it is because you get the second graph and realize even great sounding rules of thumb don't apply to everything perfectly.

You are right though, my point is made considerably murkier by the fact that "paying for access" for YC was a good experience. I could counter by saying we got a whole lot more from YC than that, but I think other folks get what I was trying to say.

to be a pedant to your point, OP never actually said he "never once paid for access"... he said "never once has anything good happened from paying for access". they're semantically different.

Gah, this is an awful pointless pedantry battle but I can't help it - OP said that, and also said that YC was something good, and YC is a program wherein you pay for (in part) access.

Maybe he paid for the part that wasn't access? Did you think of that? :)

I disagree that no good can come from "paying for access."

First, we must define what is "good". After participating in DreamIt Ventures in 2012, I can say that we extracted immense value by quickly invalidating a B2B software concept. It was taking me months to get one meeting with an enterprise client on my own. With the help of DreamIt's mentors, I secured dozens of meetings in less than six weeks. We learned that the software we were building was ill-fated through those meetings. This was undoubtedly "good" for us, and we paid a mere 6% for that kind of access. In retrospect, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

But your mileage may vary. The value we obtained was highly correlated to the fact that we were pursuing a B2B venture, a sector where DreamIt's mentors could best leverage their networks. In contrast, I saw some consumer-facing companies extract less value from the accelerator program.

In sum, you have to carefully (and honestly) weigh the value that "paid access" can yield. Feelings of frustration in connection to "paid access" likely stem from a miscalculation of the cost/benefits that the access could provide.

What made you feel differently about YCombinator than everyone else? Or rather, how did YC get their foot in your door?

PG's essays. Years of participating on HN. People I knew who had done YC. The litany of neat companies with products I liked that had come out of YC. The way they had been amazingly accomodating and flexible in smart ways during our application process. Lots more.

The most frustrating part about it is I can't read it. Fix yer damn code!! ;)

Paying someone for access never ends well. Do you think the people whose access is being sold are happy with the arrangement? By definition you're entering into a sleazy area. This is why apartment brokers selling access to apartments are sleazy.

I heard stories locally here in Miami of a "consultant" who apparently had charged people to introduce them to several local key figures (in this case I was one of these people he charged people to meet). The irony (aside from anyone ever paying to talk to me), was that they were always just cold emails as I had never met the guy charging for intros in person!

Probably not in the US, but keep in mind that very often in many other places, what the person selling access is also doing is screening for the person whose access is being sold.

This sort of arrangement works pretty well if the person selling the access is actually offering a decent service to both sides. However, it needs to be mutual, pre-arranged, and with plenty of duties all around (in most of the world "duties" end up meaning "kickbacks" but the system won't work if it is limited to that).

I get that screening is a service, but it's very gray. US (& UK) companies need to act with a higher standard globally. Barclays got in trouble with some corporate matchmakers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...

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