Startup School is going global
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Thanks, YC. That is so unselfish.
Conferences in this day and age are strange beasts. The value of going to listen to someone is, IMO, lower relative to the past because of videos, and, even better, transcripts and notetakers who summarize and eliminate all the blah blah blah. The value of talking to people in person though, is still pretty high, as well as serendipitous meetings and discussions. I'd love to see people experiment with different formats that involve less of the former and maximize the latter.
I hope they have India on their radar! It would be awesome for the Indian Startup scene to hear all those great speakers live!
1. The infrastructure: India doesn't have the tech infrastructure. Take the 3 major e-commerce requirements for example: internet access, online payment and delivery. Even the basic internet infrastructure in India sucks. Most people access the internet over their phones because getting home internet is still a pricey affair for most people. A pretty small number of people have access to credit cards and for those who do, processing payment online is a huge pain. The postal infrastructure is also pretty bad. India post is flaky and other courier companies are pretty bad or expensive or both.
2. Government interference: Indian government is inconsistent, heavy-handed and has very little interest in improving the tech sector. Most state governments are downright hostile.
3. Lack of exit opportunities: Indian tech sector lacks big players who can provide the entrepreneurs and investors meaningful exits. The culture of acquisitions as a meaningful way to get market advantage is not there. Your only hope is sell to a American or a European company looking to gain a foothold in the region (rare) or IPO (even rarer).
4. Corruption and general apathy: To get anything meaningful done in India is a struggle. From getting setup as a company to getting a good internet connection. You have to fight corruption and apathy of the organizations (both public and private) you are dealing with.
5. Labor laws: Labor laws in India are a joke. They are a relic of the socialist times and are heavily biased on the side of the employees. Setting up any type of manufacturing or operations in India is a legal nightmare. If that's not enough, the trade unions operate as a mafia and its downright dangerous to deal with them.
There is a lot of opportunity in India too but until we overcome the problems that entrepreneurs and investors face, Indian tech startup scene would never take off.
We have to start somewhere.
Also, London is not really a tech center anyways. Poor choice.
A lot of tech companies have made London their base, including some prominent YC companies. London is so big that it's many things to many people so if you think it's 'not really a tech center', please elaborate why.
And while London isn't a tech center on the level of US cities, it still is one.
Is there a sensible price comparison website that compares costs of cities for things like eating out; drinks; renting apartments; hotel rooms; public transport; etc etc.
Seeing as it's a 1 day event I don't think this is too big of a problem. If cost is an important factor in your decision to come (it would be for me) I'd suggest getting an early flight to London, attending the event, and flying home.
(Someone please correct me if this is wrong.)
UK is not in the Schengen, that's true, but IMO compared to all the hassle of airport security, it's a joke, at least for EU nationals (if you're not from the EU, you'll have to pass the border coming to Berlin as well).
Berlin blows London away from a cost perspective (YC is ~rich, so the only relevant cost is hotel/etc for attendees who are non-local), and land-travel for a lot of people, but London probably has more local founders than Berlin, especially who know of and would be interested in YC/SS.
I wonder how YC could do a "Startup School Asia" -- in general, for a larger percentage of Asian founders, travel between countries in Asia is difficult, compared to European founders (where IMO you could have SS in virtually any major city and be no worse than 50% as good as any other in terms of access; London is great but expensive, Berlin would be my pick.)
Singapore is probably the easiest and best choice for Asia, but there are strong arguments for HK/SZ, Beijing, Shanghai, one of ~10 cities in India, etc.
We have some awesome YC alum in London (and the YC community there is growing), and we're excited that they'll be joining us in July. We'd love to do something in Berlin as well.
A "how to turn your project into a company? should you, and why?" talk by YC (ideally, with European YC company founders, ideally in the product spaces most interesting to CCC hackers) would be awesome. The downside is it's 27-30 DEC in Hamburg.
However, looking at the current list of YC partners [2], I don't see many that might have ties to Europe, such that they'd be visiting much (never mind the imposition of giving up family/holiday time to give a 'work' talk).
Here in Vienna, we'll have an event with quite a few YC alumni on May 29: http://foundertalks.org
We do not have the means yet to make it free, however. We basically started this a few weeks ago, because we felt that something like startup school is missing in Central Europe. I guess you must have felt the same :-)
EDIT:
P.S.: After our event, I'd be happy to give you some feedback regarding what kind of questions/interestes/etc. European founders voice in such a setting. It's an awesome experiment, I'm really looking forward to it.
There's a great startup community here in London and I reckon that plenty of people will be willing to help make things a little bit cheaper by letting SUS attendees crash on their sofa.
I've dropped Sam an email to see if YC's interested.
Not being a fan of rah rah one day type seminars [1] I'd like to know the percentage of people who attend these types of 1 day events and actually go away with something tangible that allows them to create something as opposed to just feeling good or pumped up for a short period.
Separately, the act of actually traveling somewhere to attend is a bit different [2] than not traveling or not being able to (for reasons other than money). I wonder how that will change the benefits of the material presented.
[1] Forgetting the quality level, which I'm sure is high, it reminds me of real estate or investment seminars that go from town to town. (Of course those also have another ulterior purpose (to sell books or dvd's)).
Edit [2] I mean the level of commitment would seem to be higher for someone who actually decides to make a journey and attend to better their future vs. someone who doesn't (not that people who attend locally wouldn't travel of course..)
a) being inspired [by the right kind of founders, not get-rich-quick schemes] and pumped up. It could mean the difference between launching your startup and staying in your comfy day job
b) random encounters of other people who are more like you than most people you meet everyday. That also has tremendous value. But you'll never know if you never show up.
It is clear that I would be able to see world class speakers - but I can also do that online as I did last year when I watched a large portion of the talks posted. So is it also a networking event (obviously all these are that to some degree)?
I guess I am just trying to figure out if it is worth taking a day away from my startup, and spend money to get up to NYC to go (assuming I even got in). Can anyone with experience having gone to one of these give some insight? Thanks.
Otherwise, if you've seen the videos of previous years, you'll get exactly the same (which is quite good), however I am disappointed in the lack of slides to go with the presenter video recordings.
So if you don't have an in for the pre-event, there's not a whole lot to be gained by a physical presence.
YC owns both startupschool.com and startupschool.org but you have the .com redirecting to the .org
While .org can be (and often is used) for anything it is typically associated with organizations and more specifically non-profits [1]. So I'm curious why you don't simply have this info under the .com since obviously the overwhelming majority of your involvement is on a for profit basis (the companies you fund are almost always for profit) and the school, while free, is really a marketing feeder for YC which is for profit.
[1] Source: Me, I've been doing this "domain thing" since the mid 90's.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-entrepreneur/access-to-50000-inves...
What's the deal for technically minded founders that aren't devs/designers?
That's annoying.
At times, it appears that some people in England use the language so well it's almost as if they had invented it. But then they mess up their success with some outrageous errors in spelling!
Obviously the idea is to attract European and Middle East attendance in the London event and I think it is a good choice. Pretty much any airport in Europe flies to London and there are plenty of low cost flights (Ryanair, Wizzair, Vueling, Norwegian, Easyjet, etc) as opposed to e.g. Berlin.
That's a lot of air traffic just for warm beer! But, where do people in London live? I mean with all the Russian and Mideast money buying up all the properties, a little one room condo goes for, what, $20 million?
And, England is a huge step down from where it was when Di was alive.
I applaud the concept of adding diversity to the pool (even-gasp! people with accents--) but I have a sneaking suspicion this is really about finding cheaper labor for the us based companies in the end. What investors are really going to put money into companies in countries in Africa and Asia where property rights, IP, and other laws don't protect companies as well as the US? What about places that demand even more corporate taxes? Color me skeptical.
Now let's remind ourselves that >50% of the US population, specifically women and people of color, have been systematically excluded from the US based system.
I'm not saying that the USA is Best, by any means. A lot of people from outside the US work harder, longer and smarter. I welcome them to our community.
But the facts remain that the USA is where this phenomenon was originated, born of a complex brew of culture, investment, corporate freedom, property rights, and so on. Many have tried and most have failed to recreate this.
I predict this will be more of the same: white male and asian/southeast asian programmers. The idea that YC would choose african founders in africa after systematically excluding african founders in the US just seems impossible to imagine. If A US based African entrepreneur is scary, what's it going to be like when they go to Nairobi? The corruption in those countries is rampant. it's not as easy as it sounds.
Again, don't misinterpret my comments as xenophobia or American exceptionalism. They aren't. I'm observing significant challenges. That doesn't mean no one should try, but we all shouldn't applaud this until we actually see it happening outside of predominantly white, western countries.
is this true? I was unaware of this.
Until YC admits that the possibility of bias exists (I am charitably suggesting it's totally unconscious by the way)it will never be able to correct this problem. The longer the partners try to shout "there isn't a problem," the longer it will persist. I'm much nicer about this than other people, but it doesn't make me any less concerned. And I'm happy to discuss with you my experiences in any forum, public or private and to listen as well as talk. I'm not an anonymous troll, as you know.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04...
Every time I've pitched anything technical to men, you can see their eyes glaze over the minute I start getting into any detail. It's not that they don't understand, it's that they assume I _don't_ really know what I'm talking about, and the value of my speech is zero.
I agree that these reactions aren't necessarily intentional, but they do happen, and until there is an acceptance that it does happen, technically-minded women will continue to be discouraged from launching technical startups.
As a founder I don't have a lot of time to waste on stuff that yields no results, so I just come here for fun, when time permits. But there's a reason I'd never, ever apply to Y Combinator, and many women and minorities feel the same way. We'll just let the free market sort it out. Plenty of investors realize the arbitrage open to them.
Source: United States Census Bureau - http://www.census.gov/popclock/
By those estimates, the United States accounts for less than 4.44% of the world's population. Or, to put it another way, more than 95% of the world's population is outside the US.
So, unless you believe that there is something special about people in the United States that makes them better founders than people from other countries, it's not a massive stretch of the imagination to conclude that there are 19x as many good founders outside the US as there are inside it.
See also PG's comment on founders with strong accents.
Founders, on the other hand, are from all over the world. They come to the United States to build their businesses. Some will return to their home markets. We want to make both of those things happen a lot more. It really is all aligned.