Y Combinator for non-techies
What do you think of creating a YCombinator-like venture to help startups that are not founded by techies or are not in the tech-related field?
Is someone with a knowledge and understanding of the tech landscape and years of experience in the industry considered a techie...even if they're not hackers? Or does Hacker=Techie?
All the prerequisites are there:
1. Loads of young people with good ideas but needing funding, advice and connections
2. $20,000 is enough to make a worthwhile full-length film nowadays (have you seen Primer? It cost $7,000.)
3. A successful yet cheap film can easily make back many, many times its production cost.
4. A single well-connected individual (the pg of film) could provide enough connections to give the films the maximum chance of being shown at festivals etc and eventually picked up for distribution. Alternatively, even the ones that weren't picked up for distribution could be marketed on DVD, and the fact that they were made as part of the "YC-of-film" program would attract at least some interest for them.
Foreseeable problems: the existing studios and unions might have a problem with it. I'm not sure exactly what they would do about it, though.
Conclusion: If I were a bored, well-connected Hollywood guy with money to throw around I'd be totally doing this right now.
Additionally, tech startups tend to have a serious valuation ramp-up and multiple investment rounds that many other industries don't. So getting in on the ground floor with $10,000 is a worthwhile investment. For a YC-like program to be successful, it has to be in a field with a similar structure.
Seriously, though, if they aren't in the tech world...they are just waiting to be overtaken by us....agriculture? could use better tech.... medicine? could use better tech.... massage therapy? we could add a muscle scanner...
Maybe a place for non-webapp-oriented tech businesses, like biotech and such, would make for a good HN spin-off...or maybe we just need more of those here...
.: no sleep until the machines and we are one ! :.
Woz was the techie. Steve Jobs wasn't. Yet Jobs, while only a co-founder, turned out to be the, uhm, core of the long-term Apple success.
(Afterthought: Is it even possible to start a business these days and hope to compete without substantially embracing some emerging technology?)
I'd say it could work for non-technical startups.