"Great, how much lemonade have you sold?"
"We have 50,000 lemons on backorder!"
One thing you're right about: we're not an incubator.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/16/why-the-first-yc-backed-bio...
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/y-combinator-and-mithril-in...
And that's not pejorative -- there's nothing wrong with that; you're not crying yourself to sleep at night.
Your whole application process reflects it: with tiny textboxes and the 10-minute interview time frame. It's perfect for saying "We're like MySpace for college students," but not at all appropriate for saying, "We use a new form of compiling search results that place ranking based on complex algorithm of reputation-based weighting."
A funny example was given by Noam Chomsky. A producer at CNN (IIRC) once told him they wouldn't feature him because "he is from Neptune and lacks concision." To which he replied something like that it was fair, because if you're saying something strikingly different, you look like you're from a different planet, and then you need to justify how you got there, and that means you have to talk a lot, so by definition you lack concision.
If these guys have spent years writing their own VM, they need a lot of time to talk about why they did that, the corner they turned and all of the complex differences their VM exhibits. A one-page application is fine if you're building Facebook for Cats but if you're doing something 'from Neptune', you can't have concision. They simply don't go together.
I suspect that a lot of that is because Drew actually went to the trouble of building a video and getting a few thousand signups before applying. Similarly, Google had significant traction at Stanford well before it became a company. While it takes years for world-changing ideas to become world-changing, it usually takes about 4 months for them to get an initial prototype out that can at least excite some users.
Now when Silicon Valley talks about innovation, it's about making it so much easier to store files on a server and metrics to gauge product/market fit. There is nothing about DropBox that changed the world. Simply and sadly nothing. But there is everything in that it's what is cited as "innovation" in 2015.
This seems narrow minded. Dropbox completely changed how I use my computer. I use it every day and it's incredibly valuable. None of the competitors I looked at offer a similarly simple experience.
It's like wheels on a suitcase. Not a large innovation, but completely changed how people travel.
Gigantic innovations are great too, but there's no need to disparage things which radically change how people use devices.
You don't actually use a mouse or web browser made by Doug Engelbart, do you? Do you get paid to program in Smalltalk? And I bet your laptop says "Apple" and not "Xerox".
It took 20-40 years for these innovations to actually "change the world". Check back in a couple decades on the status of YC companies and see what the world looks like then.
(A bit more personally - I used to think of Silicon Valley as the birthplace of the future in revolutionary terms. Then I realized that I was wrong - not about Silicon Valley, but about how innovation happens. There's no such thing as a revolutionary invention made by a lone technical genius, a priori. Instead, there are environmental changes, often years after the fact, that make the original tinkering of someone who dared to be a little different seem amazingly prescient. You can't predict what these changes will be, but you can tinker and you can capitalize on the tinkering of others.)
I made an effort to clarify there wasn't anything criminal about going from 1 to n, or with the companies that do that (such as Apple and potentially some of the YC companies). Sure, that can be part of the cycle. There's nothing wrong with "tinkering and ... capitalizing on the tinkering of others." There's a lot of money in that -- and YC is quite clear that that's what they're about. It's an accelerator for making money.
But it's not an incubator for innovation. It's not for those attempting to do something in the 0-to-1 space. But without those people, the 1-n's can't do much. Alan Kay famously asked on StackOverflow, "Has there been any new innovation since 1980?" and the answer was no.
Then we have to ask ourselves, "What happened in 1980?" Right? Where did it go wrong? I suspect that it is, at least partly, when the money exploded in a distributed way. There suddenly was a huge volume of customers asking to "get something working today, it doesn't matter how." Fast forward to today and we have -- at this moment -- hundreds of thousands of the developers, including some of our top minds, writing applications in HTML/CSS/Javascript, etc. And no one is laughing. Almost every app written today is on a huge, ludicrously stupid stack. And we smile and work hard to optimize it, without questioning the stack as a whole. Everyone is still trying to get 'something working today' because that's where the money is. At the last StrangeLoop there was only one presenter from the pre-1980's: Joe Armstrong. His talk? "We can do better" Everyone else's talk? "How to optimize or manage this part of the stack."
Doug Englebart's kids found out about his innovation from newspapers. He never talked about it. He said it was never about money or fame. Alan Kay is relatively unknown and relatively poor compared to people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who invented nothing but were better at marketing, and I don't think Alan cares. And isn't that the adult way? You give kids rewards: "Clean your room and you get a cookie." But as an adult, you just clean your room.
I think that before 1980, we got 0-to-1 revolutionary innovation because it was done for the reasons we do true science or art. It's not about childish rewards of money or fame. Artists/scientists don't do it for glory or gold. They do it because the mountain stands before them. Because they see a better world, they see something beautiful, and it pulls them forward.
There are always some ways to test concept. I've done a fair bit of indirect testing in my business, as my products take years to develop. I always found a way to test the most central aspects of them, usually in a week or two.
I don't know how you'd do it for the product these guys are trying to build, because I'm not familiar with their space. But there must be a way.
In their case there are many rapid app builders so it isn't crazy talk to enter that market. What is crazy talk is they haven't entered the market but are forming up on the beachhead (waiting for what?) and (critically) applying for YC before they have tested the market.
I'll agree you need bold commitment, but the last thing you want is to commit to a concept that doesn't have any outlooks on whether or not people want it, much less, pay for it.
WATCH his videos about hydrogen cells and why he thinks they are way too complex and not useful. He didn't start SpaceX by starting with a complex theory. He started SpaceX by looking at the basic principles of cost of production and using that as a starting point
Instead of aiming for "Making a crazy complex spaceship that will have more features than those made by NASA", he's going in the other direction, namely "cutting corners and reducing complexity to come up with a simpler, cheaper spaceship".