I propose "venture catapult" as a generic term for what YC does.
startup trebuchet
startup blowdart
A few puffs of air in the right direction?
A New Venture Animal
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Re: A New Venture Animal
#12I propose "venture catapult" as a generic term for what YC does.
That is a great name, but alas there is already a venturecatapult.com.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#13The shortest description of Y Combinator I can think of is a "Venture Expediter"
I don't think YC's goal is to get startups closer to VC, or even to expedite their journey anywhere. The point is, YC is really smart money in real small amounts. If you need more money or don't need so much smarts behind it, you go elsewhere on the funding spectrum.
Our goal is definitely to get startups that could benefit from VC closer to it. 9 of 59 startups prior to this winter have raised money from VC funds so far.
More generally our goal is to get startups closer to later stage investors, whether angels or VCs. Pretty near 100% of startups are looking for at least some additional investment.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#14Very early stage startups are insanely risky. I hear this almost as much as the "90% of startups fail" piece of wisdom, and I was a little surprised to see it in a PG essay. I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, just that I don't totally understand it. Risk is "the possibility of suffering harm or loss; danger." So what's risky about a startup? If you are paying for it yourself, maxing out credit cards, etc, then th…
I simply mean there is a high risk of failure.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#15Re: A New Venture Animal
#16Very early stage startups are insanely risky. I hear this almost as much as the "90% of startups fail" piece of wisdom, and I was a little surprised to see it in a PG essay. I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, just that I don't totally understand it. Risk is "the possibility of suffering harm or loss; danger." So what's risky about a startup? If you are paying for it yourself, maxing out credit cards, etc, then th…
The risk is that if your startup fails, you've traded what probably would have been a great salary at a larger company, so essentially you gave up that guaranteed income for the more risky startup.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#17It seems like maybe traditional incubators are closer than VCs to competing in the same niche as YC. Is there any reason why it would be misleading to look at YC as an innovation in startup incubation -- namely to move the model a little bit closer to VC in terms of the independence of the founders?
Re: A New Venture Animal
#18It seems like maybe traditional incubators are closer than VCs to competing in the same niche as YC. Is there any reason why it would be misleading to look at YC as an innovation in startup incubation -- namely to move the model a little bit closer to VC in terms of the independence of the founders?
I didn't consider old-style incubators because as far as I know there aren't any left. At least, I can't think of any startups that came out of one.
Re: A New Venture Animal
#19Re: A New Venture Animal
#20pg:
But all it would have taken in the beginning would have been for two Google employees to focus on the wrong things for six months, and the company could have died.
Actually, it's even more interesting than that. Prior to AdWords (and, more importantly, the acquisition of Applied Semantics that gave them AdSense), Google did not have a real source of revenue. At all. Google Appliances were cute but negligible.
After AdWords and AdSense, they began to replace magazines, the yellow pages, and 411.
It is difficult to underestimate how important Ad(Words|Sense) has been to Google's success. And it was the idea of an intern.