Comment that turned into a blog post:
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/can-ycombinator-be...
Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?
#22I'm surprised that the responses here thusfar are negative. Right now there are certainly more companies being funded by later stage VCs than YC knock-offs, so there's obviously a large enough pool of companies that can make it to that next phase. But can seed groups pick them? I'll just make up some numbers: Let's assume that the seed investment gets diluted down to 2% before an exit, and let's assume a buyout of $5…
13 x $15K is $180K; 2% of 5 Million is 100K this is 6.6X
If YC only had 1/3 exit they would earn 2.2X which is surely less than their total cost per investment
YC looks more like a heavyweight advisor or individual angel than a seed fund in terms of the size of their equity stake.
Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
One reason Y Clone-ators may fail is lack of imagination. YC was not handed their recipe from the heavens. If these clones had any creativity, they'd be modifying the recipe to see if their ideas could make it better. For example, why not a 4 month boot camp preceded by a 1 month crash course in business, presentation skills, etc. I'm not saying this is a better implementation, only that if the clones thought for the…
Even better would be a series of two week externships that would give hackers exposure to business problems.
Really? That's what college and working a regular job is for. If you're starting a company, taking two weeks off to be exposed to the corporate world would be worse than a waste of time.
Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?
#24I'm surprised that the responses here thusfar are negative. Right now there are certainly more companies being funded by later stage VCs than YC knock-offs, so there's obviously a large enough pool of companies that can make it to that next phase. But can seed groups pick them? I'll just make up some numbers: Let's assume that the seed investment gets diluted down to 2% before an exit, and let's assume a buyout of $5…
13 x $15K is $180K; 2% of 5 Million is 100K this is 6.6X If YC only had 1/3 exit they would earn 2.2X which is surely less than their total cost per investment YC looks more like a heavyweight advisor or individual angel than a seed fund in terms of the size of their equity stake.
Oops, I accidentally messed up things by a factor of two. Reworking, this means that a YC clone would need to do half as well as YC.
Re: Can The Y Combinator Idea Turn Into A Movement?
#25great comments. can disqus get these comments into the comment thread on my blog where I posted this question? i love that you are all discussing this and that there are 22 comments here. but i got 34 comments on this post on my blog. it seems that we'd all be better served if there was one thread with 56 comments.