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YC Fellowship

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC Fellowship

#221

Post by sama »

lmb wrote: post #171
pilingual wrote: post #22

This is exactly why Y Combinator is the best. This is what leadership is (and what those other accelerators do, is follow the lead). > but as always we’ll consider solo founders too. Please be extremely open minded about solo founders. I feel that is one consideration that hasn't been adapted with the changing tech landscape.

I think you're setting yourself up for a world of hurt here. Starting a company is really hard, and there is very little downside to being in a team. VCs agree on this, and will show the same attitude towards solo founders as YC does. The real question is why you're even contemplating being a solo founder. Discounting you actually wanting to be solo (that's a whole different kettle of fish) the reason is probably bec…

We may try something in a future iteration to help people meet cofounders. In the mean time, working a large tech company is a good strategy.

Re: YC Fellowship

#222

Post by zy1t »

mattkrisiloff wrote: post #215
zy1t wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Kat, thanks for taking questions. I noticed you said the main aim of the program is to build a prototype or acquire a first customer. Our company is still working on our prototype, but we just got our first 3 paying beta customers last week. Is that a bit too late stage?

Probably not -- that still sounds pretty early. Apply!

Should have specified we're B2B. But that's great to hear. Thanks.

Re: YC Fellowship

#223

Post by bengali3 »

michaelchisari wrote: post #208
adventured wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effort involved in means testing, including verification, would be extremely taxing for an organization the size of YC and doubly so in relation to the size of the money involved. I have to suspect they never seriously considered it because it'd be so impractical, and there would be inevitable abuse (each layer of complexity makes such things worse, for YC simplicity has always been integral).

Especially considering $12k x20 is $240k, which is only two normal YC recipients. If only one of these 20 grant recipients go on to build a solid company, then this project has been a success, I'd say.

agreed, don't forget the other salaries and expenses involved with running the class twice a year. Possibly another 100k per company cost to YC.

Re: YC Fellowship

#224

Post by saveetree »

fivedogit wrote: post #19

This is great. It's the natural evolution of going earlier and earlier into lifecycle of a startup (or even idea). As a next move, I'd like to see them go "pre-team" and put talented individuals with complimentary skill sets together behind a single idea.

If you are interested in 'pre-team' you should check out EF in London (joinef.com). They are all about helping technical co-founders meet. Some of the companies have raised amongst the largest seed rounds in Europe.

Full disclosure: I have worked with them

Re: YC Fellowship

#225

Post by nostrademons »

grey-area wrote: post #210
zkhalique wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a dominant founder is different than being an only founder. But what's common to all these companies is that one founder was really dominant and had the vision. In fact, out of the top companies, it's safe to say that very large proportion have a dominant founder, who wound up having much more equity than the other founder. I don't understand why there are so many downvotes on something that is, indeed, a veri…

dominant founder is highly subjective and simply wrong in some of those cases, as pointed out above. Even if you want to argue there was a 'dominant' founder (whatever that means), your examples don't make sense: Apple would not exist without Steve Wozniak Google started as a partnership Allen sold qdos to IBM which established Microsoft

I'd argue that Apple had a dominant founder in the early days, but it was Steve Wozniak, not Steve Jobs. He'd basically built the Apple I in its entirety and shown it off at Homebrew before Steve Jobs said "Let's build a company around this and sell it."

Also, Larry was always the primary driver behind Google; it started out as his thesis project, PageRank is named for him, and he'd already started crawling the web by the time Sergey joined. Sergey's initial startup idea was to order pizza via fax machine. Google obviously wouldn't exist without both of them, and Larry was smart enough to share equity and credit equally, but a startup at the YC fellowship stage is much more likely to look like Larry's thesis project than Google when it took VC.

Re: YC Fellowship

#227

Post by cperciva »

targeted at teams that are very, very early.

How about a version of this for companies which have been around for a while?

Seriously, it doesn't sound like Tarsnap would fit into this program at all, but I'd love to be able to participate in something "lighter-weight" than YC -- something which, like the YC Fellowship, would allow me access to advice and contacts without taking funding or relocating.

Of course, I'm guessing the YC Fellowship are largely a recruiting tool for YC ($12k is a small price to pay for the opportunity to extensively vet candidates prior to offering them a YC investment), so it wouldn't make sense for YC to invite me into that particular structure; but I'm not looking for money and I'd like to think that I could help YC by being "part of the family" and being someone companies could be pointed at to help with questions relating to my areas of expertise.

Re: YC Fellowship

#228

Post by kapitalx »

TheMakeA wrote: post #4

This seems really close to what YC started as. Why the spinoff?

I think as the popularity and # of applications of YC has increase over the years, YC has naturally leaned towards startups who were further along. This way they can make that shift official without losing the original vision of YC.

Re: YC Fellowship

#229

Post by shaaaaawn »

Love to see YC branching out to those unable to migrate to SF immediately. As someone that's been through other incubators and been extremely underwlemed by my experiences; this is a fantastic idea. I know YC is open to all types of ideas and companies, but there is obviously a concentration on software/hardware related ideas. I'm curious if YC has funded any non-hardware/software startups? Any examples?

Re: YC Fellowship

#230

Post by dean »

arihant wrote: post #167

I'm not sure why it is repeated over and over that 12k is small sum of money. 12k can easily pay off 2-3 months rent, server costs, marketing stuff, even a few flights. That's mental peace for 12 weeks to build something with 100% focus. That's an extremely high value priviledge. This should make sense for a lot of startups.

3k a month for a two-founder team. A single guy with no other obligations living in a cheap place might be able to pull it off. Married with kids -- forget it.
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