There's a lot of nay-saying going on here, so I'm going to throw out some cautious optimism: This is somewhat non-obvious, but their copy is written against a background of other early stage investment stuff in continental europe. This sounds almost bizarre to Silicon Valley attuned ears, but funding hackers early stage doing original ideas is not common in Germany. It's encouraging to see people putting their money…
Fear of risk and years of mental training to expect big, government backed projects and funding.
Proving the old cliche once again that "Europeans just don't get it". Compare and contrast with YCombinator, or if you think that's unfair because Y is so well-known, to the other tens of incubation/early acceleration programs in the US. I don't want to be too negative, but can't they at least get their HTML design more appetizing?
By "HTML design" do you mean the graphic design? In my eyes the site has an edgy, artsy, designer-y feel to it, are you put off by that? I found it more fun and exciting than YCombinator's or Seedcamp's sites or those of any VC I've ever seen (except maybe Sequoia). Of course an established investor/incubator/funding program doesn't need to rely on site design to communicate their awesomeness, but it seems like an obvious place to start differentiating and I don't agree that HackFwd's is "unappetizing" in any way.
Proving the old cliche once again that "Europeans just don't get it". Compare and contrast with YCombinator, or if you think that's unfair because Y is so well-known, to the other tens of incubation/early acceleration programs in the US. I don't want to be too negative, but can't they at least get their HTML design more appetizing?
By "HTML design" do you mean the graphic design? In my eyes the site has an edgy, artsy, designer-y feel to it, are you put off by that? I found it more fun and exciting than YCombinator's or Seedcamp's sites or those of any VC I've ever seen (except maybe Sequoia). Of course an established investor/incubator/funding program doesn't need to rely on site design to communicate their awesomeness, but it seems like an ob…
Yes, I found the visual design to be interfering with the message (the animated logo is a poor choice, for example). You're right, it is edgy and artsy in a startup-y way. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that incubators should leave the edge to the startups they fund.
I wonder what sort of equity Y Combinator would take if they ran a similar operation in Europe. Maybe 30% is more to do with business conditions than with HackFwd's own preference.
I don't know any specifics, but on Y Combinator's page they say: "We make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%)." Which I assume means $20,000 = 10% (max of both ranges). So a 30% stake, at this stage, is worth $60,000, which is less than the salary of an average experienced programmer, so is it such a bad deal?
Yes, it is. It seems logical that 3x the funding isn't going to produce 3x the outcome, especially at this stage.
The site is just way too "IN YOUR FACE" for my liking. Because it's so "IN YOUR FACE" and "made for nerds" I almost get a feeling that the whole thing is a huge insult to every serious hacker out there. ...Especially the flow chart seems so fucking insulting to me. Yaddayaddayaa, yes, every geek likes starwars & light sabers, yes we've read the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, yes, we've seen the back to the future…
I don't like it when non-technical people talk about geeks. It doesn't feel right. The reason this community works is because PG is a geek (or hacker or whatever word you want to use) so he immediately has credibility. This Lars guy (and the others) are not. They have made money etc. (which makes me jealous), but they are not geeks. And they should not talk to us like that. It's like when your parents attempt to use…
I know this Lars guy. He's not a programmer and he never claimed he is, but when I worked with him, he was able to patch up his own shell scripts, ssh into his web server and configure them without help. Later he did the smart thing and hired people more talented with tech than he is, and wasn't shy to admit this. Your geek score may be higher than his, but I'd definitely call him a geek. One thing is true, though - the fact that English isn't his first language may make his choice of words weird from time to time.