This is awesome. There is, no doubt, going to be a lot of haters complaining about how hmexx is taking advantage of techies/the terms are unfair/don't do it/etc.
But the reality is he/she is putting money where his/her mouth is, and making it happen. To come up with something completely new like this takes guts, and even moreso to follow through. The fact that ~300 proposals were submitted is evidence that demand exists for such a program.
Also interesting is the fact that 4 out of the 5 participants selected are located outside of the United States. We'll see if geographic distance becomes an issue. I've long thought YC is missing out on a lot of talented developers who may not have the freedom to drop everything and move to Mountain View.
Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the results!
Kickstarter's terms of use explicitly say you can't Kickstart a Kickstarter competitor on Kickstarter. I wonder if YC would accelerate another accelerator?
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of
startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We're one;
TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?
It sounds like some preposterous way to break the speed of light; we'll just accelerate the accelerator, and it's turtles all the way down.
On the one hand, it reduces YC's risk even further, by giving them a miniscule stake in a wide range of companies. But I don't think they would be content with helping the meta-accelerator; they'd want to be hands-on with every node on the tree. That's a lot of time investment with little capital investment, which is not really their bag.
The proposition generally seems less like an accelerator, and more like a small-scale VC fund. Less intensive, less structured, just a way to invest money in startups.
It probably wouldn't be in their interest to accelerate a web startup accelerator. Maybe an accelerator for some other field. It would be interesting to watch this artificial organism reproduce.
whilst I'm usually loathe to see comments such as this, I was interested in reading this and must say:
The post is completely unreadable on opera mobile, whether I send through desktop or mobile UA, and on default 2.3 browser. Guess I'll give it a read at work tomorrow.
I'm not sure it's secrecy: it's investment on a smaller level and investing in smaller teams (4 out of the 5 are solo-founder).
Maybe that nobody got the time to do something "more professional" at the moment. What counts at the moment is that these solo founder got some recognition and a little boost thanks to the money.
That part seems to be doing fine. We'll see what comes next.
I'm not sure what you're talking about; what I mean is we don't know who hmexx or any of the founders is, not even a first name, location, or anything.
I'm not that paranoid, but if this was a completely imaginary enterprise, we wouldn't be able to tell.
But the reality is he/she is putting money where his/her mouth is, and making it happen. To come up with something completely new like this takes guts, and even moreso to follow through. The fact that ~300 proposals were submitted is evidence that demand exists for such a program.
Also interesting is the fact that 4 out of the 5 participants selected are located outside of the United States. We'll see if geographic distance becomes an issue. I've long thought YC is missing out on a lot of talented developers who may not have the freedom to drop everything and move to Mountain View.
Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the results!