

With Own Incubator On Hold, Facebook Befriends Y Combinator - yurisagalov
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/with-own-incubator-on-hold-facebook-befriends-y-combinator/

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andrewljohnson
It's good they are doing this. Facebook had no business running an incubator -
they didn't have the people, the experience, or insights. They just threw
money at the venture and hoped for the best. The fbFund program cash really
helped us get going early on, but the institutional support didn't work for
us, and since the program has been shuttered, I assume that sentiment was
shared. The money really is just a small part of one of these programs.

Under the fbFund incubator program, we won a $25,000 grant, and that was the
sum total of their support for us. After that, all follow-up consisted of
admins with no entrepreneurial or programming skills, demanding documents in
the middle of the night. At some point, I got some support from a Facebook
developer, but he only replied to one email, and then ignored my follow-up.
The whole thing was run like a marketing campaign, and they tended to focus on
getting us to go along, rather than engaging us as a partner and trying to
help us succeed. I have no hard feelings about this, because the money let us
write a lot of code and practice at starting up, but we might still be focused
on Facebook if we had more technical and marketing help. Meeting Zuck would
have been a good sign too.

Even with YC to look at for guidance, they didn't understand what made YC tick
- uniting a community of the best and brightest, under the tutelage of a a
great entrepreneur. If you have ever been down to YC HQ (I have once), you
would know what I mean. One of the primary reasons we haven't worked on the
Facebook aspects of our company for a while now is because of the experience
we had as an fbFund company. Also, at the time, the API was extremely
immature, as were the docs. I remember just giving up on sending out
notifications many moons ago, and I never looked back. I also remember getting
tripped up because I tried to follow the rules and not store user names to
show in comments, but everyone else was breaking the ToS and Facebook turned a
totally blind eye.

I knew some other fbFund companies from later rounds (we were round 1 I
think), who got support instead of money, and they seemed to think it was
worthwhile. But, I don't know that any of them has a successful business
today, so they were still missing something key.

I should apologize, because Facebook helped us out, and this is a bit
critical, but I think it's honest and worth posting. The program certainly had
good intentions and good financing, but it was poorly conceived. Of course,
they know all of this, and Facebook has a reputation for measurement and
changing quickly, so that's probably why they are taking these steps to fix
things now. They certainly picked the right partner in YC.

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derefr
> they didn't have the people, the experience, or insights. They just threw
> money at the venture

Throwing money at the problem _could_ have worked in this situation: they
could have just _acquired_ an incubator :)

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jacquesm
I wonder how this will affect next rounds applicants. I would expect them to
get skewed significantly to the facebook add-on category.

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mrduncan
I doubt much will change.

I'm not sure why, but few people seem to remember that YC has (what appears to
be) pretty much the exact same partnerships with Twitter[1] and JustinTV[2].
Both of these partnerships were announced, if I remember correctly, around
this time last year as a part of the W09 applications. So far, I haven't seen
any startups which have launched that take advantage of either partnership.

Given the seeming propensity of startups which leverage Facebook to get
acquired, this could be a completely different ballgame though.

1\. <http://ycombinator.com/rfs3.html>

2\. <http://ycombinator.com/rfs4.html>

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Groxx
Does this mean we'll be getting more random Facebookers here?

