

HitForge: Another YC clone? - omouse
http://hitforge.com/

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naval
So I'm the guy behind Hit Forge.

It's changed - that PR is obsolete (Thanks PG, for helping with the strategy
shift).

We're a straight early stage seed-investment fund. We invest in social-media
early-stage web startups, putting in between $100-$500k. We maintain
specialist resources to help with SEO and Viral Marketing. We provide free
office space to our companies, if they want them. We have a one-page no-hassle
termsheet, where we buy something that looks a lot like common stock. We don't
try to control the company. We help with future fundraising (see my blog at
<http://www.venturehacks.com>). And we decide very quickly.

PG pointed this out to me as a gap in the market for early stage web
companies, and he is absolutely right.

See you all at Y-Combinator D-Day.

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pg
We know Naval, and it's not really a YC clone. Structurally it's more like
Idealab or Obvious Inc, in that they develop ideas in house and then spin them
off if they succeed.

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omouse
Thanks for the info :)

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natrius
It's an interesting concept, but the setup takes away a lot of the incentives
that drive people to not have a life for months on end so they can succeed. If
a venture succeeds, the people who actually did it only get a fraction of the
payoff. If they don't succeed, everything's still okay since they can wait for
someone else to succeed and still see a payoff.

If everyone's waiting for another venture to succeed, they're not trying as
hard to make theirs succeed.

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pbnaidu
I am little suspicious about the website itself. It doesn't contain who's who
(funny they're asking your resume without revealing their resumes). It doesn't
contain contact details like phone number, postal address, etc. It's all up in
the air.

Seems like good old Nigerian emails scandal written all over it.

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kul
it's done by the guy who sold epinions to eBay. and the guy who is helping out
entrepreneurs with VentureHacks. and he just invested in twitter.

~~~
pbnaidu
Well its good to know that it is a legitimate website. I would prefer who's
who to be, contact details, links to their blogs, etc on the website.

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davidw
Cool: not concerned about geography - that would be ideal for me.

Dubious: I'd like to see a name or two associated with it, or a little bit
more about them. I mean, anyone can put up a web page...

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omouse
That's what concerned me. There is only one link and that is to email them an
application. No other names associated and parts of read like marketing mumbo-
jumbo.

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rustartup
Socialistic (community) approach to become capitalists (rich) - seems like a
problem here.

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kmt
It does seem like a problem: sharing the upside and the downside makes people
less determined and focused to succeed.

However who knows? The scale of the Internet business is such that things like
open source are thriving; this idea might as well have good chances to live
and grow.

Finally, people are different and have different needs, this may very well
work for some folks.

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rms
Their business model is pretty unique; it doesn't really derive much from YC.

~~~
tuukkah
To expand a bit on that: HitForge does share some aspects with YC but those
aspects aren't what made YC special. Namely, YC wasn't the first investor of
small monies in the seed stage or the first investor with technical insight.
I'd say calling something a "YC clone" is meaningful if it does what YC was
first at and the result is in large part a similar investor.

"The Hit Forge is a group of entrepreneurial engineers building mass-market
web properties." What is YC? I think most people can't answer that clearly. To
quote the home page: "Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing
in funding early stage startups." That doesn't tell us new in what kind. I
mean, incubator investors share such a description, but pg makes a point YC
isn't one. But it's enough here to point out that, unlike YC, HitForge is some
kind of a "co-operative" and if you fail your company you can still profit
from the other companies.

What kind an investor is depends on who is the owner, why they invest, and how
the ownership is implemented. The second part is what the investor does:
what's the investment product, who are the customers, and how the operations
are run. Answering these questions can take you a long way already.

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omouse
I just discovered an article about it:
<http://gigaom.com/2007/04/25/hitforge/>

