

Ask YC: Will YC compete with YC? - shayan

The title might be a bit misleading so please read on.  How would YC treat a proposed idea that is in one of the following categories:<p>	1- direct competition with one of its current companies and/or products<p>	2- possible future competition of one of its current companies and/or products<p>	3- if the new proposed idea is not really in competition with any of YC's companies, but it does have some major ideas, that  another YC company could take advantage from, or add in as new feature to their system?<p>of course, if there is already competition then your idea might not be as interesting, regardless of whether the competition is a YC company or any other company.  I guess the real question is whether they review any new application without considering what they previously own and give it a fair treatment or not?
======
pg
Overlap is always a matter of degree. We deal with it by warning startups with
substantial overlap about one another, and then leaving it to them to decide
how secretive or open to be.

We try not to tell startups about the ideas of other startups working on
related things, including applicants we turn down. (Usually this isn't an
issue, because few applicants have genuinely novel ideas, but one applicant
this last batch had cooked up a trick I'd really like to tell a startup from
summer 2007 about.)

I was worried about funding competitors when we started YC, but it has turned
out not to be a problem. In most good markets there's room for many companies,
and it's unlikely that two we fund will take exactly the same route.

But even if we told everyone about everyone else's ideas, it wouldn't be as
bad as you might think. Secrecy is not as important as beginning founders
think, because (a) ideas are less valuable than they think, and (b) the most
common form of death for startups is suicide, not being killed by competitors.

~~~
brlewis
I'm curious as to how snipshot and splashup deal with their substantial
overlap.

I notice that <http://www.paulgraham.com/> has a new link for splashup, but
still says "photos edited with snipshot."

~~~
pg
Those two compete less than you might think. Snipshot is an easy tool for
ordinary people to tweak their photos; Splashup is aiming at Photoshop.

The link says the photos are edited with Snipshot because they _are_ edited
with Snipshot. All I need for my site is something simple.

~~~
brlewis
The link is there for the additional reason that you are still promoting
Snipshot. This is good news for me, because integrating Snipshot with
ourdoings.com is in my plans, and I wouldn't want them to disappear. That they
recently added a Pro version seems a good sign.

