

A weekly assemblage of startup founders in Palo Alto - mlchild
http://whynotcombinator.com

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jyothi
This is a great initiative. But it might need way more customization and
polishing and set rules before it can help founders with problems at hand or
direction or anything that matters.

Good things where even VC meetings can't help:

1\. Founders have better on the ground idea on petty things but important in a
way and tedious to solve. eg. food in office or affordable monitors that are
great, a specific case of an employee etc

2\. Founders can relate to problems, help solve or collaborate in solving
together. eg. technical issue in infrastructure or log processing say.

3\. Boosts morale and can provide some light even after a week of bad sales or
VC meetings. Some can even make you see the truth or accept it if the
situation is truly negative

4\. Business opportunities - VCs most always connect startups to pilot with
portfolio companies and other startups. This can bring early clients and
introductions

However I see some critical issues with this model:

1\. People need many sittings to understand the product landscape, persona of
the founder or the team to provide relevant suggestions or advise - which
means either _known people have to meet_ or it needs the _same set of people
to meet again and again_

2\. Moderation can be an issue. With known friends who are founders it is easy
to converse & open up on issues - but with a random group it might become
chaotic or a silent dinner.

3\. The moment the meeting is unpredictable (not consistent week on week) in
terms of value the zeal to attend would fade over time.

4\. Given the unknown value of such a meeting you do not have a measure to
value this time against a release you planned to do or an interview or even
some mundane task at hand which has to be finished.

I am a startup founder in India. Given we lack the ecosystem even when
VC/angels are involved it is only founder-networks to bank on here. These
meet-ups have worked well only with founders who are friends/ex-colleagues.

~~~
dannowatts
i think you may be missing the rather casual, light-heartedness of what
they're doing and instead you're taking it far too serious.

good thoughts for a discussion about seriousness, but maybe not applicable for
this specifically.

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EdJiang
I completely thought this was a reference to
[http://incubatorincubator.com/](http://incubatorincubator.com/) \- one of
their joke Incubators was "YNotCombinator".

On a more serious note, how is this different to something like
[http://www.nreduce.com/](http://www.nreduce.com/) ?

~~~
jacquesc
nReduce had it's in person meetings last summer. Since then it's morphed into
more of an online collaborative community.

I'd love to see weekly dinners happen again under a different group, as they
were pretty valuable when we did them.

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sneak
It seems tacky to engage in such blatant logo use.

(I understand that parody is fair use— I don't believe in copyright anyway. I
just think that it's lame that all you did was rotate it. You're capitalizing
on a brand that you did not develop.)

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Brajeshwar
From the guys behind strikingly.com?

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five18pm
McAfee web gateway flags this site as 'Malicious site.' Something to check
there.

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kriro
The favicon is elite. Good luck.

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wes-exp
Lost me at the 10pm meeting time.

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lifeisstillgood
You get my vote simply for the domain name.

Perfect - an elevator pitch in a URL, with self-selection filter built in.

