

Could the YC model have existed in the late 90's? - terpua


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pg
Yes, actually. Our model for YC was Viaweb, which was started in 1995 with
$10k plus legal work from our friend Julian.

At the time everyone gave us a hard time for starting the co in an apartment
with so little money, using open-source sw for everything, writing a web-based
app, and running the co ourselves instead of getting an MBA as the CEO. At the
time we were considered a broken startup. Now we would be called a "Web 2.0"
startup.

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terpua
Did you consider launching YC earlier (say in 2000)?

~~~
pg
It would have worked then, but I wasn't thinking about such problems then. I
only got into YC by accident, really.

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rms
Yes, but they would have needed to invest more money to cover software and
servers. Open source has come a long way since then.

~~~
staunch
Doesn't Viaweb doing it in 1995 kind of disprove that statement? I also know
that's not true because I was working on web-based products since then using a
totally open source setup.

