

All accelerator programs are not the same - mikeleeorg
http://blog.jwegener.com/2011/05/23/thoughts-on-techstars-y-combinator-differences/

======
emmett
He has four points of comparison, so I want to address them below from the
perspective of someone who has done YC.

Location: I really don't see the NYC advantage. It's even MORE expensive than
SV, there are fewer angels and VCs, and the culture worships investment
banking instead of startups. I would say NYC is probably the second best place
to start a startup after SV, but it's a distant second.

Mentorship and events: This does seem to accurately describe a difference
between the two programs. In YC you'd never[1] spend an entire month (let
alone the first month) in meetings. And YC is mostly about advice from YC
rather than from a larger group of mentors. [2]

Size of the program: YC is much bigger than TechStars. Of course, YC _can_ be
bigger because it gets so many more applicants. While you may share access to
the YC partners with more startups, they commit enough time to make sure
everyone has all the access they need.

Demo Day: If you've ever been to a YC demo day, you know it's incredibly
intense. Three days of presentations to many of the top investors in the
world, packing the house. The presentations may be shorter, but it doesn't
seem to hurt anyone's ability to raise money.[3]

[1] There are probably exceptions to this, for people who somehow already have
products coming into YC, but offhand I can't think of one.

[2] Of course YC can introduce you to pretty much anyone at this point due to
the size of the network, but I don't think that's really the central point of
YC.

[3] Side note: I find the complaint that the pitches are "informal" a little
weird, since I think one of the things that makes startups so dangerous is
exactly that they are allowed to skip the formalities and cut to the chase.

~~~
mattmaroon
WRT NYC, there's probably a big advantage to the less competition for talent.
When you're recruiting out of college, NYC is probably as easy of a sell as
SF, if not easier, and you're not fighting Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for
those same people. A lot of people choose where they want to live and then
where they want to work, especially programmers since a guy with a CS degree
from MIT or CMU can get a job anywhere.

~~~
leelin
Possibly true given that startup employees tend to also not mind being Google
/ Facebook employees. However, don't discount the Wall Street / financial
industry pull. For hacker employees, median cash compensation in finance
dominates startups.

Plus, the number of hacker-friendly finance firms doing heavy recruiting seems
to be on the rise (as a first order approximation, that's any finance firm run
by mathematicians or computer scientists).

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bkrausz
This article seems deliberately targeted at putting down a lot of the
attributes of YC without being well-informed on them. Example:

    
    
       Now I've never been to a YC demo day, but it's my understanding
       that the whole event is a lot less formal and the pitches 
       are basically cookie-cutter and done in a rapid-fire manner.
    

The pitches are very much not cookie-cutter, and YC has ~4 different days
throughout the summer where we're supposed to pitch each other and investors.
PG tells us to reserve the couple of weeks before demo day to work on and
practice our pitches.

Have you read <http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html> or spoken to any YC founders?
We're usually very willing to discuss the program, and will share the good and
the bad. There are always areas where any accelerator can be improved, YC
included, but this article seems to have pointed out the differences between
the two programs and assumed that they make YC a worse program. There's more
than one way to skin a cat.

------
pg
"your first month will be spent mostly in meetings rather than intensely
focused on building your actual product. That's almost certainly not the case
with YC."

I can definitely confirm that.

~~~
jgershen
I had to reread the article to confirm that that sentence is actually in
there. I honestly can't believe that a program which focuses on launching
successful companies prioritizes "building your actual product" below meetings
and finding mentorship.

I can't remember who said it, but I read somewhere that "the goal of every
startup should be to _stop_ being a startup" (the moral was that a startup is
a fledgling business, and you should be trying to mature that business rather
than staying in the beginning stages forever). If you're more interested in
meeting people and talking about startups than you are in actually _working on
your startup_ , something is probably wrong. Not that this is a bad thing, but
you should reevaluate whether being a startup founder is right for you.

------
earbitscom
I agree with @ajju. The article claims to be unbiased but "isolationist" and
"cookie cutter" are neither objective, nor appropriate ways to describe the YC
process.

Not only have I formed amazing friendships through a very adequate amount of
time with the other YC founders in w2011, but I've slept on their couches,
gone out drinking, and leaned on them for plenty of support, as have they with
our team. What I got by being "isolated" was an even stronger bond with my own
team, which I wouldn't trade for anything.

As for cookie cutter presentations, when you're presenting 40+ companies,
investors simply cannot sit through 8 minute presos. More importantly, PG
doesn't cram you into a room with 800 people. He breaks Demo Day into several
events. It lets you mingle with nearly every single person you want to after
your pitch. It also means that, if you have one bad presentation, you didn't
mess up for the whole group. It sounds like TechStars gets through that by
having you practice a lot more, but I have to agree with PG that it's not a
good use of your time and I don't recall any of our companies having a hard
time presenting very well.

At the end of the day, TechStars sounds like an incredible opportunity. While
a comparison might be helpful in choosing which one is right for your company,
I think anybody should consider themselves lucky for getting into either
program.

------
dtran
I don't understand why YC is even mentioned in this blog post if the purpose
is to encourage people to apply to Techstars (other than the obvious: to be
linkbait). The best way to get people to apply is just to talk about your
experiences and how the program helped your company, regardless of how it
compares to other programs (Just google to find dozens of great blog posts by
founders on their YC experience, none of which trash other programs while
claiming to be unbiased).

Sure, the OP mentions that lots of YC and Techstars founders have already sung
the praises of each, but I for one still enjoy reading about each company's
unique experience, so more posts in the vein is in no way redundant. It's also
much, MUCH more exciting than all this YC vs. Techstars nonsense. Let's keep
the focus on the _startups_ rather than the _startup accelerators_.

~~~
edanm
I don't entirely agree. I think of it like source code - sending a diff is
much more efficient than sending a completely new file.

In the same way, as someone who knows a lot about YC from reading numerous
posts about it over the years, it's much easier to understand TechStars in
terms of how it's different from YC.

------
gyardley
This article is being misread by almost every commenter on this thread. The
author is - very politely to TechStars - pointing out the many good things
about Y Combinator, and some of the flaws with the TechStars model.

As currently constructed, TechStars in NYC will benefit a startup that's
already built a product and is looking for sales / marketing / fundraising
assistance more than a startup that's just beginning to build a product. The
relative performance of OnSwipe, Red Rover, and CrowdTwist in the last NYC
class serve as examples.

Obviously I don't think TechStars is completely useless for pre-product
startups, because I've got an application into TechStars for my pre-product
startup. I suspect it'll still be quite helpful. But it would be nice to have
a highly-regarded, Y Combinator-style incubator in NYC for those of us who
would sooner gnaw off our arm than move to the Bay Area. California is simply
not for everybody.

------
justin
As told by someone who hasn't gone through YC.

"TechStars' intimacy obviously gives you more attention, exposure, and access
than YC." -- how can you make this claim having not gone through YC?

~~~
sudonim
Maybe the op should have qualified those more, but the key point in that
paragraph was as 1 out of 10 rather than 1 out of 40, there's more focus on
you.

------
sudonim
I know the op and based on our conversations if he came across as being
critical of or putting down YC, that probably was not his intention. While he
was in techstars we talked about the differences and he had a very high
opinion of the way the YC program worked.

I read the article as an attempt to state the differences between the two
programs from his point of view, not as a criticism of YC. Since he's not
participating in this thread it seemed like people were jumping to the defense
of YC by attacking the article. That knee jerk is unfounded.

------
ajju
It's nice to hear about the positives of TechStars but there is an
undercurrent of YC criticism in the article ("isolationist","cookie cutter"
etc) that seems unfounded coming from someone who admits they weren't there
and it distracts the reader from the positives of TechStars.

------
tlrobinson
_"Y Combinator is an isolationist model [for lack of a better word I use
isolationist, but the negative intention of the word is not intended]"_

This like saying "you're fat... no offense".

 _"This blog post isn't going to sing the praises of TechStars"_

It's hard not to see this as exactly that. YC gets "isolationist", TS gets
"collaborative"; YC gets several sentences describing cons to their approach,
one mentioning pro; TS gets several mentioning pros, one mentioning con.

I like the idea of comparing and contrasting the different "accelerators", but
this is clearly biased towards TS and uninformed on the YC side. Of course
naturally it will be hard to find someone intimately familiar with multiple
accelerators' inner workings. Perhaps external investors or journalists.

------
jchonphoenix
Since the poster went through TechStars, it would be interesting to see
someone from YCs take on this.

~~~
drusenko
I'll give it a shot.

There are very few truly hard problems in starting a tech startup; the hardest
of those is product-market fit. Put another way, it's successfully solving a
problem that a lot of people have.

The other hard problems are hiring/growing a team to be effective at scale,
and finding distribution for your products.

Some things seem really hard but aren't: Finding a lawyer, drafting or
negotiating contracts, getting incorporated, adding full time employees to
payroll, getting health insurance for the company, getting an office,
generating financial statements, finding mentors, raising money. They're all
orders of magnitude less difficult than the above 3 hard problems.

About raising money: It's hard but it's not the hardest problem you will face.
If you have successfully solved a problem a lot of people have, you will have
proof of that (traction). A company with a great solution to a problem in a
large market with traction will not have a hard time raising money. And in
fact, YC helps you do so with Demo Day, once you have spent time focusing on
the really important stuff.

So, if you spin it as "Look at all the things TechStars does for you that YC
doesn't!", it sounds like a better deal. But if you look at it as "YC helps
you focus on your #1 problem", it sounds quite different.

~~~
bkrausz
I agree, except I would say "web startup" instead of "tech startup". Tesla is
a tech startup, and they have some damn hard engineering problems. Twitter
didn't have engineering problems until they had to scale.

~~~
drusenko
Definitely, although generally you could lump the engineering problems under
the "product-market fit".

You need to (a) think of a problem and solution, (b) create that solution, (c)
validate your solution in the marketplace, (d)iterate successfully -- not
necessarily in that order.

------
neworbit
As someone who has never done either, but has done startups, this doesn't make
Techstars sound that attractive to me. Seems to make a lot more sense to focus
on building your company, and save the schmoozing with 30 other entrepreneurs
for happy hour.

Mentorship sounds great either way, but you might want that from someone more
aligned with your market (not that it's bad to have advisors skilled in
startup growth). Saying "you're going to spend the first month in meetings
instead of building your first product" sounds like really the sort of thing
you probably left your BigCo job to avoid, no?

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ericfrenkiel
Any comparison beyond basic program structure will naturally reflect
experiential bias. From the article, even a nominal effort at objectivity is
difficult if not impossible for the author.

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zmitri
I've never been through either of them, but the stylistic differences
highlighted in the article very much so reminded me of the difference in style
between "Do More Faster: Techstars" and "Hackers and Painters." IMHO Hackers
and Painters is a bit weird and subtle at times, but overall a beautiful piece
of work that triggers inspiration from within (at least in my case). Whereas
the Techstars book is true to its name, and recounts stories of people "doing
more, faster." I could be completely wrong, but that's the kind of impression
I get from the article.

------
replicatorblog
"Most people talk about TechStars and Y Combinator and interchangeably. But
most people don't understand that the programs are radically different
accelerator models"

Yes, YC has a track record of large exits (Heroku), high profile companies
(Drop Box), and buzz/relationships with the most important investors
(Sequoia/SV Angel).

TechStars is "Different" and lacks all of those things to this point.

Granted TS is a little newer so its not an apples to apples comparison, but
does anyone seriously think the benefits are at all balanced? The press does,
but mostly because it helps them fill out a narrative, but YC and TS belong in
the same category the way a Maserati and a Schwinn both fit in the category of
wheeled transportation.

------
fedd
biased or not, the poster tried to make an explicit comparison as he sees it,
i didnt read something like that before. posts like this decrease the
obscurity.

------
MenaMena123
The success of the startups speak for themselves. I am not sure whats the
records are, but the article talks about Techstars being in a variety of
cities and meeting alot of friends and having a huge Demo day.

In all honesty I feel like YC is just straight up and too the point. They
don't need to work in an office, if you like a startup you'll go hangout
together. They don't need to hype the Demo day, they just need the right few
people in the room.

Techstars seems to have people from all over the place, which I prefer not to
have. If I want to meet people I want to talk the the ones in the valley,
because they understand.

I haven't been in either program, but follow both and YC just seems to wipe
out the unnecessary old school corporate things. TechStars seems like you
better be a social butterfly and talk with everyone even the ones that don't
know anything about.

More mentors does not mean better. I would take 2 really good mentors over a
1000.

