

Would Y Combinator fund a porn startup? - azabkar

Would Ycombinator fund a porn startup? Why or why not?
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pg
It would depend how directly involved with porn it was. As a rule investors
won't touch pure porn companies, regardless of how they feel about any moral
questions, because they can never grow into anything more. But there seem to
be a lot of successful companies that are one step removed from porn.

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meredydd
_one step removed from porn_

Okay, I have to ask - what do you mean by this? Are you talking about
supposedly general-purpose products whose main revenue-generating usage is in
fact pornographic? Or products that operate elsewhere in some supply chain but
don't actually have direct contact with the naked boys and girls?

Could you give a couple of examples, perhaps?

~~~
wheels
One of the first startups I was asked to work for was doing a Java widget for
decoding video in the browser -- no plugins required. This was before Flash
took over that area. I didn't get how it was supposed to make money until they
hinted at porn. I suspect that's in the category of "things one step removed".

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IsaacL
I think 'startup' has (at least) two definitions:

1) any new business enterprise 2) a new business enterprise with high
potential for growth, with an untested product/service

So porn would be included in 1, but 2 is more for 'untested' models like
software, web services and biotech. I imagine this is what pg is talking about
when he says that startups are a new economic model - I imagine he's less
interested in 'established' models like porn, since such businesses probably
have many more options for raising cash.

