
Seed Camp - A YC style startup bootcamp for Europe - danw
http://www.seedcamp.com/
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rms
They have the best approach to interviews out of all the YC style companies.

There is a one-week intensive learning experience, a week long Startup Camp.
At the end, they pick 5 teams to invest E50,000 for a 10% stake. One week will
give them enough time to really get a sense for the team members. The rejected
applicants still get the benefits of the one week program.

edit: Seems to add extra characters in front when I use the  character

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pg
Oy, another one. Its advantages compared to YC:

 _1) it is a collective rather than an individual initiative by members of the
VC community, serial entrepreneurs, mentors, and angel investors and 2) it
incorporates the challenges specific to European entrepreneurs in starting up
businesses._

Number 1 is not an advantage. We're entrepreneurs, mentors, and angel
investors. The only thing we're not is VCs. But including VCs in a seed
funding operation is a bad idea. It means any startup that doesn't get a
follow-on funding offer from those VCs will be marked as a loser to all other
VCs. Techstars has the same problem.

I'm not sure what number 2 means exactly, but it is unfortunately worded.
"Incorporating challenges" sounds like they mean it will be more difficult for
a startup to succeed in London than in the US. That's probably not what they
mean, but it's probably true.

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sethjohn
Paul seems to have a negtive attitude towards every one of the recent crop of
YC clones. (Of course, perhaps I'm simply misjuding his tone due to
insufficient use of emoticons! ;)

Is he worried they will crowd the marketplace and diminish the success rate of
YC companies? Does he think they are so poorly constructed that they will harm
the young people who get involved? Or is it just a spirit of competetiveness?

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corentin
Judging by his essays, Paul is clearly for more startups, not less startups.

But you have to admit that, e.g. YEurope is just a cut and paste from
YCombinator: from the name, to the website (same Heysan rolling stuff!), the
amount they offer, the percentage they take, the application form, etc.

Seriously, _who_ would want to be funded by guys who just copy and can't
create even their own _ideas and thoughts_? It may explain why european
startups are just copying US startup concepts to adapt them to european
markets...

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davidw
Since PG and company can't really scale past a pretty small number of
startups, I don't really get what the problem is. The more the merrier, until
the bubble bursts.

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pg
Really? How much can YC scale? We ourselves aren't sure of the upper limit.

One thing I've learned from being around technology for so long is never to
bet against the possibility of scaling things.

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davidw
I'm not betting on anything, I just got the impression you guys were close to
your limit:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29072>

As far as I'm concerned, "it's all good" as they say. YC seems like a cool
idea, so if you guys manage to scale it, great! If other people do something
similar, that's good too from my point of view.

I'll defer to your longer involvement with technology, but YC is inherently a
people operation, rather than a technology operation. I think technology
scales more than people in some ways, but like I said, you guys are doing
something good, so it's all icing on the cake, I guess.

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palish
I'm thinking they're going to bring on successful founders as YC partners and
break YC up into teams. All the applications would go through each team, and
any team that wants to accept the application is responsible for mentoring
them. That will scale beautifully, because more teams lets them accept more
applications which will result in even more teams.

But that's just my guess.

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davidw
Before you know it, they'll be going door to door;-)

Sounds like a reasonable guess, and it might work, although it must be said
that PG took something like 10 years to go from viaweb to YC, which is
probably healthy in terms of gaining experience.

Oh well... should be interesting to watch in any case!

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palish
That's very true, but if the YC teams are made up of winners, it's likely that
they'd be able to create winners. They'd guide applicants to do what they did.

Plus, they'd have a financial stake in the applicants. One reason the YC teams
would be composed of successful startup founders is because successful
founders have money to invest, and $15k is pocket change. With that kind of
self-sustaining cycle, there _is no upper limit_! Before you know it, they'll
be creating a thousand companies a year. Ten thousand! Imagine that for a
moment. Sure, most of them may fail, but if just one in ten succeed with
returns of more than ten times their investment then it's a net win. My god..
This might turn into a viable alternate life path for the average Joe. It's
hard not to be excited.

But I shouldn't count chickens before they hatch.

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cbetta
Interesting view. I am currently at Essential Web 2007 in London with Saul,
and I might confront him with your issues.

