
DreamIT Ventures Opens Up Applications For Summer 09 Funding Cycle - jasonlbaptiste
http://dreamitventures.com/node/3
======
pj
They still have the default Drupal favicon up there! hahaha, no wonder they
are begging for hackers...

They need to hire a copy editor "We each founded, built and successfully sold
one or more business."

Seriously, the videos on this page are all quotes from very very young kids.
<http://dreamitventures.com/node/16>

All those videos talk about how great everyone is and wow, it's so awesome and
look around, this is totally terrific,

EXCEPT! They never say WHY! they never talk about anything quantifiable. Sure,
it's fun, and exciting and great, but are they going to help you get your
product to market? How much of your equity are they going to take for it? Was
it worth it?

No one has talked about any of that. These guys seem like marketing scamsters
and I'm highly highly skeptical.

I would suggest any young entrepreneur come here to HN first and get help
before going to those guys.

Back during the dot-com boom, I saw lots and lots of incubators like this,
idealabs, et all and they were largely a big waste of time. They were fun
though!

If you're looking to have "fun" these kinds of shops may be the place to go,
but if you are looking to be productive and build something valuable that is
going to make a lasting impression on the world, I suspect these guys are a
massive waste of time.

It seems from the videos and the marketing mumbo-jumbo that they are preying
on the young, passionate, and inexperienced minds that would be better served
somewhere else.

All the portfolio companies are Web 2.0 me toos, mostly boring, and short
lasting "features" -- not real products that improve the world around us in
any substantial way.

I can sense a bit of "anger" in my tone here. I feel a big sense of "these
guys are not good" when I browse around their site...

But that's just my intuition and intuition can be wrong, so whatever.

<http://dreamitventures.com/node/6> anthillz is trying to get out of
technology what human relationships are for. Go meet people in the real world.

Beanstockd? It was a blog and they are trying to build a company?

Drop card? Why would I waste my time putting my personal info into a shady
startup just so i can text my contact info to someone when i could jsut hand
them a business card?

ugh... these guys are so transparent.

Look at the videos! They just got some kids up there to do a presentation on a
screen in front of a no one so they could add these vimeos to their site to
make it look legit.

Watch the interview best one, there's only one old guy there and the startup
is okay, but is it "worth" anything? probably not. Any motivated person isn't
going to need them and i can't see anyone paying for it...

There's nothing new or novel about any of their startups...

They're marketing hope. They are behind the times, you want to work with
someone /ahead/ of the times.

Look elsewhere first!!

~~~
kwamenum86
There are not quite as glamorous as the start-ups you may have heard of but
they have been around: <http://sleep.fm/blog.html>

Does that make DreamIt ventures automatically a great option? No. I think
everyone who looked at the website noticed the spelling/grammatical errors,
nebulous role descriptions, and laughable testimonials. Their 15,000 bucks may
not be the same as 15,000 from YC but they seem to be a legitimate option. At
the very least they are a "safety" incubator to YC one would think.

------
dangrover
I really like the idea of having lots of YC imitators to open up options, but
there's ONE thing that makes me want to stay away from DreamIT.

When you apply, you have to be an "innovator", "strategist", or "hacker."

The implication is you can't be, for instance, both an innovator and a hacker.
Either you're calling the shots and designing products, or you're just some
code monkey that's hooked up with some people who are.

For me, part of the reason I'm an entrepreneur in the first place is the
rejection of this kind of dichotomy.

~~~
helveticaman
Agreed. Sounds like they're almost trying to hire douchebags. Innovator?
Really? No innovator calls himself an innovator. Nobody who matters uses that
word. With the exception of patent law, where it actually is very convenient
and legitimate to use this word.

~~~
fallentimes
You're right, it's like a creative person calling themselves creative. Or the
glaring problem with the everyone is special mentality.

 _"If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand
what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you're really just
following a rote creative template. That's the opposite of creativity.
Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all the time." - Chuck
Klosterman_

~~~
kwamenum86
So, paradoxically, if you are creative according to whatever definition
created by society, you are not actually creative? So if you observe your own
creativity it is not creativity? That quote is quite silly.

Creativity is the ability to come up with new ideas. A creative person can
certainly recognize that they are good at coming up with new ideas.

~~~
helveticaman
This also happens with wisdom; I had a teacher who said that the minute
someone said he was wise, he stopped being wise. I don't think creativity or
wisdom are like amplitudes in quantum mechanics, though; observing character
traits does not destroy them. Rather, I think this is a reflection of the lake
Wobegon effect: most everyone thinks he is at a higher percentile than he
actually is. Most people think they are above average. The really capable
people realize this and figure that they have to say they're in the bottom
percentiles in order to fill in those gaps. So that's how you get B performers
who think they are A performers, C performers who think they are B performers,
and A performers who think they are F performers.

I don't try to be modest or arrogant. I prefer to try to be correct. If I'm
good at something, I might miss out on opportunities if I think I'm bad at
said thing. For example, I might take too much shit at work and not realize I
can call the shots because they need me there.

I see no reason why a young man can't be wiser than an old man. Sure, an old
man has lived longer, but the young man might have more experience if he's
lived better and faced the truth more often. So I think I'm wiser than most
people. Reality bears this out: I think there's going to be a housing bust,
and then there's housing bust (I thought this was going to happen early 2006).
I take Robert Schiller's word for it when he says this is going to be the
worst depression since that Great one, and then it happens (early 2007). I
could go on, but the point is, would I be better off by saying I'm a fool? I
could have made a lot of money off these this crisis if I trusted my gut.

There are also things I know I suck at. I'm terrible at holding my tongue (4
percentile, I'm guessing). I ramble. I'm also really clumsy in a few kinds of
social environments, particularly pregames.

If you have nagging doubts about your creativity, ignore them and look at your
work. Is it creative? There's really no need to be bashful, at least in
private.

~~~
kwamenum86
If the quote said it works this way for "most" people then maybe there is an
argument.

Some of the greatest minds have remarked at how little we know but those same
great minds realized that they were great in the context of their time.

------
alain94040
The quality of a program like YC depends on two intertwined factors:

\- who is running it, so they provide real value from real experts

\- the reach they have, so that the applicants are top-notch and you benefit
from interacting with other rising stars

In the case of DreamIt, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. If no one has
heard of you, no matter how great your coaching will be, you end up with
second rate projects and there's not much you can do to make stupid ideas fly.
And once you are known for a batch of mediocre projects, none of the smart
entrepreneurs want to join your program, and you are stuck.

I hate cronysm, but who you know matters so much and makes such a big
difference, it's scary.

------
omarish
I hope someone in their organization sees this thread and ganders over here to
provide some insight.

When developing most products, you must know that your audience is not an
engineering student or a hacker and probably don't know how to SSH into your
server.

But I wonder if they have a separate perception of hackers, and if that could
imply that they're looking for a different type of hacker than the type on
news.YC?

------
omarish
... we will offer you a $5,000 DollarshipTM to participate in DreamIt ...

!!

------
apgwoz
... at least their site looks better than it did last year.

------
medearis
What/Who is DreamIT? Is anyone familiar with these folks?

~~~
mkull
Taking a glance at the partners / speakers / advisors, there are some
seriously smart and successful people in there
<http://dreamitventures.com/node/2>

I think the YC crowd is hating way too quickly, there is plenty of room for
more then one seed stage YC style fund... especially on the east coast now
that YC is full-time in Palo Alto.

~~~
breck
I don't understand why the HN community isn't more supportive of these YC
clones. It's simple: the more clones the better your odds of getting money and
getting your startup off the ground.

Also, it _theoretically_ could be better to be a "big fish" in a small pond
than to be a "little fish" in the big YC pond.

------
daveambrose
So what is the tally of incubator/Y Combinator like programs out there?

1\. Y Combinator 2\. TechStars 3\. DreamIT 4\. ?

~~~
siong1987
From UIUC, <http://www.iventures10.com/> < IV10.

Disclaimer: I am not associated with them.

~~~
anon1776
Run, don't walk from IllinoisVENTURES. Read up on them at TheFunded.

They're probably even worse than these Dreamit guys, but they are definitely
of the same ilk.

~~~
rms
Slightly different ilk, I think, but IllinoisVENTURES will offer the worst
valuations out of anyone in this game.

~~~
anon1776
Their valuations are terrible and the program's entire purpose is to try to
get lucky and latch onto the next YouTube coming out of UIUC.

It's like YC except without any of the benefits and with terrible terms. There
is no value added.

~~~
sachinag
The whole Illinois/Chicago group is a bunch of way-too-late wannabes who are
looking to take advantage of people. Startupnomics is 200 bucks with real
people; DePaul's startup conference is 600 with no value.

The environment here are _these people_. This is why I go on and on about
"Chicago is the next Detroit".

------
fallentimes
This reads like parody.

------
Dilpil
There is a difference between them and YC: YC requires you to have an idea,
DreamIT just wants ambitious hackers and business people. In a way they have
found a way to be even earlier stage than YC.

~~~
davidw
My impression is that PG et al. require an idea as a way of figuring out who
can think of reasonable ideas. They don't require you to stick with it, so
primarily they're looking for good people. Requiring an idea is just another
way to try and sort out the wheat from the chaff, even if the idea in question
isn't the final one used for the startup.

------
icefox
One of the features is "free Microsoft software". How is that a feature?

------
volida
spelling error "devloper"

~~~
mrtron
Overall the quality of their writing is a bit low. This doesn't mean their
program is good or bad, but it just leaves a bad first impression for me.

But I would also like to know more info - perhaps someone needs to whip up a a
review site for early investment companies.

Lastly I was wondering why they separate 'innovator' vs 'strategist' vs
'hacker'.

~~~
prospero
Don't worry, once you hit level 20 you can multiclass.

It actually looks like their model is that they find three strangers with
different skillsets and put them together in a team. It's an interesting idea,
but it seems like interpersonal problems down the line could be a pretty big
problem.

------
rms
Sleep.fm.

~~~
anon1776
Are these guys for real?

<http://sleep.fm/about.html>

~~~
rms
Extremely real. The founder posts here occasionally.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ryanspahn>

~~~
anon1776
I meant with that site I linked to. The front page looks pretty slick, but the
other pages look like they were made in 1996.

------
keltecp11
Calling All 'Hackers': <http://dreamitventures.com/node/12>

