

Alternate YC Summer 2011 Class - let's do it ourselves - allanscu
http://www.ycreject.com/2011/04/were-you-rejected-for-summer-2011-y.html

======
iamelgringo
Or, you can start showing up at cool hacker spaces like the Hacker Dojo or
Noise Bridge.

Get a stack of business cards, and hang out at Hackers & Founders </shameless
plug> or 106 miles and make a point of having coffee with a couple of cool new
people every week.

Join one of the dozens of cool co working spaces in the area. (Avoid Plug and
Play).

Spend $9 on the "Pitching hacks" ebook. Best money you'll spend as a founder.

Work on building:

    
    
       team with at least one technical founder
       workable product
       refined pitch
       gain some traction
       preferably find one or two people to be your advisors (aka social proof)
    

And then apply to Angel list.

You need demo day for "social proof" in front of investors and to get a press
bump. Demo days aren't essential for funding any more now that Angel List has
turned funding into an API.

There's an open ecosystem in place for this, and it's improving. There are
still a number of places in the early stage ecosystem that really suck,
however. And, that's why incubators are still able to charge 6% of your equity
for fixes to that.

But, some of us are working on fixing these problems. You'll be hearing more
from Hackers & Founders about this in the near future.

~~~
orky56
Just curious, what's wrong with Plug and Play?

~~~
iamelgringo
It's all about incentives. Plug and Play's business model is people paying for
office space. So, they take anybody who comes and is willing to pay their
prices for real estate, and they try to call investors in so that the people
paying for office space can present to them.

Investors want to see a bunch of qualified, filtered startups. So, the
incubators/accelerators that provide "good deal flow" for the investors have
the best reputations with the investment community. Plug and Play doesn't
provide that.

------
anon_19409
A word of caution about the name and approach. You'll find when fundraising
that branding yourself as "ycreject.com" will make it very hard to raise
funding. VCs and Angels are going to think, "if YC wouldn't give them money,
why should I give them a much larger amount of money?"

I don't think it's controversial to say that most angels and VCs suffer from
group-think and an over-reliance on social proof. That's why finding your
first investor is the hardest.

This concept will be perfect for boot-strapers, but not good for someone
looking for funding. You'd be better off avoiding all relation to YC and
branding yourself as some sort of unaffiliated startup co-op.

~~~
allantyoung
While your advice makes a lot of sense, I think they can definitely get some
traction with this idea.

Here is a wrinkle that I think could work. Limit it to everyone that got an
interview but didn't get in.

~~~
wangwei
Then, this would disqualify the author of this post because he didn't get an
interview.

~~~
allanscu
Yes.. then I would be DQ'd.

------
pbiggar
I was in YC, and I think this is an awesome idea. You can replicate lots of
the value, even if you don't have PG giving office hours. However, five isn't
enough. Lots of the value from YC was to hear lots of different ideas and
opinions and feedback, and you won't get that with five.

What's the downside of taking 30? You're not taking investment, not providing
mentorship; there's no cost to taking more.

You're going to want to arrange stuff for you to do, right, speakers for
example? So you should split the effort of getting angels to talk, between the
companies who join.

Finally, no-one is going to want to give talks (very high value) to five
groups, and there will definitely be no demo-day (ultra-high value) with 5
groups.

With five groups you'll gain very little (some, but little). I'd urge you to
accept as many groups apply, to a limit of 30-ish at least.

~~~
allanscu
You bring up good points especially with getting speakers and getting angels.
I do plan to leverage the groups by having them contribute in setting up
speakers and finding qualified angels.

I'm more concerned about scaling this (that's the engineer in me thinking). At
least five groups is somewhat manageable especially when it comes time to
finding space to meet once per week.

~~~
pbiggar
Book hacker dojo in MV. (Actually, that's right beside YC)

------
il
What will happen to people rejected from YC reject? Will they form a YC reject
reject group?

~~~
melvinram
:) Made me smile

~~~
allanscu
There's no reason to not start their own group. But you have to stay laser
focused.. otherwise too many cooks spoil the food.

------
Jd
Good idea, but:

(!) You should invite more people. I can't figure out why you wouldn't want as
many as possible

(2) You should change the name. Not only is it not good to label yourself as a
"reject," there may also be people who have independent funding (I'm a
contractor and make good money that way) that don't need YC money but would
still be regular participants. What about "Indie YC" or something like that
(perhaps related to a different math theorm)?

(3) Why do you want people to fill out the YC app again?

(4) And why does only one person (yourself) get to decide who gets in or not?
There would need to be considerably more trust involved before people are just
going to just let you make all the decisions. I tend to think it is better to
say, "My co-founder and I will be at this place at this time every week with
our laptops and free food." Once you have 3 or so committed startups you
probably have traction enough to continue.

That said, I'm moving to the Bay area next month to work on solo ventures. I'm
in if something is going on.

------
todd3834
_"We have to keep this group small in this first batch to make it
successful."_

I feel bad for anybody rejected by the rejected...

~~~
dpapathanasiou
That would simply lead to this: rejectedbyycreject.com

------
rms
I actually like this as a concept, though iamelgringo's advice is probably
better in practice. But you could run this social group in addition to taking
his advice. Good luck!

Be careful with using the name YC around here though, one of the rules of
Hacker News is that you can only use "YC" if you are actually affiliated with
YC.

~~~
mtran
Hmmm. Wonder if that's why my post got killed yesterday? I posted for people
who weren't accepted this round to check out Startup City in Baltimore and
some info and links about Baltimore neighorhoods. I'm not affiliated w/Startup
City in anyway and am unsure why the post was "deaded"?

------
triviatise
I dont think there are many downsides to letting in more people. If you want
to keep the quality high, maybe crowdsource and let the YC community vote on
who gets in. But 30-40 just like YC is a good idea. It also increases the odds
that someone coming out of the group will actually be successful

I suspect as the person organizing you wont have time for your own startup as
you will need to keep the thing organized, get speakers etc. but you may be
able to get funding.

maybe a name like abiogenesis - spontaneous formation of life would be better
than yc rejects

Also I suspect you will immediately be able to get press as everyone loves the
underdog

------
maxer
i have been rejected from ycombinator multiple times over the years probably
because i am a solo founder- its hard to find other guys to work with that i
get on with in my local area..

my startup is yrecruit.com - someone mentioned am i ripping of ycombinator -
its more a play on words

~~~
rsl7
What is your local area?

------
will_lam
YC isn't the end all and be all of your startup hopes. There's awesome
accelerators like TechStars, etc. out there.

~~~
DanielRibeiro
... and IO Ventures, 500 startups (whose demo day also featured on Techcrunch
[1]), and many, many more[2, 4]

Also, you can take 37 Signal's advice that _Outside money is plan B_

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/08/the-seven-most-
interesting-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/08/the-seven-most-interesting-
startups-at-500-startups-demo-day/)

[2] <http://blog.shedd.us/321987608/> From Steven Blank's list[3]

[3] <http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/>

[4] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569687>

[5] <http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Fund_Yourself.php>

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jot
Nice idea! Here's something similar we tried in Brighton, UK in 2009:
<http://bootcycle.com>

I think being in the bay area and basing out of somewhere like Hacker DoJo
would have made a huge difference.

------
jayliew
A bunch of people will push forward regardless:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2422145>

