Could the YC model have existed in the late 90's?

[terpua]

[pg]

Yes, actually. Our model for YC was Viaweb, which was started in 1995 with $10k plus legal work from our friend Julian.

At the time everyone gave us a hard time for starting the co in an apartment with so little money, using open-source sw for everything, writing a web-based app, and running the co ourselves instead of getting an MBA as the CEO. At the time we were considered a broken startup. Now we would be called a "Web 2.0" startup.

[terpua → pg]

Did you consider launching YC earlier (say in 2000)?

[pg → terpua]

It would have worked then, but I wasn't thinking about such problems then. I only got into YC by accident, really.

[kf]

Yes, but they would have needed to invest more money to cover software and servers. Open source has come a long way since then.

[staunch → kf]

Doesn't Viaweb doing it in 1995 kind of disprove that statement? I also know that's not true because I was working on web-based products since then using a totally open source setup.