It's changed - that PR is obsolete (Thanks PG, for helping with the strategy shift).
We're a straight early stage seed-investment fund. We invest in social-media early-stage web startups, putting in between $100-$500k. We maintain specialist resources to help with SEO and Viral Marketing. We provide free office space to our companies, if they want them. We have a one-page no-hassle termsheet, where we buy something that looks a lot like common stock. We don't try to control the company. We help with future fundraising (see my blog at http://www.venturehacks.com). And we decide very quickly.
PG pointed this out to me as a gap in the market for early stage web companies, and he is absolutely right.
We know Naval, and it's not really a YC clone. Structurally it's more like Idealab or Obvious Inc, in that they develop ideas in house and then spin them off if they succeed.
It's an interesting concept, but the setup takes away a lot of the incentives that drive people to not have a life for months on end so they can succeed. If a venture succeeds, the people who actually did it only get a fraction of the payoff. If they don't succeed, everything's still okay since they can wait for someone else to succeed and still see a payoff.
If everyone's waiting for another venture to succeed, they're not trying as hard to make theirs succeed.
I am little suspicious about the website itself. It doesn't contain who's who (funny they're asking your resume without revealing their resumes). It doesn't contain contact details like phone number, postal address, etc. It's all up in the air.
Seems like good old Nigerian emails scandal written all over it.
That's what concerned me. There is only one link and that is to email them an application. No other names associated and parts of read like marketing mumbo-jumbo.
It does seem like a problem: sharing the upside and the downside makes people less determined and focused to succeed.
However who knows? The scale of the Internet business is such that things like open source are thriving; this idea might as well have good chances to live and grow.
Finally, people are different and have different needs, this may very well work for some folks.
To expand a bit on that: HitForge does share some aspects with YC but those aspects aren't what made YC special. Namely, YC wasn't the first investor of small monies in the seed stage or the first investor with technical insight. I'd say calling something a "YC clone" is meaningful if it does what YC was first at and the result is in large part a similar investor.
"The Hit Forge is a group of entrepreneurial engineers building mass-market web properties." What is YC? I think most people can't answer that clearly. To quote the home page: "Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups." That doesn't tell us new in what kind. I mean, incubator investors share such a description, but pg makes a point YC isn't one. But it's enough here to point out that, unlike YC, HitForge is some kind of a "co-operative" and if you fail your company you can still profit from the other companies.
What kind an investor is depends on who is the owner, why they invest, and how the ownership is implemented. The second part is what the investor does: what's the investment product, who are the customers, and how the operations are run. Answering these questions can take you a long way already.
It's changed - that PR is obsolete (Thanks PG, for helping with the strategy shift).
We're a straight early stage seed-investment fund. We invest in social-media early-stage web startups, putting in between $100-$500k. We maintain specialist resources to help with SEO and Viral Marketing. We provide free office space to our companies, if they want them. We have a one-page no-hassle termsheet, where we buy something that looks a lot like common stock. We don't try to control the company. We help with future fundraising (see my blog at http://www.venturehacks.com). And we decide very quickly.
PG pointed this out to me as a gap in the market for early stage web companies, and he is absolutely right.
See you all at Y-Combinator D-Day.