NYT on Paul Graham's YCombinator Bootcamp

prostoalex writes "The New York Times tells the story of Paul Graham's YCombinator - a venture firm that specializes in funding early stage startups that's famour for startup bootcamps conducted twice a year in Silicon Valley and over on the East Coast. YCombinator's boot camps apparently attract a lot of employees out of major software companies, who are still young and want to run a software startup."

Comments

Re:One of the attendees...

[caseydk]

I enjoyed Startup School, it was a great experience. I managed to connect with quite a few people doing different things up and down the coast. Despite my travel problems (noted on another post), I would happily go again.

Re:My impression of Y Combinator

[Anonymous Coward]

i agree...it seems that the only alternative for our situation is bootstrapping it with credit cards and savings to build a prototype , which you could then take and get further funding...
on a side note, joel spolsky had some interesting stuff to say on why to avoid venture capital anyhow.... theres an mp3 available of the interview with him at

http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/11/vv_show_20_joe l_spolsky_of_fog.html#more

its a pretty neat podcast, which you may find of interest....i think he had some good points on starting small

Re:The only one to win is YCombinator

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>AND they won't sign an NDA

How many VC's are willing to sign NDAs these days? They used to resist like crazy.

You're absolutely right

[jbellis]

Y Combinator isn't targetting people like you. Or me, for that matter. They're quite up-front about this.

Does that mean that Paul Graham is a bad person or Y Combinator is a bad choice for the people they _are_ targetting? Not at all.

"How many VC's are willing to sign NDAs?"

[jbellis]

None of them. This is SOP for early-stage investors of all sorts. Grandparent is simply ignorant.

Re:One of the attendees...

[commanderfoxtrot]

I wasn't able to be there in person (it's a bit far from England) but the MP3s of the talks were very informative.

Here is the link to the recordings. (Coralised)

I have some other associated bookmarks.

Paul Graham

[pHatidic]

If you don't know, there are some amazing talks given by Paul Graham that can be downloaded on the net. I will paste the links below, but all of these are copied from my lens on start ups (see my sig), where there is a good mix of free start up goodness and amazon link referral whoring (because the only thing worse than tricking Americans into reading is tricking Americans into reading while raising money for charity).

Ideas for Start ups -- An entertaining talk by Paul Graham on how entrepreneurs get ideas for start ups.

Hackers and Painters -- Another entertaining and informative talk by Paul Graham. Unlike architects (who figure out what to build) and engineers (who figure out how), great hackers and painters do both. Who makes a good hacker and how can you identify a good hacker/programmer in a job interview? Why is empathy an important skill for programmers? As a hacker who also studied painting in Europe, Paul may be uniquely qualified to write a book entitled Hackers and Painters. If you leave your day programming job only to get home and write more code, this is a great book for you.

What business can learn from open source -- Paul Graham, popular author and Lisp programmer, discusses what business can learn from open source. According to him, it's not about Linux or Firefox, but the forces that produced them. He delves into the reasons why open source is able to produce better software, why traditional workplaces are actually harmful to productivity and the reason why professionalism is overrated.