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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."
Why? Their boot camps require everyone involved to move to either Silicon Valley or Cambridge, MA, find their own office and living space (in two of the most expensive markets in the US for both!) and then code up a prototype in some number of weeks. After that, if you don't get funded, you're done and you go back home... assuming you have a home and a job left to go back to. Yes, they offer assistance with all this, but the whole idea isn't really practical on its face for the people they purport to be trying to serve: small-timers with big ideas trying to work on a shoestring. I can't afford to just drop my middle-income tech job, leave my wife behind while I go haring off hundreds or thousands of miles away, on a chance that my team may successfully code a prototype and get funded. Neither could any of the other people I'm thinking of going in with... except one guy. (And he already lives in Brighton, ironically enough.)
Y Combinator works if you're a single, highly employable geek with no obligations, but most of the people I know with the skill to accomplish things worth investing in are either married, have broad skills but relatively specialized job experience (= smaller market with correspondingly smaller proportion of available jobs), or have things like family and financial obligations they can't just drop and leave behind on a whim. So where's financing that's friendly to our situation?
-- Old Man Kensey
I enjoy reading Paul Graham's essays, but I'm bothered by the logic "climbing the corporate ladder" verus starting your own company.
A common theme in many of those essays, and one of the primary reasons for starting Y Combinator, is for young hackers to create their own companies to sell (so they don't have to about climbing any corporate ladders) -- briefly, control your own destiny. So how is "flipping" your start-up any different from the corporate culture?
When you "flip" your start-up, you'll be put right back into the corporate ladder, albeit a little higher, but you're still working for the "man". Why not make your start-up into a viable, self-sustaining business? Or is that not Web 2.0?
Synchronize your calendar and mobile phone via text messaging.
It's not about the money. Paul Graham and company's input and expertise, plus the advantages of being in a setting with lots of other individuals doing the same thing, plus the connections that are put at your disposal are what make it worth the 6% or so. The $6000 per person is merely a safety net to keep you from having to worry about going too hungry.
Here is my personal experience on some of Graham's commonly touted suggestions for entrepreneurs:
I have no wife or kids, no mortgage, and sufficient savings to last for long enough to give entrepreneurism a shot. Paul suggests people do this young not because of any inherent bias, but because the young have very little to lose.
The tech startup market is booming. The amount of available funding and interest shown by VCs, and large companies is very attractive to a couple of small entrepreneurs. With several startups having been acquired in the last year, there are rewarding exit strategies on the table too. If you are skilled, and good at your job, why not let the market decide your value instead of your manager?
The cost of creating value on the Internet is very low. Our product is a web-based application (some may call it Web 2.0), built entirely using open source software. With an abundance of cheap machines, and the fact that most web-apps simply don't need much more than lots of memory and some big disks, our hardwares costs have been low. In fact, we have funded the entire thing ourselves from our savings. With such low startup costs, you don't need to give equity away to try out an idea.
What really happens if I fail? Well at worst I'll be nearly broke, and back in the job market. But even then, I will have ways to commoditize my failure. Though by no means a given, having entrepreneurism on your resume often suggests some traits that employers look for: self-motivation, willingness and ability to work hard, maturity, technical expertise, ability to prioritize etc. I conducted many interviews during my time at Amazon, and candidates who had tried something on their own and failed were nevertheless, generally more interesting.
Graham helped me assert to myself that the risk calculation I was doing was right enough. At the end of the day, the risk is mine, and the rewards too. We launched the site 5 weeks ago, already have over 3000 users, have been contacted by several VC firms, and have gotten some great press on blogs like TechCrunch, and the Scobelizer. If you're interested, check out what I've been up to at http://www.billmonk.com/, and decide for yourself.
One thing I can say for sure: this is the best job I've ever had.
um, if you're going to make such accusations then you better back them up. Wasn't there a roomful of people there who saw your presentations? If Paul & co. ripped you off, find some of those people and have them back you up. It should be trivial to prove your case and drive the StartUp school out of business. OTOH, if you can't substantiate your claims, then you're walking on thin ice.