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Considering that all of these came up after YC, I'm not sure we can even assume these companies would exist without YC having first been created.

Granted I'm fairly certain someone would've conceived the YC model eventually.

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I'm not so sure someone would have come up with this exact approach. Incubators have been around for a while, but they seemed to involve less collaborative mentoring and higher bars for entry. To my mind, YC was designed to address a specific population and problem space simultaneously. On the investor side, that seems very unique. The best analogy I can think of is a magnet school for tech entrepreneurs. The difference is previous attempts thought more about what could they take from the entrepreneurs than what could they give them (apart from cash). To me, the knowledge and support is the most critical element and YC.news is a very nice outgrowth of that. What incubator ever produced a product to help facilitate knowledge sharing among people outside the incubator?

Most of the other ones are incubators that deal in YC-magnitude investments, rather than YC which is explicitly not an incubator.

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