* each team gets a one-on-one meeting with the AlphaLab team every week, and when something urgent comes up they can usually make time for another meeting or discuss it on the spot.

* between the AlphaLab program advisors and Innovation Works (the parent company) there are a bunch of experienced business people and entrepreneurs to get advice from and network with.

Together these people have helped us with all sorts of stuff, from developing business documents like executive summaries and seeking further investment to setting up focus groups to test and discuss our product.

I don't have experience with YC's program first hand, but anecdotally AlphaLab blows YC away in terms of amount hands on business help you get. Makes sense when the program only includes six start ups and is backed by a mature investment firm. For teams like ours with a lot of technical experience but very little business experience this seems pretty important.