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Comment by thinkingkong | Hacker News Reader

This is good devrel marketing but man… also super disappointing. Taking a bunch of credits offered by 3rd parties and front-running it to pretend youre running an accelerator is lame. The business part of me applauds it, but the nerd in me is so over vercel and their reseller strategy.

How about you guys fix telemetry, or configs, or finish next 13, or fix the auth layer (its a joke).

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> Taking a bunch of credits offered by 3rd parties and front-running it to pretend youre running an accelerator is lame.

That's like 1 (£850k in credits in total for 40 engs) among the 4 things (community, coaching, demo day) Vercel highlight in the post?

We're offering Vercel platform credits, as well as credits to other AI companies. We're not re-selling any AI vendor, but giving accelerator participants a variety of tools to choose from when building their product. They don't have to use any specific AI API or LLM.

We'll also have a community of folks we're providing educational content for, connecting them with other builders, and having speakers come to show new AI tooling.

I'm not sure what specifically you are referring to with finishing Next.js, but possibly the App Router, which is now "finished" API wise with v13.4 (stable core APIs). We don't have a built-in auth layer in Next.js, what do you mean here?

I realize that Vercel is a business, but NextJS increasingly looks like just a way to sell serverless with goin all-in on RSC instead of continuing of what made NextJS popular in the first place: eliminating webpack pains and SSR out of the box without forcing a specific thing onto devs.

> NextJS increasingly looks like just a way to sell serverless with goin all-in on RSC

Serverless because it can't work in a serverfull setting?

"Looking at the next.js repository, there are a lot of memory leak issues, often without resolution / response": https://community.fly.io/t/high-memory-usage-in-deployed-nex...

Server Components don't have to run on every request. They can run during a build, including generating entirely static sites. The way you deploy Next.js (serverful, serverless, a bunch of HTML files) doesn't change.

https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/deploy...

I read the website but don't see if you want shares in the startups or if it is just a free grant? Usually accelerators are investment programs so it's not clear to me what this is asking.

If you click on "Official Rules" on this page[0] (located in the application form), it takes you to a google doc that says this.

> RIGHTS IN ENTRY MATERIALS. As between Entrant, on the one hand, and Sponsor and Partners, on the other hand, Entrant retains all ownership of the Entry Materials. However by submitting an Entry, Entrant grants Sponsor and Partners and their agents and representatives a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, modify (solely for the purposes of transmission), distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, and transmit all or a portion of the Entry Materials in connection with the Contest, for promotional purposes and otherwise, including on and through third-party distribution channels selected by, but not affiliated with, Sponsor or Partner.

[0] https://vercel.com/ai-accelerator

We aren't taking equity in the participants. It's for individuals (not just startups) as well.

lol, what a marketing sham wrapped up as 'startup accelerator', where is the real money/investment?

:( A bit uncharitable IMO. What word would be better, you think, for "we'll give you a bunch of free resources, connect you with peers and industry leaders, run a contest for even more resources, and give your project a big publicity boost?"

It's not like "startup accelerator" has a scientific, stable meaning. And yeah, it's marketing - they're a for-profit firm. It's marketing for all the companies involved.

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