Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

If there was one change I'd like to see YC make, it's this: expand the franchise outside of the Bay area. Open a branch on the East Coast (Raleigh/Durham would be a nice location!).

OK, yes, I'm being selfish here, but this is just the way it is for us... moving, even for 3 months, just isn't an option and may never be. But that's really the main thing preventing us from taking a stab at doing YC.

Of course, we do have a similar accelerator/incubator here in The Startup Factory, but competition and more choices are a Good Thing. :-)

View on HN

Incidentally YC is actually the YC for all startups everywhere. Lots of startups move to Silicon Valley for 10 weeks, raise money, and sometimes they decide the best place for them is where they came from, or another startup hub.

Silicon Valley is so concentrated that it is super valuable to absorb the values of how startups build valuable things, and start your company here.

It seems to be a litmus test for commitment — 10 weeks is short enough that if you're serious about your startup, it's not too much to ask. It is correlated with commitment and therefore success.

I completely agree with garry comments ' 10 weeks is a Litmus test for commitment' . If one can't be away from home Town for 10 weeks, you are not prepared for 10x or 20x bigger tough situations Start-up is going to throw at you

It might work for 20 somethings just out of undergrad. But when you start looking at founders who are older and have families, you eliminate a lot of talent from the pool (including people with actual experience). It just isn't feasible for everyone.

Actually we have quite successful founders who move with their families to Mountain View — notably the two founders of Mongo HQ and their families shared a rented house there for the duration of the batch. They happened to stay in the Bay Area, but they could have just as easily went back home after raising their seed round too.

mbreese didn't say that it eliminates all such founders. I think the argument here is that some number of startup founders (where the exact number would be hard to pin down) are unable to move to San Francisco for 10 weeks due to other commitments, and that this factor is probably going to be more pronounced with older founders - who are more likely to have spouses, children, mortgages, and other entanglements that work against letting them move.

The other argument, that I'll make, is that as nice as the Bay Area is, you don't have to be there to be successful.

Assuming that all of the smart, talented, hard-working, $INSERT_SUPERLATIVE_HERE people in the world aren't already in the Bay Area, then if you accept the above premises, it stands to reason that a YC expansion to some other parts of the world could be very effective.

you are not prepared for 10x or 20x bigger tough situations Start-up is going to throw at you

Such as?

That strikes me a bullshit, completely unfounded observation. How do you justify that, exactly?

> Silicon Valley is so concentrated that it is super valuable to absorb the values of how startups build valuable things, and start your company here.

Assuming you think modern Silicon Valley "values" are worth emulating, and the idea of inhaling the Silicon Valley myopic mono-culture 24/7 appeals to you.

On the other hand, staying grounded in the world outside Silicon Valley means being able to empathize with people who aren't 20 years old and don't know everything, and who actually have to produce real lasting value for there to continue to be a paycheck.

I went through an exit in the first bubble once already; I was happy when it popped, and happy to move away from the navel-gazing Silicon Valley culture when it re-emerged, and can't possibly imagine why I would want to go back.

10 weeks is short enough that if you're serious about your startup, it's not too much to ask.

I'm sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that. It has nothing to do with how serious you are or not... some of us have constraints that just don't allow uprooting our lives and moving to the opposite coast for 10 weeks. We all have different situations and to suggest that someone isn't serious about their startup just because they won't come to CA for 10 weeks is, to be quite frank, rather disparaging and insulting.

It's appreciated though. I use this kind of shit as fuel for the fire. Doubt us, please... the more people that doubt us, the stronger we get.

Anyway, as far as commitment, let me share a little history with you... I started tinkering with the earliest ideas for what would become Fogbeam Labs way back in 2006... was only treating it as a hobby OSS project back then, had no (or very nebulous) plans to make a company. By 2010 I knew far more about what needed to be built, threw out all the old code, started over, and created an actual company. By late 2010 I had recruited a co-founder. In 2011 we recruited another co-founder. In late 2012, the second co-founder left, but we hired in intern in Summer of 2013 and he did such a bang-up job that we asked him to stay on and join the founding team. We've since recruited another intern / part-time sales guy to work with us.

So over 4 years, we've gone from nothing but one guy (me) and some half-baked ideas, to a 4 person team, with 2 products that are shipping ("limited availability" but still, available for sale), another product in development, and we are having sales conversations with Fortune 500 companies.

We have a marketing strategy that is starting to come together, we're developing potential partnerships, and we're learning how to do the sales thing (all of the members of the founding team are techies first and foremost).

No, we haven't gotten our first sale yet, and as far as that goes, we might never. We could still fail and never make a dollar. That isn't the point.

The point is that I've given ~4 years of my life, and quite a bit of my income during that period, to building this company. And during that time, I've done little but eat, sleep and breathe this company... dating? Feh, no time for that. Social life? What's that? Friends? You're kidding, right? Family? They think I'm dead or something. Adversity? Fuck, I could tell stories that would make me cry to tell them.

But here we are, still pounding away. But somebody is going to say that we're not committed because we're not willing to go to CA for 10 weeks? Yeah, right. ROFLMFAO.

There are many paths. Best of luck to you sir.

How about you downvoters actually provide some kind of reasoned response telling me why I'm wrong, instead of just blind downvoting? Or are we so wrapped up in celebrity worship now, that you can't disagree with a YC partner without being downvoted to hell?

Seriously, if somebody can provide me any actual evidence that you can conclude anything meaningful about someone's level of commitment from one data-point, I'll happily eat crow. Until then, as far as I'm concerned, all of this "coming to CA equates to commitment" stuff is just hand-waving.

I didn't downvote you, but as someone who did a pretty arduous company from almost-zero-in-bank-account to acquisition without taking a dime of funding: spend time with your friends and family. You're going to look back and see that over the long run, any time you that shortchanged from them didn't actually contribute to your success.

spend time with your friends and family. You're going to look back and see that over the long run, any time you that shortchanged from them didn't actually contribute to your success.

Yeah, you're probably right. And don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't spend any time with friends and family. (I do engage in a bit of hyperbole from time to time). But I have made a conscious choice to focus the majority of my energy on a particular path for the time being, in the hopes of achieving some things that are important to me.

Unfortunately, because I take the piss out of people and joke and exaggerate a lot, many people on HN probably think that my only motivation really is to drive a Maserati and have a 6' tall redheaded supermodel with a Scottish accent for a girlfriend.

Finding the right balance is tough, and like too many things in life, these situations are things where you don't get many (if any) "dry runs". You're learning on the fly as you go, hoping for the best outcome while being fully aware that you might be fucking the whole thing up. :-)

Ah well, that's what makes things interesting, I guess!

As a Brazillian that did not went to YC because of that, yes!

(explaining for those wondering: I believe Bay Area costs are too ridiculous of high, and the YC money is too low to cover them when I have to also account the costs of moving from another country entirely and then moving back...)

I'd love to see an East Coast incubator as well ;)

I'm in the D.C. Baltimore region, and the DC-to-Dulles tech corridor and the Bethesda, MD biotech region are huge tech regions.

There's a very large small/bootstrapped tech business scene here, they just don't call themselves "startups" quite as often. Most folks I know out here get funding from SV or Boston and not the local area.

The main problem of course is that many investors (and potential board members and mentors) fundamentally don't understand how to do business in this area, where the major customer is the USG. It's been done (e.g. Palantir), but they were working off of SV cachet more than local talent. Even simple things like release schedules (which inform and are driven by development practices) are different, plus the additional processes around getting approved for use on USG systems (not just DOD!) are things that outside companies just don't really understand how to deal with.

Big SV (and West Coast) companies do have significant presences out here, but they tend to be more large "sales offices" than proper tech shops.

edit I mean, there's In-Q-Tel I guess...that's part of Palantir's early story as well...and probably a large part of how they've been successful. Understood the climate, negotiated access for them, and basically helped them navigate the byzantine environment.

Well, there are East Coast incubators, but no "YC East". Here in the Triangle (NC) region, we have TSF - The Startup Factory[1], which is a "YC like" program, as well as Groundwork Labs[2] who don't invest money.

[1]: http://thestartupfactory.co/

[2]: http://groundworklabs.com/

I'm in DC as well, and you're right about all the "beltway bandits" as we like to call them.

But, there are plenty of wealthy beltway bandits who are willing to make investments. You just have to approach them a big differently.

Can you provide some insight? I've found the investment ecosystem out here pretty thin.

They used to do a batch in Boston/Cambridge, but stopped when PG was expecting a child. I'm hoping that Sam Altman considers bringing this back, or continues expanding to other areas. I believe such a move could have a huge impact in places they'd expand to

How exactly would YC benefit from having an office in NC? Access to government contractors?

Raleigh? Access to students from NC State, Duke, and UNC Chapel Hill, all within a few miles. And of course...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle_Park

It may completely shock some of you stuck in bubble land, but many people don't want to live in SV. Even for a day.

If you're planning to run a successful tech company, you'll need to spend time talking to customers, partners, suppliers and investors. A large fraction will be in SV. You should really learn to be comfortable in any of the major tech cities.

True, but still, it's hardly required to be in SV in order to found a successful technology company. And the Triangle area is actually quite a burgeoning startup hub these days... although the word hasn't gotten out quite everywhere yet. :-)

Because there are a lot of smart, talented people out here building startups, and not all of them are willing/able to move to CA for 10 weeks. Personally I think an RTP branch of YC would be wildly successful, but I am a bit biased.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com