There are plenty of alternatives to YC, YC is just the posterchild for incubators rightnow.
As far as archenemies are concerned, if by that you mean there needs to be several competitors in the market so that the customers (the entrepreneur) has choices and the players in the market are forced to compete for the customer, then I agree. There are other incubators in the market, some with better deals; YC happens to carry a good deal of name and a great network with it though.
It's an excellent way to mine the mid-point of the long tail. Clearly YC has limited resources and part of the requirement to be YC is to know that everyone they accept must be able to get the level of support they offer for new ventures.
The resource limitations guarantee that there will be people rejected which are otherwise solid ideas. So finding a way to get those people resources is a good thing for everyone.
I don't think it necessarily has to be a 'competition' but it could also give YC the ability to know what if they had chosen 'project Q' vs rejecting it, giving them a way to perhaps tune their own process a bit.
It's also true that there is an uncomfortable amount of randomness to startup success, founder chemistry, market windows, world events, consumer whim, all contribute an uncomfortably large factor to the success outcome. In some sense knowing the timing can be as important as executing well.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 17.2 ms ] threadAs far as archenemies are concerned, if by that you mean there needs to be several competitors in the market so that the customers (the entrepreneur) has choices and the players in the market are forced to compete for the customer, then I agree. There are other incubators in the market, some with better deals; YC happens to carry a good deal of name and a great network with it though.
The resource limitations guarantee that there will be people rejected which are otherwise solid ideas. So finding a way to get those people resources is a good thing for everyone.
I don't think it necessarily has to be a 'competition' but it could also give YC the ability to know what if they had chosen 'project Q' vs rejecting it, giving them a way to perhaps tune their own process a bit.
It's also true that there is an uncomfortable amount of randomness to startup success, founder chemistry, market windows, world events, consumer whim, all contribute an uncomfortably large factor to the success outcome. In some sense knowing the timing can be as important as executing well.