This is a great experiment given how many YC teams change their idea midway. For teams who have many ideas (but have not implemented any), would you advise them to
a) pick one and apply through the normal process (thus demonstrating they're capable of coming up with good ideas, and perhaps prototyping one), or
b) go through this new no-idea process instead (thus making it clear they are flexible in terms of what idea they pursue)?
This is definitely a good idea. I think a lot of talented groups struggle with finding an idea because the two easiest means of doing so -- solving a personal pain point or uncovering an opportunity in your current domain/job -- are bearing no fruit. After those avenues are exhausted they may not be sure of what path to take to find an idea. As a result, these otherwise talented folks are meandering around until they stumble upon something, which can take quite a bit of time.
My co-founder and I were in a similar boat until we found a process that worked for us to uproot unmet needs, but, if we hadn't, we'd definitely be exploring this track.
I think it could be really positive. Just the fact that this option exists will re-orient everyone's YC applications toward thinking about making sure they've got the best team. I would presume that there would be a very high bar to be accepted as a group of founders without an idea. (I would also expect that with a high-potential team the problem would be choosing from a large number of potential ideas.)
Seeing "(e) None of the founders are programmers." on the form, I was wondering - and I fear this has probably been answered before but it's not an easy thing to look for - pg, would you mind saying how often, if ever, you have taken in founders who literally couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, and if so do you have anything you can share on success rates / examples?
I'm not sure why you'd think that. If you take a few examples of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Dropbox... I don't think any of these needed coders to think of.
Obviously having technical founders can have many benefits, including:
a.) Can create technical product yourself, spend less on coders initially (e.g. Zuckerburg)
b.) Some products may need complicated code even for a POC (whereas sites like Twitter, less so. Any mediocre dev could make a badly written Twitter clone)
c.) Easier to think of technical ideas. For example I doubt a non-technical person would think of creating BitCoin. On a smaller level, could fail to think of feature-sized ideas within a company.
I think that, if Twitter didn't exist and I decided to create it, lack of coding skill wouldn't be a problem, as long as I had funding for coders to replace the technical founder's early role. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming I could do what Twitter have done, but I don't think that the things I'd have done worse would be because of technical ability, the same as if I was hired as a lawyer my failings wouldn't be for tech/code reasons.
Edit:
As an example data point, the company I work for is a digital publishing company, creating and managing content websites. Founded by people from hardware distribution industry, and successful - yet I would argue that our core business type is similar to Reddit, in that success/failure comes more from business decisions than "wow, you coded a better website than other people!" (Reddit being better than Digg, for example, is much more than "Reddit is coded better".)
But does that mean that the difference between technical and non-technical makes the difference between success and not, or does it just mean it's the difference between "got an idea, might as well code a bit and see what happens" and "got a great idea... I wonder if I can get some investment"?
Suppose your idea is to build a brilliant sculpture. Who will most likely succeed: a sculptor, or a guy who's instructing a sculptor? Would it work better to hire a sculptor and explain to them exactly what it should look like, or would it work better to be that sculptor and directly build what you have in mind? Even if you are explaining it to somebody else, it helps your ability to explain tremendously to be able to sculpt yourself. That's not to say that other roles aren't very important, like marketing for example. But unless your "business decisions" are truly brilliant, you're probably not adding a lot of value in a startup if that is your only contribution.
Despite your opinion that it they are unnecessary, is it a coincidence that all the startups you name had technical founders? Obviously your chances of success are not zero without a technical cofounder, but empirically a technical cofounder does seem to be a common factor.
I like your analogy but it didn't quite convince me, and I was trying to work out the best way to explain why, and here it is: How many of the world's buildings were commissioned, and had fantastic architects working not on their own ideas but on the ideas of people with money? Or painters hired to do a portrait, or composers hired to write an opera around a libretto.
Of course, in most of those cases I would assume that the person/s providing the money would have a lot less input into the final product than a non-technical founder would have in a company, so perhaps they're better compared to a VC than a founder?
If the business decisions guy was also bringing money to the table, then that changes the story. But now the important contribution is the money, not the decisions.
I imagine a conversation with Mozart went something like this:
"Mozart, I want a libretto."
"What should be in it?"
"It should be about birds."
"Okay, I'll get on it."
The corresponding conversation in our world would be:
"Jack, I want a piece of software."
"What should it do?"
"It should be like a blog but every post limited to 140 characters."
"Okay, I'll get on it."
It is Mozart and Jack who end up making 99% of the design decisions. What I'm saying that once the guy hiring the creator gets so involved that a good portion of the decisions are his/hers then that's a very inefficient way to compose a piece of music or a piece of software, and you're better off doing the composing yourself. Of course in many cases marketing is more important than the technical side, but this is no different. In a startup with just a couple of people the contribution comes from the guy doing the marketing, not a guy deciding the rough marketing strategy. In a big company the influence reverses because the business decisions have a lot of leverage simply because they affect what a large number of employees are going to do. Simply put, the question you're asking is "Could twitter be done by me getting YC (and later VC) money and then hiring a programmer and a marketer?". The right question is "Why would the YC give the money to me instead of the programmer and the marketer?". Note that a perfectly valid answer for a lot of startups could be "I have connections and experience in the field" (especially for e.g. medical or payments startups), but the answer needs to be something.
The advantage that Zuckerberg got from writing Facebook himself wasn't that he could "spend less on coders," it's that Facebook got created at all. Meanwhile, he had been contracted by the Winklevoss twins to implement their idea, which he didn't do because why would he?
Meanwhile, he had been contracted by the Winklevoss twins to implement their idea, which he didn't do because why would he?
Well, let's be fair here - he did implement their idea, at least the important part of it, the bit without which Facebook probably would have been a flop (the early elite school exclusivity, which was a major selling point especially at the first few schools, since there was nothing else particularly special about the site itself).
He just decided to keep it for himself rather than hand it over when it was ready.
Of course it's serious, and it's not (IMO) massively different from VC's that have EIR's, essentially founders just looking for the right "idea" to come along.
This is why YC is amazing and why anybody who says they ask for too much equity is an idiot. Most investors won't invest until you have traction and prove out a bunch of risk. YC used to invest when all you had was an idea, and now you don't even need that. Bad ass.
I dunno, it feels like there's enough noise and low-value startups in the ecosystem already I can't help think this is a little predatory and simply further dilutes the perception of value to investors outside the YC fold.
That's actually why this is great. There are low-value startups out there because naive people start companies that aren't good ideas. Meanwhile, great founders realize their ideas aren't that good and don't build companies. YC is going to find those people, help them curate their ideas, and get them on their way to building meaningful companies. It's as far from predatory as you can get. It's giving great people the tools, resources and support they need to do big things.
Seems similar to Alan Kay's often repeated observation that what made ARPA and PARC so innovative in the 1960s and 1970s was that they "funded people, not projects": http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf
That's a big complaint in modern CS research funding as well; traditional NSF and DARPA funding came in bigger chunks, with longer timeframes and less strong micromanagement of projects it was to be used for (there even used to be completely non-specific "center of excellence" type block grants, which gave a huge pile of money for a group of researchers to use on good research in a given topic of interest to the funding body). Now it typically comes in small chunks with very narrow parameters that have to be pre-approved and checked up on on a yearly basis, which not everyone thinks has improved the quality of CS research.
Thanks for the link. Here's the full quote (see page 4):
"Thus the "people not projects" principle was the other cornerstone of ARPA/PARC’s success. Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and "whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important". Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible. "Peer review" wasn't easily done even with actual peers. The situation was "out of control", yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic."
I would think that the type of person who would succeed in the startup world is one who would come up with an ad-hoc idea in order to do a startup, rather than the type of person who wouldn't do a startup because they couldn't think of an idea.
I've been involved in a lot of companies, I can code, do (simple) multi-layer PCB layout, server-admin, tons of real-world business experience, can go in cold to a group of hundreds of people and present almost any topic and manage positive or negative audience feedback under pressure.
I have an idea (submitted in the past, denied, still working on it though)... But, YC might frankly have a BETTER idea for me. Or together we might be able to identify an exploitable market.
I see this as kind of YC's version of an EIR, and frankly I think it's cool and will likely produce several successful projects.
This works out well for all parties. There are a lot of people out there who are in love with the idea of working on a startup more than they have passion to make their particular vision a reality. And YC realizes that they're basically playing a numbers game, and so they need to get more meat for the grist--both to boost profits and for the network effects of the YC brand/experience. At the dirt cheap prices they pay for equity, it's a no brainier.
Ooh, that's harsh. But I don't think that's the case at all, as that would be playing the short con. Too much of that and YC's brand will erode. The network-effect can carry companies pretty far but not far enough - they need to find companies with true intrinsic potential, so I don't think they're trying to take more risk at this point.
I think this is awful .... I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse me, I'm a bit of a romantic when it comes to startups and innovation.
Sure, people who come up with an idea to do a start up usually change it midstream, but they actually come up with one and set out to achieve it. If you can't even think of something to work on, then I don't think people should be falling over themselves to give you money to just come up with something just because you're 'smart' ... it just seems to commoditize and cheapen the process in my opinion. Plus if it doesn't work out, now they have the easy out ... "It wasn't even my idea".
Yes, I know the founder of Yelp got handed $1 million to come up with something and they got Yelp ...
Yes, I know I haven't done this day-in day-out for years like you guys have ...
but it still upsets me. maybe I just need to give it 5 minutes.
For me the important thing is caring about what you're doing, not that it was your idea. Certainly that's my experience working in a startup-esque non-startup.
I know YC wouldn't ever say "right, here's your new business plan", and I suspect the aim here is to be able to find ideas that these idealess-founders will be passionate about.
My gut feeling is strong and very similar to yours. But, I have learned that when something bothers me this much it usually it means I'm not looking at it correctly.
I don't know what happens when you take smart people who are confident they can solve problems and give them problems.
Maybe they can actually solve them, maybe they can't, I have no idea, but I look forward to watching it and seeing what happens.
Think of how many people YC has seen flow through. Successes, failures, one's they can't predict yet. There are probably certain patterns and traits in the good ones. They've also seen what types of idea's work best with certain types of people.
YC is directly integrated into the heartbeat of Silicon Valley, gaining more insight into where the puck is going to be, far better than any outsider. If they can match traits of a group/person to an idea only they have the privilege to imagine, you might have a winning combination.
The fact that people are complaining about this likely means it's a good idea, or should at least be tested. Occasionally throwing a monkey wrench into the machine is always good practice.
Colleges do this already by accepting smart students who don't know what to major in yet. Who cares if it takes them some time to figure it out? They're smart! They'll get it!
> Colleges do this already by accepting smart students who don't know what to major in yet.
Colleges do this to get their tuition money, not out of the goodness of their hearts. Who cares if they don't know? Society standards dictate most of them will stick it out and pay for four years of something.
That assumes that the most important thing to a college is present earnings and not potential future earnings. Colleges regularly compete for top students (at a loss via scholarships) in order to pump up their stats and increase their prestige (which comes largely from what graduates do long after leaving school) both of which are intended to increase future earnings. And that is only considering universities from the cynical, profit-driven perspective.
Let's just say I am a lot less idealistic about colleges than you appear to be.
The top students who will become prestigious alumni are by and large not the same students who don't know what they want to major in yet. For every Steve Jobs-like outlier you have a ton of executives, accountants, doctors, and engineers who know that's what they want to do. The major-less students will generally either pay for four years of psychology or be successful for unrelated reasons (legacy status and family connections, the occasional dumb luck).
If YC thinks trying to pick out the outliers, the lucky, and the connected from their application pool is worth the trial, power to them.
Great call. The people you're funding are worth a lot more than the money they're being given. Ideas being a dime a dozen, you're obviously funding the people more than anything else.
If I remember correctly reddit founders originally applied with some mobile app idea and even if their idea was rejected they got in anyway. I wonder if there is many more cases like this.
Not being able to come up with an idea seems to be contradictory to the prior observation that founders needed to be 'endlessly resourceful'?
Recognizing pain points and opportunities seem a vital entrepreneurial skill to me, but then again there's no harm in applying the scientific process to verify assumptions.
"Endlessly resourceful" is a broad statement. Groups that are resourceful enough to take an idea/problem (self-sufficient idea or given too them) and expound upon it, is no different than creating a start up, to fill a void or disrupt an industry.
This is what I call cranking up the rates. Here comes the bottleneck. Great to see YC iterate and scale like a software startup should. The haters will say this is irresponsible but I think it's simply brilliant.
We've heard/read countless stories of YC companies pivoting, but I can't find any hard data on it. I'd be curious to know what the pivot rate is for YC portfolio companies during their funding cycles; given this change, it would seem that the rate is high-ish, but I'd hate to presume anything.
My intuition would be that this is a bad idea. It seems that requiring teams to bring an idea to the table isn't valuable because of the idea, but rather because it filters out those too lazy to come up with an idea.
If they've known each other for, say 10 years, and still don't have a startup idea they want, it seems like it will take more than 3 months, I think that's the Y combinator length, to get an idea that they are truly passionate about.
Note, I'm sure that smart people can come up with many ideas in 3 months, it's the becoming passionate about it part that I have a hard time seeing.
I'm guessing that people become truly passionate about say 5 -10 things in their lives, it seems odd to suspect that they'll come across the idea in such a short time and then be able to act on it in time to take advantage of Y combinator.
Show me someone who is qualified to be a founder but happily shrugs about his/her utter lack of ideas... and I'll show you someone who should be in a corporate sales job making $600K per year, not someone who has seen a glimpse of the future and is driven to make his/her vision a reality.
Hmm, maybe selling companies to investors is a form of corporate sales after all.
Most successful entrepreneurs have ideas that seem bad for various reasons. YC's focus on critiquing founders' ideas (PG's sneers about mobile/social/local) suggest that YC is very confident that it knows which ideas will work and which won't.
In terms of predicting which companies will be successful in 10 years, nobody would ever have sufficient hubris to claim such foresight. But if the goal is to sell a company to VCs in 6 months, it's not hard to have a pretty good idea of the market dynamics.
Personally I'd rather see YC post "drafts" of business plans and let would-be teams start their own incarnations of those businesses and apply to YC with them. At least then it feels more like an authentic entrepreneurial spark than a search for pedigrees the VCs will buy into a few months down the line.
Disagreed. I'm on my 2nd startup (b2b SaaS) with 2 other cofounders. We're profitable but stagnating with $6,000 in revenue per month for each of the last 3 months. Although we are working on interesting problems, we aren't exactly passionate about what we are doing. We've been talking about a pivot for a while now but nothing compelling has come up. I have always wanted to go through YC and this sounds like an amazing opportunity - I love it. Now I have to run it by them....
Our margins are really good and we don't make a lot - the only reason I listed numbers was to highlight that we are a capable team that has track record of being able to make at least some money. We work well together and I think what we are working on now is small beans compared to what we could be doing. Applying to YC without an idea would be a really cool opportunity for us and other groups like us.
This bothers me too, perhaps it's romanticism, however I feel it's taking away from the authenticity of the process. VCs investing in a company are investing in the team. The team should be more than some technical folks.
This situation makes me wonder how much of the ideas and direction came from the incubator, and how much came from the team - and who's specific vision, etc.. I don't know how far ahead, long-term thinking (re: strategy, future features, etc) could be figured out if ideas weren't solidified over a period of time. The depth of the ideas I don't think in most cases would go very far.
From my own experiences putting time into development without first having a solid idea of what you're wanting to create ends up being a lot of extra development time.
For myself, I have spent years evolving my ideas and now I'm very ready to find technical co-founders / core team members. I've been told by some very experienced and very wise folks that I have everything else figured out.
Also, I don't see any company posting drafts of business plans. It would give away too much. I do always wonder where these 'other ideas' come from though. I would think people would keep their best ideas that they'd hope to be able to do someday, for themselves, and only share their secondary ideas that they'd never see themselves doing.
I do see this being beneficial for incubators in being able to experiment with relatively minimum costs to them, though is this really going to yield big results for the team members or are they selling themselves short?
Most sales roles are commission based, and it's hard to get solid numbers. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Oracle-Sales-Manager-Salarie... lists 5 Oracle salaries averaging $211K (including commission), but that almost certainly under measures those making really good commissions.
I, for one, think this is misguided. While I agree that team is one of the most important important aspects to consider when funding a startup, I fail to see how a team without a vision or an idea will have the passion necessary to stick with it.
Even though many companies pivot to ideas nothing like their original, the original shared vision by the team is what keeps it together and unified.
I have no doubt that there are groups you could hand an idea to that would go at it with gusto, I just don't think most will.
When helping brainstorm ideas with founders, YC takes strong consideration as to what type of startup the team is best suited to build.
We considered switching ideas in the middle of YC. One of the reasons the partners talked us out of it was that we weren't particularly well suited to tackle the new space we were thinking about.
Like I said in the announcement, one of the reasons we're pretty sure this will work is that we're already doing it. I.e. a lot of the people who applied to YC in previous cycles were applying without a viable idea; they just didn't realize it at the time.
Also (I'm starting to wonder if you read the announcement) we don't hand people ideas. We encourage them to solve problems they already knew about but had been overlooking.
I didn't mean to imply that you would force an idea upon them, but helping someone come up with an idea can easily turn into that if you're literally accepting people with no ideas (which you state you are and yes I read the announcement).
In the end, the person is going to have to become passionate about the idea. That's hard. When you're talking about a group that comes in together and wants to start a company together, it is much harder.
Honestly, if someone comes in just wanting to start a company without an idea, it sounds to me like they are more in love with the idea of being a founder than solving a problem close to their heart. I don't think that I would be interested in people like that.
What's up with all the negative attitude at HN that's being up voted for things that until recently at HN would have been applauded. This announcement is one. Sam altman's exit also had a negative tone. Also fred's post on yahoo also had some BS comment about VCs encouraging patents being up voted.
This is a great idea and people at most should at least have a neutral approach.
edited- I didn't mean this as a comment to Daniel's comment. It was meant for the grandparent
People calling it as they see it, by nature of this place YC is going to be very popular and generally have lots of fans and positive feedback. Not everything they do though has to be agreed with all the time by everyone.
Same with Sam Altman, just because someone is a very prominent YC founder doesn't mean everyone has to agree with everything they do.
As HN gets larger, it gets more and more likely that there will be some negative comment made. When it was smaller, there was just a greater chance that no one would make the negative comment.
It would be interesting to run sentiment analysis on the archives of various online communities to figure out where the likely phase transition point is. Probably a PhD in it for someone.
I agree with this. PG responded that he believes in the idea because they already did it, but it doesn't seem quite accurate.
Teams initially accepted by YC were accepted on the basis of an idea. I am going to take a bit of a leap of faith and suggest that a significant portion of self worth was placed in the nurturing of that idea. When it came time to pivot or in some cases completely alter their business plans, I suspect that a lot of that initial value was then grafted on to the new plan as a way of salvaging ego meaning that the same level of devotion then seeded the second idea.
Will this work? Who knows...it is certainly an interesting experiment. To be frank, it seems like a step away from the wild west toward the corporatization of start-ups. Essentially hiring talented people, pushing them in a direction and seeing what they develop.
I agree that the original shared vision is crucial, but I don't see why they can't come up with that after acceptance.
If a team knows how to go quickly from idea or concept, to market definition, to customer discovery, to validation very quickly it's not a problem. Most people don't even get out of the building to talk to customers routinely. They build something and see what sticks.
I would rather take a team with no idea but were really good at customer development over a team with a concrete idea but no customer development experience. The no-idea team can quickly figure out if an idea solves a problem for a big enough market and if they are willing to pay it.
If you have previously edited the regular form using this username, the link will direct you to the regular form. To see the "no idea" form, logout of your regular username, follow the link, and create a temporary username/password.
FYI, the "no idea" form is exactly the same as the regular form, except it is missing 18 questions that are idea-specific.
315 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threada) pick one and apply through the normal process (thus demonstrating they're capable of coming up with good ideas, and perhaps prototyping one), or
b) go through this new no-idea process instead (thus making it clear they are flexible in terms of what idea they pursue)?
My co-founder and I were in a similar boat until we found a process that worked for us to uproot unmet needs, but, if we hadn't, we'd definitely be exploring this track.
This effectively opens the floodgates but it might also reduce the number of poorly thought-out ideas since teams now have a different access point.
Fits well with the 'replace university' comments in the PyCon talk.
edit: Makes me wonder how about the proportion of people who apply with demos (and how advantageous that is -- or is not).
Didn't the airbnb founder(s) have little/no coding experience?
Obviously having technical founders can have many benefits, including:
a.) Can create technical product yourself, spend less on coders initially (e.g. Zuckerburg)
b.) Some products may need complicated code even for a POC (whereas sites like Twitter, less so. Any mediocre dev could make a badly written Twitter clone)
c.) Easier to think of technical ideas. For example I doubt a non-technical person would think of creating BitCoin. On a smaller level, could fail to think of feature-sized ideas within a company.
I think that, if Twitter didn't exist and I decided to create it, lack of coding skill wouldn't be a problem, as long as I had funding for coders to replace the technical founder's early role. Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming I could do what Twitter have done, but I don't think that the things I'd have done worse would be because of technical ability, the same as if I was hired as a lawyer my failings wouldn't be for tech/code reasons.
Edit:
As an example data point, the company I work for is a digital publishing company, creating and managing content websites. Founded by people from hardware distribution industry, and successful - yet I would argue that our core business type is similar to Reddit, in that success/failure comes more from business decisions than "wow, you coded a better website than other people!" (Reddit being better than Digg, for example, is much more than "Reddit is coded better".)
I'm not sure about Twitter, but I think so too in that case.
So maybe it IS important.
Despite your opinion that it they are unnecessary, is it a coincidence that all the startups you name had technical founders? Obviously your chances of success are not zero without a technical cofounder, but empirically a technical cofounder does seem to be a common factor.
Of course, in most of those cases I would assume that the person/s providing the money would have a lot less input into the final product than a non-technical founder would have in a company, so perhaps they're better compared to a VC than a founder?
I imagine a conversation with Mozart went something like this:
"Mozart, I want a libretto."
"What should be in it?"
"It should be about birds."
"Okay, I'll get on it."
The corresponding conversation in our world would be:
"Jack, I want a piece of software."
"What should it do?"
"It should be like a blog but every post limited to 140 characters."
"Okay, I'll get on it."
It is Mozart and Jack who end up making 99% of the design decisions. What I'm saying that once the guy hiring the creator gets so involved that a good portion of the decisions are his/hers then that's a very inefficient way to compose a piece of music or a piece of software, and you're better off doing the composing yourself. Of course in many cases marketing is more important than the technical side, but this is no different. In a startup with just a couple of people the contribution comes from the guy doing the marketing, not a guy deciding the rough marketing strategy. In a big company the influence reverses because the business decisions have a lot of leverage simply because they affect what a large number of employees are going to do. Simply put, the question you're asking is "Could twitter be done by me getting YC (and later VC) money and then hiring a programmer and a marketer?". The right question is "Why would the YC give the money to me instead of the programmer and the marketer?". Note that a perfectly valid answer for a lot of startups could be "I have connections and experience in the field" (especially for e.g. medical or payments startups), but the answer needs to be something.
Well, let's be fair here - he did implement their idea, at least the important part of it, the bit without which Facebook probably would have been a flop (the early elite school exclusivity, which was a major selling point especially at the first few schools, since there was nothing else particularly special about the site itself).
He just decided to keep it for himself rather than hand it over when it was ready.
One of these groups was Auctomatic, which did pretty well. Another is in the current batch and isn't launched yet.
This is very, very rare.
"Thus the "people not projects" principle was the other cornerstone of ARPA/PARC’s success. Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research. ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation and ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and "whose doings were likely to be highly interesting and important". Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible. "Peer review" wasn't easily done even with actual peers. The situation was "out of control", yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic."
Sounds remarkably like YC.
Anyway, it's an interesting experiment.
I've been involved in a lot of companies, I can code, do (simple) multi-layer PCB layout, server-admin, tons of real-world business experience, can go in cold to a group of hundreds of people and present almost any topic and manage positive or negative audience feedback under pressure.
I have an idea (submitted in the past, denied, still working on it though)... But, YC might frankly have a BETTER idea for me. Or together we might be able to identify an exploitable market.
I see this as kind of YC's version of an EIR, and frankly I think it's cool and will likely produce several successful projects.
Sure, people who come up with an idea to do a start up usually change it midstream, but they actually come up with one and set out to achieve it. If you can't even think of something to work on, then I don't think people should be falling over themselves to give you money to just come up with something just because you're 'smart' ... it just seems to commoditize and cheapen the process in my opinion. Plus if it doesn't work out, now they have the easy out ... "It wasn't even my idea".
Yes, I know the founder of Yelp got handed $1 million to come up with something and they got Yelp ...
Yes, I know I haven't done this day-in day-out for years like you guys have ...
but it still upsets me. maybe I just need to give it 5 minutes.
I'll sit down now.
I know YC wouldn't ever say "right, here's your new business plan", and I suspect the aim here is to be able to find ideas that these idealess-founders will be passionate about.
I don't know what happens when you take smart people who are confident they can solve problems and give them problems.
Maybe they can actually solve them, maybe they can't, I have no idea, but I look forward to watching it and seeing what happens.
YC is directly integrated into the heartbeat of Silicon Valley, gaining more insight into where the puck is going to be, far better than any outsider. If they can match traits of a group/person to an idea only they have the privilege to imagine, you might have a winning combination.
The fact that people are complaining about this likely means it's a good idea, or should at least be tested. Occasionally throwing a monkey wrench into the machine is always good practice.
Colleges do this already by accepting smart students who don't know what to major in yet. Who cares if it takes them some time to figure it out? They're smart! They'll get it!
Colleges do this to get their tuition money, not out of the goodness of their hearts. Who cares if they don't know? Society standards dictate most of them will stick it out and pay for four years of something.
The top students who will become prestigious alumni are by and large not the same students who don't know what they want to major in yet. For every Steve Jobs-like outlier you have a ton of executives, accountants, doctors, and engineers who know that's what they want to do. The major-less students will generally either pay for four years of psychology or be successful for unrelated reasons (legacy status and family connections, the occasional dumb luck).
If YC thinks trying to pick out the outliers, the lucky, and the connected from their application pool is worth the trial, power to them.
Recognizing pain points and opportunities seem a vital entrepreneurial skill to me, but then again there's no harm in applying the scientific process to verify assumptions.
Just curious.
So pick one you feel slightly stronger about than the others, and then mention the others in the application.
The idea pg is implementing is for people with "zero" idea of what they want to do.
If they've known each other for, say 10 years, and still don't have a startup idea they want, it seems like it will take more than 3 months, I think that's the Y combinator length, to get an idea that they are truly passionate about.
Note, I'm sure that smart people can come up with many ideas in 3 months, it's the becoming passionate about it part that I have a hard time seeing.
I'm guessing that people become truly passionate about say 5 -10 things in their lives, it seems odd to suspect that they'll come across the idea in such a short time and then be able to act on it in time to take advantage of Y combinator.
What am I missing?
Hmm, maybe selling companies to investors is a form of corporate sales after all.
Most successful entrepreneurs have ideas that seem bad for various reasons. YC's focus on critiquing founders' ideas (PG's sneers about mobile/social/local) suggest that YC is very confident that it knows which ideas will work and which won't.
In terms of predicting which companies will be successful in 10 years, nobody would ever have sufficient hubris to claim such foresight. But if the goal is to sell a company to VCs in 6 months, it's not hard to have a pretty good idea of the market dynamics.
Personally I'd rather see YC post "drafts" of business plans and let would-be teams start their own incarnations of those businesses and apply to YC with them. At least then it feels more like an authentic entrepreneurial spark than a search for pedigrees the VCs will buy into a few months down the line.
This situation makes me wonder how much of the ideas and direction came from the incubator, and how much came from the team - and who's specific vision, etc.. I don't know how far ahead, long-term thinking (re: strategy, future features, etc) could be figured out if ideas weren't solidified over a period of time. The depth of the ideas I don't think in most cases would go very far.
From my own experiences putting time into development without first having a solid idea of what you're wanting to create ends up being a lot of extra development time.
For myself, I have spent years evolving my ideas and now I'm very ready to find technical co-founders / core team members. I've been told by some very experienced and very wise folks that I have everything else figured out.
Also, I don't see any company posting drafts of business plans. It would give away too much. I do always wonder where these 'other ideas' come from though. I would think people would keep their best ideas that they'd hope to be able to do someday, for themselves, and only share their secondary ideas that they'd never see themselves doing.
I do see this being beneficial for incubators in being able to experiment with relatively minimum costs to them, though is this really going to yield big results for the team members or are they selling themselves short?
This job does not exist.
600K is high, but maybe possible.
Even though many companies pivot to ideas nothing like their original, the original shared vision by the team is what keeps it together and unified.
I have no doubt that there are groups you could hand an idea to that would go at it with gusto, I just don't think most will.
We considered switching ideas in the middle of YC. One of the reasons the partners talked us out of it was that we weren't particularly well suited to tackle the new space we were thinking about.
Also (I'm starting to wonder if you read the announcement) we don't hand people ideas. We encourage them to solve problems they already knew about but had been overlooking.
In the end, the person is going to have to become passionate about the idea. That's hard. When you're talking about a group that comes in together and wants to start a company together, it is much harder.
Honestly, if someone comes in just wanting to start a company without an idea, it sounds to me like they are more in love with the idea of being a founder than solving a problem close to their heart. I don't think that I would be interested in people like that.
This is a great idea and people at most should at least have a neutral approach.
edited- I didn't mean this as a comment to Daniel's comment. It was meant for the grandparent
Same with Sam Altman, just because someone is a very prominent YC founder doesn't mean everyone has to agree with everything they do.
Teams initially accepted by YC were accepted on the basis of an idea. I am going to take a bit of a leap of faith and suggest that a significant portion of self worth was placed in the nurturing of that idea. When it came time to pivot or in some cases completely alter their business plans, I suspect that a lot of that initial value was then grafted on to the new plan as a way of salvaging ego meaning that the same level of devotion then seeded the second idea.
Will this work? Who knows...it is certainly an interesting experiment. To be frank, it seems like a step away from the wild west toward the corporatization of start-ups. Essentially hiring talented people, pushing them in a direction and seeing what they develop.
If a team knows how to go quickly from idea or concept, to market definition, to customer discovery, to validation very quickly it's not a problem. Most people don't even get out of the building to talk to customers routinely. They build something and see what sticks.
I would rather take a team with no idea but were really good at customer development over a team with a concrete idea but no customer development experience. The no-idea team can quickly figure out if an idea solves a problem for a big enough market and if they are willing to pay it.
Is it broken or am I missing something?
FYI, the "no idea" form is exactly the same as the regular form, except it is missing 18 questions that are idea-specific.