Ycombinator-x: self organizing 3 months bootcamps/feeder

I often find myself wishing I had the hacker equivalent of a gym buddy: basically someone who keeps me motivated to keep working on something and makes me feel like a bit of a loser when I stop or slack off, and for whom I do the same.

At the risk of hijacking your idea, I think the 97% of startups that don't get accepted to YC are the tip of the iceberg. There must also tons of talented people who don't even think to apply to YC because their project isn't the sort of thing YC funds, or isn't far enough along to seek funding, or they just aren't in a position to drop everything, quit their day job, and move to Silicon Valley.

And I don't think you need to limit it strictly to "companies who are seeking funding" the way that YC does, since you're not (I assume) sitting on a pile of cash that needs investing. You could really accept any person or small group that is working on an interesting project. Or you could just dispense with the pretense of "applying for" and "accepting" people and just make it open to whoever wants to show up and share their project.

A weekly checkin in the form of a dinner and mini demo is perfect. It's enough time to get something important done (even within the confines of a day job), but frequent enough to enforce regular progress and at the same time make it not such a huge deal if you have to miss a week.

I think the key to self-organizing is to think less like an organism and more like a species: if you want the concept to succeed you need to be OK with any particular implementation of it failing.

So just start a group in one or a handful of geographic areas. If it's successful, it will generate official and unofficial copies in other areas. Some of the copies will work better than the original and hopefully overtake them. I don't think there's any need to enforce a minimum or maximum size. Groups that are too small will die out and those that are too large will likely fork.

You could look to groups like Appsterdam, Pecha-Kucha, the Homebrew Computer Club, Beer && Code, etc. for inspiration.

And rather than something as formal as YCombinator, I would start with something like a weekly "Hacker Dinner" where people show up, eat, socialize, and show off what they're working on. Prototype days (or weekends) and demo days could come later.

Picking 10 teampickers at random and letting them draft their team in rounds would allow for similar benefits to a college or pro sports draft: try to make up for shortcomings in the existing line-up (team with good design skills, team with good business savvy) would probably end up working out.

Allowing for a midseason merger between these groups would probably also be productive, as there will probably tend to be people who don't stay with the program, and thus groups of 10 will become groups of 5-8.

The end best answer may be all of these approaches, with each approach taken over a span of every two weeks.