Y-Combinator vs Seedcamp - Paul Graham nailed it?
I'm Michael Sliwinski and I'm an entrepreneur who's also the..... Founder of Nozbe.com - a time and project management web application
.. Editor of Productive! Magazine - a global PDF publication on productivity
.. and a blogger as well as a producer of a weekly 2-minute Productive! show.
8 comments
But maybe you're right, maybe the failure rate of too-young startups was just too high and the organizers didn't want to waste their time on guys who "appeared to be good" and work on something "tangible" instead?
After all, I don't remember any of the first-round Seedcamp finalists who have made it big, and most of them where PPT-stage startups...
This also means that they'll be increasingly more students or post graduates who will risk and go the startup route instead of going for a J.O.B. and later submit their half-baked startups to Ycombinator or Seedcamp to really prove themselves. Just hope they'll get their chance...
Then again more Ycombinator-like competitions are being created throughout US and Europe... and this is a good thing too (supply and demand :-)
In my oppinion anything which produce another user-generated stuff is following historical concepts, there are a lot of crapy content over Internet.
That's way codility won seedcamp - they found niche not for another UGC but for analysis od data which produce needed output. If there are customers for that output, the Codility will win.
The problem that founder of a startup is having... and he wants to solve it his way. This is what Jason Fried did with Basecamp, what Alexis Ohanian did with Reddit and what many successful startups owners did to create something great. Hell, this is what I did with Nozbe - my way of a GTD app.
Doing a copycat startup for money and fame should not be a way to go. Doing a social app for the sake of it being social is also a no-no.
I like what 37signals are saying - do something useful. Useful is always good... and is useful for people :-)
Maybe we really don't know how to do Seedcamps in Europe? So maybe ultimately my point is right and Y-Combinator is just better? Reddit, Posterous, Dropbox... have been founded by relatively inexperienced guys who were looking for seed round... not "additional" round.
Just as you noticed - how can you participate in a "seed"-kind like competition in Europe with a new startup (even if you already have a demo) if you know that relatively big and already founded startups are your competition and they'll win - you have no fighting chance (or a zero-to-none).
My take - competitions like these are for investors... European investors... and we know very well that European investors don't want to invest in innovation but in proven model (copycat from the US) or proven business (with first rounds of funding - knowing someone has taken the initial risk first)... Maybe they should be called "investor-camp" and not seedcamp? Or "vc-camp"? :-)
Good comment flow guys, nice discussion :-)
