Tech Billionaire Boot Camp

theodp writes "Forget the Summer of Code. If you've got a hot idea for a start-up, Newsweek says Y-Combinator, the boot camp where Silicon Valley meets 'American Idol', is the place you should be. 'Some critics scoff that Y Combinator's investment is peanuts for that amount of equity. But the opportunity is unparalleled -- total immersion into Silicon Valley start-up culture, advice from Graham and a fast track to the top angel investors and venture-capital funds. When Graham calls the winners, the founders have only five minutes to accept. "If people turn us down," he says, "as far as we're concerned they've failed an IQ test."'" We've previously discussed the program on the site, just over a year ago.

Too Late for Spring...Wait for Winter

[Listen Up]

"If you want to apply, please submit your application online by midnight PST on Monday, April 2, 2007. Groups that submit early have a slight advantage because we have more time to read their applications."

Good timing for this article...

Re:Graham?

[tansey]

The "Graham" is Paul Graham. From his website bio:

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998...

He has a really interesting essay-blog at his website [paulgraham.com] which is worth checking out.

$20k , ridiculous.

[adam]

You're completely correct. First of all, the phrase "angel investor" should never be used to accompany a five digit figure --even "venture capital" is kindof out of place. Secondly, if they're investing (up to) $20k into a startup, it is they who are failing the IQ test. [in my experience] Serious venture investors want to see startups that have already bootstrapped a significant amount of funding (at least six if not seven figures), have PhDs onboard, etc. Now, obviously some industries and ideas have a much larger barrier to entry than others. For instance, I'm in the cinema field, where a cutting edge product might cost between $50k (low end) and $1M (high end). So designing, manufacturing (etc) these products has a much larger barrier than say, the guy who has a bright idea for the next digg.com or whatever web-two-point-oh site is hot this week (where $20k might actually pay a brilliant developer to write much of the code needed). But, even using the American Idol analogy-- if you were going to invest in a singer, someone who doesn't have any sofware/hardware development needed, just needs the cash to get into a studio and get recorded, that alone would cost more than $20k.

Twenty grand really is peanuts. Hell, some venture capital groups have proposal fees that can easily run a few thousand dollars (that the startup needs to pay just to present the business plan to them), not to mention cookie-cutter research [scri.com] for business plans alone can easily run $5-10k (I won't even get into custom research).

My advice if you need $20k of investment capital? Put it on your Visa (worked for Under Armor [msn.com]). Selling off a chunk of anything you genuinely believe to be a good idea should only be considered when you have no other available means to bring that idea to fruition.

Re:Barely an investment

[ShakaUVM]

He also didn't invent Bayesian filtering. I open sourced a similar statistical spam filter a year or two before he wrote the plan for spam. And I didn't invent it either.

Y Stealer

[Anonymous Coward]

I was once turned down by Y Combinator, I met Paul Graham, he is arrogant and thinks he's the smartest guy in the world. I applied them because I was living outside USA, so it could be a good opportunity for me. But after coming to Silicon Valley, I saw that things are not so hard, you can easily access people you want here, so you don't need to give 10% of your company to this asshole (I respect his articles though). I'm very happy now that I was turned down, it allowed me to protect my shares.

For a guy who lives in USA, Y Combinator is purely stupid. I talked with many VCs and that's what they think too. Look at Y's current investments, which ones succeed? Loopt, Scribd got the investment in a few months, do you think it's Y Combinator who gave them this mojo, they could do it by themselves too. With Y Combinator, you fail without learning anything. If you are without him, at least you fail by learning something.

Re:Living in the past

[achacha]

Then this is what you should do. There are plenty of tech friendly cities with affordable housing and relatively low cost of living. Portland, OR; Austin, TX; Vancouver, BC; Raleigh-Durham, NC; Heck even Boston, Seattle and New York City are a steal compared to SV (if you live in one of the suburbs nearby). I lived in SV for 5 years and could not reasonably afford a house and family with developer salary (pure interest loans never sounded good to me); so I moved to Austin and managed to buy a house without much trouble and enjoy it a lot and glad I moved away from the valley (not to mention all the fun life outside of work which the valley sorely lacks unless you want to drive to SF every night).

Re:Barely an investment

[Zeinfeld]

Silver bullet for what? Bayesian filtering simply works. The thing is, lots of people want a single filter to work for more than one person, and then of course you'll get issues: What's interesting/spam for one person is not the same as what's interesting/spam for another person, so why should a single filter know?

Bayesian filtering does not come close to the effectiveness of most of the commercial schemes I have used. Since I get over 3,500 spams a day (and 500 legitimate mails) I could not possibly tollerate even a 1% false positive rate. Currently I have less than 30 false negatives and essentially zero false positives. I do not check my junk mail folder, simply can't afford to.

Content analysis as pushed by Graham is much less effective than looking at other message features such as the headers, timing, etc. Bayesian learning is much less effective than other strategies.

Best paper at Graham's first spam conference was by an MIT undergrad from course 6 who completely debunked the whole notion with some rudimentary statistical analysis.

Re:Barely an investment

[ShakaUVM]

We just called it Spamfilter.

Readme:
http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~wkerney/spamfilter.README [ucsd.edu]

Download:
http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~wkerney/spamfilter.tar.gz [ucsd.edu]