[Coax]

Paul, do you fault every entrepreneur that takes a novel business model/approach and tries to improve upon it or extend it? If not, can you explain what is special about this situation?

By way of comparison, do you fault Burger King and Wendy's for taking McDonald's idea?

[pg]

Depends how much they add. Like most people, I think, I don't have a high opinion of things that could be described as knockoffs. E.g.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/02/technology/kopy_kat_kids.biz...

Whereas if the idea is significantly transformed, it starts to be a new idea. If someone started a YC-style operation for funding films, I'd think that was cool. In fact I've suggested it to several people.

[Coax]

Fair enough, but since there's a geographic element to startup accelerators, can't their addition merely be porting the concept to another geography?

If I visit SF and go to a great a great Hawaiian-Italian fusion restaurant (I random example), I don't think the proprietor would blame me of plagiarism if I started a Hawaiian-Italian joint in Boston.

Further, I see important differences between YC and competing accelerators. YC doesn't provide office space; TechStars and DreamIt do. I'm not sure which approach is better, but I do think it's a non-trivial difference.

[pg]

There isn't a geographic element to seed funding, though. That's the mistake they all make. People think they're starting the YC of city x, and then they discover that everyone is competing for the same national (and to some extent even international) founder pool.

You're right that office space is a distinction. It's not an innovation though. The incubators of the late 90s all did that. It was a novel move for YC to consciously discard it. So it's hard to say whether including office space was a deliberate change or a transcription error. Honestly, I'd guess the latter. The naive impulse when starting some kind of incubator is always to envision it as a space, rather than a set of relationships between people.

[Coax]

Point taken regarding the geographic element, your argument makes sense.

But I'm still having trouble understanding how your gripe with the other accelerators is legitimate....

In founding YC you came up with a wonderful, innovative model for birthing startups. Kudos for that. You invented a whole new paradigm of investment; that's f-ing cool. But whenever an entrepreneur comes up with an brilliant new way to do business, other entrepreneurs follow. I struggle to think of an instance where a company created a new industry and other folks didn't join. And I don't begrudge the followers; they are part of a dynamic that is central to the innovative beast that is American capitalism.

Perhaps other entrepreneurs follow because a single company can rarely support an entire industry. Perhaps they follow because they think they can do things subtly (or radically) different to improve the model. I'm not sure the reason is terribly important. The point is, inventing an industry niche does not give you a monopoly right on that niche ad infinitum.

The internet space is full of examples. Aliweb was (arguably) the first commercial search engine. I remember trying it back in 1994. At the time, it seemed damn cool. Then, soon after, I heard about a new search engine called Lycos, so I tried that. It was similar to Aliweb--I thought I slightly preferred the Lycos results, but I wasn't sure. Lycos begot Altavista; Altavista begot Dogpile; Dogpile begot Google. Each new search engine was doubtlessly dependent on its predecessors. And each new search engine had no obvious new innovation--changes were subtle, usually hidden under the hood.

I don't buy the argument that entrepreneurs should be frowned upon for entering a new industry without a radical new twist. Begrudging folks who are making subtle changes to your model seems petty. YC will, for the foreseeable future, have the name brand and network to attract better talent than all other accelerators. That--not a universal monopoly--is a proper reward for being the first mover.

[pg]

You're blowing this out of proportion. All I said at the event was that while I was slightly annoyed at being copied, the other YC-like organizations helped us by showing us when we mistakenly rejected people.

[Coax]

Okay, fair enough, I'm probably blowing this out of proportion. That comment caught my attention because I've always sensed antagonism between YC and the other accelerators, which seems unwarranted.

I think your responses in this thread do indicate that, to some extent, you think they have unfairly stolen the YC model and their existence is unjust.