How to start a Y Combinator?

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Subtitled: How to surround yourself with smart people outside of academia?

To me, the greatest advantage of being a CS professor, is being surrounded by lots of smart, motivated colleagues & students. The greatest disadvantage -- is that much of research appears to be about doing "new" rather than "useful" things, and funding is governed by NSF/DARPA rather than market demands.

YCombinator seems to have this figured out -- put yourself in a position where students who want to launch startups come to you. So, question is: how do you start something like this?

[martinrigby]

Without wanting to take away from the pioneering example of Y Combinator itself, I like the way that Redgate, the Cambridge UK based SQL tools developer, has set about setting up Springboard as an adjunct to the main business. The objective is to strengthen the Cambridge developer cluster to the benefit of everyone in that community and economy including, even if indirectly, Redgate itself. Besides speaking to Paul Graham about Y Combinator, I'd speak to either of Neil Davidson or Simon Galbraith the Redgate founders.