Some of the feedback here is a little harsh. This kid applied for YC when he was 18 and now he's only 20 years old. I wish I had launched something and had it fail when I was 18. When I was 18 I wasn't even finishing my software projects. It wasn't until a few years later that I would launch something, it fail and I'd realize I need to re-evaluate my approach.
He's young and making mistakes, but if he operates on a long time horizon I think he's doing pretty good. He realizes the he needs to research a market before creating a product (customers own the problem, you own the solution).
His mistake here is that he's angry about YC (which is unjustified, they were right to deny him) so he wants to make an "incubator". That's probably not a good idea, but he's only 20 so has plenty of time to fail more.
I think he knows what to do though. Research an idea first before building. So, the smart thing to do would be to find a vertical that intrigues him and start engaging with people in that industry trying to identify problems they may they need solving. B2B (specifically B2SmallB) is always easier than B2C for a solo founder.
I personally think the criticisms are too polite, not direct enough. It’s fine if a person spends time trying and failing on their own, but this person’s idea is explicitly to influence other people, knowingly, with no experience or reputation. The targets are the most inexperienced, naive, passionate candidates.
It’s likely that the absence of a project like this, led by a person with zero or possibly negative experience, would be better.
Isn't the origin story for Stanford University that the founders wanted to be benefactors for another Ivy League school but were snubbed (classism)?
There are a lot of adversities that steel a person's resolve. Rejection is one of them, if not as sexy as personal or family trauma ("I became a neurologist because my childhood friend died of seizures").
And what if that's part of his schtick? If he specializes in YC's blind spots, then he has an ice breaker. Hey YC didn't want to talk to you, get in line to talk to me instead.
We the public get some data points on whether YC's blind spots are rational or not. We all avoid things we are bad at. Some of those things everyone is bad at, so nobody would fault you for avoiding them too. But if you are good at it, people will throw money at you to deal with the situation.
The problem is that he’s starting to get involved with other people’s businesses before he even understands how business or startups work. It’s not clear if he’s ever worked at any company other than his own, yet he’s trying to mentor others on how to start and operate businesses. Incubators traditionally trade mentorship and other valuable resources in exchange for equity.
If he’s taking equity (not stated in his post but assumed if he’s operating as an incubator) then it’s right to be more critical about what he’s offering in exchange. University students can be vulnerable to entering into bad equity deals or working arrangements operating under the guise of incubators, accelerators, or angle investors.
I think that's getting a little ahead of ourselves. The guy built a landing page that links to a google form.
Who knows if he'll get any interest. And if he does, founders need to do due diligence on their investors too. It goes both ways, the market for private equity is relatively illiquid non-commoditized and informationally asymetric which means it requires a higher transaction cost and due diligence.
I don't think it's constructive to shame someone for trying something new even if they're not super experienced in it. What is the threshold one needs to cross before they try an idea? There's a balance between gaining experience and taking action, maybe he needs to move a little to the other side of that spectrum, but he'll learn that and in the end there is no effort without error. I don't think his incubator is going to be very successful so it's no big loss to anyone
> What is the threshold one needs to cross before they try an idea?
That’s missing the point. The concerns aren’t about his personal business. The concerns are about the students he’s trying to influence and take equity from.
Once you start putting yourself in a position to take equity in the labor and businesses of University students, the bar is higher.
> I don't think his incubator is going to be very successful so it's no big loss to anyone
You’re still missing the point. If his incubator isn’t very successful, then presumably any of the students who become involved with his incubator won’t be successful either. It’s not fair to the University students to be drawn into an incubator program that we can all apparently agree is not on a track for success. I just hope Universities are smart enough to not endorse this idea.
It's not going to be successful, not because it's gonna gain a lot of traction and then go bust, but because no one's going to sign up for this. Look at the comments in this thread, read his landing page. It's obvious you wouldn't take this seriously as an incubator. It's not even an incubator, it's just google form he's using to do customer development. He'll probably have some conversations with the few people he gets to fill it out and then realize it's too much work or it's a bad fit and he'll move on to his next idea or maybe it'll morph into something else. Who knows? You make it seem like he's this charlatan peddling some false incubator product to unsuspecting founders. He's a 20 year old college student from Macedonia dipping his toe into something.
If I understand this correctly, the author was rejected from YC, failed to get any customer interest for his own startup, so he’s pivoting to running Hackathons in Universities as an incubator.
> Univation is the way to change the process and implement the above-listed solutions. An incubator program, for Universities, to let Student Founders start 1) on an already developed idea and 2) make them into teams.
This sounds like any other themed Hackathon event without pre-formed teams. My concern is that he doesn’t mention what, if any, financial interest he takes in their output.
If he’s simply coordinating students with experts in a mentoring environment for fun and learning, that’s great.
If he’s taking advantage of students to do work on other people’s (“experts”) ideas and keeping large portions of the equity for himself and experts, that’s not so great.
Until we have the details, I’m skeptical. I’ve seen a lot of great things come out of university entrepreneurship programs, but there are constantly sharks in the water around enterprising college students. If you find yourself approached by one of these programs, make sure to find an external mentor without a financial interest who can provide some guidance and review terms for you.
I'd recommend you abandon this idea. What attracts most people to YC is money, connections, and advice. It doesn't sound like you're in a position to offer these things.
If you need help figuring out to work on, Startup School is a good option. Reading Paul Graham's essays on ideas should help. His advice is not all applicable to people outside his bubble but his advice on ideas is excellent.
Choosing the idea is the most critical thing you will do. The difference between an idea that seems good and one that is actually good can be very difficult to determine. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to launch multiple projects and see which gets traction. In any case, the ability to iterate on multiple projects and then multiple versions is a hugely powerful ability.
I'd recommend you focus on solving some problems you have experienced personally. Want a GIF meme generator for your Discord channel? Do that. Or anything regardless of how trivial it is but just focus on making it grow. Worry about the financial aspects after you have learned how to make something succeed. Maybe you will find that your project can't be easily monetized but at least you will learn what market success feels like for the next project. Or you can decide to do only things that might have a good financial outcome, that could work too, but it still would be very good to solve a problem you have experienced.
I was going to say... he got rejected by YC (and YC turned out to be 100% correct), started one business that had the least possible success, somehow made a lot of assumptions about business success after that, and now is starting a program to mentor others?
At least it doesn’t really sound like an actual incubator, it’s more of a school club for people with startup interest. Unlike a real incubator where you get something like space or money, this is basically just a mailing list. The members get nothing but also basically invest nothing.
The act of building something with peers is far from nothing. Having a space to experiment and create is in itself pretty useful and does require some overhead, so there is value being added. Of course it depends on what level of oversight is provided/required that will determine how good it is.
If you anonymize the details it sounds a bit like a motivational speaker.
It doesn't cost me much for him to try, so I'm content to sit here and watch, and make sure I have some microwave popcorn bags in reserve should things get interesting, for any definition of 'interesting'.
> ... started one business that had the least possible success, somehow made a lot of assumptions about business success after that, and now is starting a program to mentor others?
maybe it's all an elaborate ruse to become president of the USA?
A man who runs an incubator in Portland once told me that anyone can run an incubator one year. Almost anyone can run it two years. It's years three and beyond that make all the difference.
With that in mind, I'm exciting to see where this incubator is in 2023!
I regularly see incubators (including yc, but the worst offenders are e.g. indie bio) pick ideas that are actually physically/scientifically/practically impossible, or socially difficult with no plan to solve it. And the proxy that is used to select them/reject other candidates is 'team'. PG even says that the most important criterion is team.
Of course, this is not necessarily a poor model for an incubator, as, if you're someone that can hoodwink an incubator into buying into snake oil with your personality, you're likely to be able to hoodwink the next round of investors, or better yet, all the way to an exit. Greater fools theory and all that.
I wouldn't be surprised if those running incubators know this and therefore don't bother with more than cursory due diligence as the next round will assume early due diligence was done/"the correct pivot was/would've been chosen due to mentor input", due to the power of social validation. The incentives are not correctly aligned, anyway.
I wonder if this harebrained idea might actually have a shot at breaking the diligence problem.
I get people who succeeded preaching their view on what made them succeed (even if it often mis-attributes luck to spurious factors). But what is the recent trend of people who haven't even succeeded in their field preaching about what it takes to succeed and being listened to? Youtube videos, that coding career book that was posted here recently, this incubator, etc. I mean, I get the Dunning-Kruger effect as to why they preach but why are people paying so much attention to them?
I remember seeing it a lot with the “digital nomad” scene. People would try some bottom of the barrel business like drop shipping, fail or eke out a living in some much cheaper country, and then realize that most of the money to be made was being a personality and selling guides to other experience-less, aspiring DNs.
Realistically, people who were good at the actual business side wouldn’t give the special sauce away.
We’re launching a live course on software startup formation with Shawn Kung, Venture Partner at AV8 Ventures, a VC firm based in Silicon Valley. He’s also an angel investor at Y Combinator Demo Day as well as a Stanford Lecturer.
The course includes:
- 6 weekly live lectures with Shawn and all the other students (2h each)
- Guest speakers (founders & investors from Shawn’s network)
- 1-1 office hours
- Unlimited Q&A on the course private Slack channel
- Startup mini project where students will form teams and pitch a business idea to Shawn
- Lifetime access to Shawn’s Slack channel & private LinkedIn group for alumni
We are 75% full. Class is capped at 50 students. The live course will kick off on July 23. Schedule for the lectures is 5-7pm PT.
True, and if you think about it, the answer is decidedly ‘yes.’ Humans are capable of building up almost any skill or craft from scratch, from a new language to teaching yourself guitar to independently inventing portions of math.
He's young and making mistakes, but if he operates on a long time horizon I think he's doing pretty good. He realizes the he needs to research a market before creating a product (customers own the problem, you own the solution).
His mistake here is that he's angry about YC (which is unjustified, they were right to deny him) so he wants to make an "incubator". That's probably not a good idea, but he's only 20 so has plenty of time to fail more.
I think he knows what to do though. Research an idea first before building. So, the smart thing to do would be to find a vertical that intrigues him and start engaging with people in that industry trying to identify problems they may they need solving. B2B (specifically B2SmallB) is always easier than B2C for a solo founder.