[fijiaarone]

Here is a a key problem:

“It began with an effort to extract “sponsorship” dollars from local service providers: the lawyers, accountants, recruiters and PR firms that cater to startups.”

The YCombinator strategy was to give founders money and get them to focus on building a product.

Techstars, on the other hand, sought to extract money from founders to support their sponsors to nickel and dime dreamers and bog them down with time wasting distractions like articles of incorporation and formal business plans and commercial bank accounts and press releases —- because these are the vanity services their sponsors provide. You feel like you are building a company when you consult a lawyer and accountant creating an S-Corp and delegating shares.

But Y Combinator has had direct access to the unlimited fount of free money created by zero interest rates so they only needed to appease the vultures capitalists with pump and dump schemes.

Both methods are flawed, even if the stated aims of the organizations are noble.