[gruseom]

No, it's not "the same thing". It's not equal-by-value, and it's certainly not equal-by-reference, which is what the title implied, at least to me: I saw it and thought "YC in Atlanta? But I thought they just decided to stick to the Bay Area!"

sanjayparekh, I think you should be a good sport and change this to something less misleading. It's great that you're launching a YC-inspired fund. The more the merrier as far as founders are concerned. Why not announce it accurately?

[rjurney]

Not sure what you mean, where did he say it was Y Combinator? Did the title already change?

[gruseom]

Yeah, they changed it. I won't quote the original here since it was probably just overenthusiasm and these guys have every right to be excited.

[sanjayparekh]

yeah, you guys are right - I probably should have said "YC inspired" instead of "YC in Atlanta". my bad.

[gruseom]

I'm sure it was well-intentioned. Separate question - why didn't you say "YC inspired", or something like that? Everybody who isn't dumb knows where the model came from (and you don't want dumb applicants). So why not just be open about the fact and celebrate it? It would increase my respect for you, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. And if you've changed the model, why not say so explicitly and talk about why? It would at a minimum make for an interesting blog post.

This has puzzled me for a long time about the other YC clones, the ones who insist on pretending that they sprang up sui generis and take all these pains to act original. Who do they think they're fooling? How can they not see the incongruence of insulting founders' intelligence this way? All they're achieving by acting so prissy about it is drawing attention to how inferior a copy they really are, and what a culture gap there is between them and the founders they're addressing.

[sanjayparekh]

So I guess there is a two part answer. I should have said that in the title of this post but the wording I used was confusing and removed by the powers that be - as it should be. I didn't change it to say "inspired by" because it's a moot point.

We also didn't say it on the site because we didn't want people to think we were approved or licensed in some way to be YC in Atlanta. We aren't and we didn't ask for approval. In fact PG made a comment on a previous post that he hadn't heard of us and couldn't keep up with the clones.

That said, we are taking the YC forms (thanks for open sourcing those!) and using those as a base for us. There are likely some minor changes for Georgia law but for this initial round we are innovating close to zero. We want to try it first and see what happens. If we want to innovate after that, we will.

That said, I wouldn't say just "inspired by" I'd say "heavily inspired by".