If you’re interested in very early stage funding models and haven’t come across Y Combinator yet, check it out. Y Combinator organizes summer startup school and founder programs and provides seed capital to teams of entrepreneurs with compelling ideas. It’s already cranked out several notable companies.
I was talking on the phone with Danny Newman the other day about my PocketFuzz post – id345‘s latest project. In looking into his background, I found that after high school and while at CU Boulder, he just started cranking out his ideas. Danny actually pitched an idea to Y Combinator recently, and was turned down.
It makes me wonder how many other Danny’s there are out there who just go and take a job with some large company right out of college, losing their entrepreneurial “spark” in the process. Not everyone has the courage and support necessary to immediately pursue their ideas. However these kids who are still in school or are just graduating are probably in the best position of their life to take such risks, as Y Combinator partner Paul Graham points out in his “Hiring is Obsolete” essay.
Perhaps they just need a little funding and a creative and supportive model like Y-Incubator here in Colorado to start coming out of the woodwork.
What do you think of Y Combinator? Would you like to see something like this in Colorado? Are there things like this that I’m not aware of?
Colorado NEEDS a Y Combinator, a way to allow ideas to fly. Too much focus on Bplans helps you believe your own BS and wastes a lot of energy trying to convince domain inexperts of the value. Test the market quickly and find out what exactly is needed/desired, build it sell it, then go find expansion capital.
This was a great post from a little more than a year ago. ItÂ’s great that you did not just talk about the idea but you did something about it. Thanks for providing leadership in the department of ‘making things happen’. For us to stack up with the SVs and Bostons we need more people like you: DOERS.