All accelerator programs are not the same

http://blog.jwegener.com/2011/05/23/thoughts-on-techstars-y-combinator-differences/

by mikeleeorg • 15 years ago

76 33 15 years ago

blog.jwegener.com

jchonphoenix• 15 years ago

Since the poster went through TechStars, it would be interesting to see someone from YCs take on this.

jmonegro• 15 years ago

Yeah it feels a bit biased.

drusenko2• 15 years ago

I'll give it a shot.

There are very few truly hard problems in starting a tech startup; the hardest of those is product-market fit. Put another way, it's successfully solving a problem that a lot of people have.

The other hard problems are hiring/growing a team to be effective at scale, and finding distribution for your products.

Some things seem really hard but aren't: Finding a lawyer, drafting or negotiating contracts, getting incorporated, adding full time employees to payroll, getting health insurance for the company, getting an office, generating financial statements, finding mentors, raising money. They're all orders of magnitude less difficult than the above 3 hard problems.

About raising money: It's hard but it's not the hardest problem you will face. If you have successfully solved a problem a lot of people have, you will have proof of that (traction). A company with a great solution to a problem in a large market with traction will not have a hard time raising money. And in fact, YC helps you do so with Demo Day, once you have spent time focusing on the really important stuff.

So, if you spin it as "Look at all the things TechStars does for you that YC doesn't!", it sounds like a better deal. But if you look at it as "YC helps you focus on your #1 problem", it sounds quite different.

bkrausz2• 15 years ago

I agree, except I would say "web startup" instead of "tech startup". Tesla is a tech startup, and they have some damn hard engineering problems. Twitter didn't have engineering problems until they had to scale.

mattmaroon2• 15 years ago

I don't think I'd call YC isolationist. We did something almost every week outside of YC with other groups. I still talk to the people from our batch. I don't think I'd want to work in a shared office space personally, it would encourage too much work/life separation for that stage of the company.

I don't think spending my first month in meetings with mentors sounds very good either. You enjoy your mentor dating, I'll stick to working on my product. Your customers will tell you far more than any mentors ever could, I'd rather spend the extra time with them.

We left Silicon Valley. I don't regret having made the decision at the time, it allowed us to stay afloat until we raised money and then hit profitability. Now that we're scaling (19 people and growing) though it makes it very, very hard to find good programmers. We often ask ourselves if we should possibly open up out there too. I'm not really sure if Tech Stars being located somewhere else is a good thing or a bad thing on the whole.

You might get more "attention, focus, and exposure" from/to the Tech Stars founders, but from the press and investors you're way better off in YC. I don't think I can even name one Tech Stars company, seriously. As far as I know nobody is giving Tech Stars companies convertible notes sight unseen.

I don't know where he got the impression that YC doesn't focus on demo day. I can't tell you how many times PG said it would be the defining moment of our entire lives. (I'm exaggerating but only slightly.)

They certainly aren't interchangeable. One is Harvard, the other is Sheboygan Community College.

barry-cotter• 15 years ago

That was excellent, informative and balanced until the last line.

zmitri• 15 years ago

I've never been through either of them, but the stylistic differences highlighted in the article very much so reminded me of the difference in style between "Do More Faster: Techstars" and "Hackers and Painters." IMHO Hackers and Painters is a bit weird and subtle at times, but overall a beautiful piece of work that triggers inspiration from within (at least in my case). Whereas the Techstars book is true to its name, and recounts stories of people "doing more, faster." I could be completely wrong, but that's the kind of impression I get from the article.

justin• 15 years ago

As told by someone who hasn't gone through YC.

"TechStars' intimacy obviously gives you more attention, exposure, and access than YC." -- how can you make this claim having not gone through YC?

sudonim2• 15 years ago

Maybe the op should have qualified those more, but the key point in that paragraph was as 1 out of 10 rather than 1 out of 40, there's more focus on you.

ajju• 15 years ago

It's nice to hear about the positives of TechStars but there is an undercurrent of YC criticism in the article ("isolationist","cookie cutter" etc) that seems unfounded coming from someone who admits they weren't there and it distracts the reader from the positives of TechStars.

ericfrenkiel• 15 years ago

Any comparison beyond basic program structure will naturally reflect experiential bias. From the article, even a nominal effort at objectivity is difficult if not impossible for the author.

bkrausz2• 15 years ago

This article seems deliberately targeted at putting down a lot of the attributes of YC without being well-informed on them. Example:

   Now I've never been to a YC demo day, but it's my understanding
   that the whole event is a lot less formal and the pitches 
   are basically cookie-cutter and done in a rapid-fire manner.

The pitches are very much not cookie-cutter, and YC has ~4 different days throughout the summer where we're supposed to pitch each other and investors. PG tells us to reserve the couple of weeks before demo day to work on and practice our pitches.

Have you read http://ycombinator.com/atyc.html or spoken to any YC founders? We're usually very willing to discuss the program, and will share the good and the bad. There are always areas where any accelerator can be improved, YC included, but this article seems to have pointed out the differences between the two programs and assumed that they make YC a worse program. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

emmett• 15 years ago

He has four points of comparison, so I want to address them below from the perspective of someone who has done YC.

Location: I really don't see the NYC advantage. It's even MORE expensive than SV, there are fewer angels and VCs, and the culture worships investment banking instead of startups. I would say NYC is probably the second best place to start a startup after SV, but it's a distant second.

Mentorship and events: This does seem to accurately describe a difference between the two programs. In YC you'd never[1] spend an entire month (let alone the first month) in meetings. And YC is mostly about advice from YC rather than from a larger group of mentors. [2]

Size of the program: YC is much bigger than TechStars. Of course, YC can be bigger because it gets so many more applicants. While you may share access to the YC partners with more startups, they commit enough time to make sure everyone has all the access they need.

Demo Day: If you've ever been to a YC demo day, you know it's incredibly intense. Three days of presentations to many of the top investors in the world, packing the house. The presentations may be shorter, but it doesn't seem to hurt anyone's ability to raise money.[3]

[1] There are probably exceptions to this, for people who somehow already have products coming into YC, but offhand I can't think of one.

[2] Of course YC can introduce you to pretty much anyone at this point due to the size of the network, but I don't think that's really the central point of YC.

[3] Side note: I find the complaint that the pitches are "informal" a little weird, since I think one of the things that makes startups so dangerous is exactly that they are allowed to skip the formalities and cut to the chase.

mattmaroon2• 15 years ago

WRT NYC, there's probably a big advantage to the less competition for talent. When you're recruiting out of college, NYC is probably as easy of a sell as SF, if not easier, and you're not fighting Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for those same people. A lot of people choose where they want to live and then where they want to work, especially programmers since a guy with a CS degree from MIT or CMU can get a job anywhere.

leelin• 15 years ago

Possibly true given that startup employees tend to also not mind being Google / Facebook employees. However, don't discount the Wall Street / financial industry pull. For hacker employees, median cash compensation in finance dominates startups.

Plus, the number of hacker-friendly finance firms doing heavy recruiting seems to be on the rise (as a first order approximation, that's any finance firm run by mathematicians or computer scientists).

thomasgerbe2• 15 years ago

"When you're recruiting out of college, NYC is probably as easy of a sell as SF, if not easier, and you're not fighting Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for those same people."

If we're talking about programmers, I think you're also fighting with Wall Street and $$$'s.

thomasgerbe2• 15 years ago

Having lived in both SF and NYC, I would say NYC is more expensive IF you live in Manhattan. If you live in Brooklyn (which is not a bad 'consolation' prize since the bars/concert halls/people are great), it's pretty comparable.

I also found it much easier to find designers because of the agencies/firms that choose NY as their HQ. Living in SF now, I'm still trying to find where they hang out.

earbitscom• 15 years ago

I agree with @ajju. The article claims to be unbiased but "isolationist" and "cookie cutter" are neither objective, nor appropriate ways to describe the YC process.

Not only have I formed amazing friendships through a very adequate amount of time with the other YC founders in w2011, but I've slept on their couches, gone out drinking, and leaned on them for plenty of support, as have they with our team. What I got by being "isolated" was an even stronger bond with my own team, which I wouldn't trade for anything.

As for cookie cutter presentations, when you're presenting 40+ companies, investors simply cannot sit through 8 minute presos. More importantly, PG doesn't cram you into a room with 800 people. He breaks Demo Day into several events. It lets you mingle with nearly every single person you want to after your pitch. It also means that, if you have one bad presentation, you didn't mess up for the whole group. It sounds like TechStars gets through that by having you practice a lot more, but I have to agree with PG that it's not a good use of your time and I don't recall any of our companies having a hard time presenting very well.

At the end of the day, TechStars sounds like an incredible opportunity. While a comparison might be helpful in choosing which one is right for your company, I think anybody should consider themselves lucky for getting into either program.

sudonim2• 15 years ago

I know the op and based on our conversations if he came across as being critical of or putting down YC, that probably was not his intention. While he was in techstars we talked about the differences and he had a very high opinion of the way the YC program worked.

I read the article as an attempt to state the differences between the two programs from his point of view, not as a criticism of YC. Since he's not participating in this thread it seemed like people were jumping to the defense of YC by attacking the article. That knee jerk is unfounded.

MenaMena123• 15 years ago

The success of the startups speak for themselves. I am not sure whats the records are, but the article talks about Techstars being in a variety of cities and meeting alot of friends and having a huge Demo day.

In all honesty I feel like YC is just straight up and too the point. They don't need to work in an office, if you like a startup you'll go hangout together. They don't need to hype the Demo day, they just need the right few people in the room.

Techstars seems to have people from all over the place, which I prefer not to have. If I want to meet people I want to talk the the ones in the valley, because they understand.

I haven't been in either program, but follow both and YC just seems to wipe out the unnecessary old school corporate things. TechStars seems like you better be a social butterfly and talk with everyone even the ones that don't know anything about.

More mentors does not mean better. I would take 2 really good mentors over a 1000.

neworbit• 15 years ago

As someone who has never done either, but has done startups, this doesn't make Techstars sound that attractive to me. Seems to make a lot more sense to focus on building your company, and save the schmoozing with 30 other entrepreneurs for happy hour.

Mentorship sounds great either way, but you might want that from someone more aligned with your market (not that it's bad to have advisors skilled in startup growth). Saying "you're going to spend the first month in meetings instead of building your first product" sounds like really the sort of thing you probably left your BigCo job to avoid, no?

pg• 15 years ago

"your first month will be spent mostly in meetings rather than intensely focused on building your actual product. That's almost certainly not the case with YC."

I can definitely confirm that.

jack7890• 15 years ago

Is that seriously true? As a graduate of DreamIt Ventures, I can confirm that it's also not the case with DreamIt. We spent most of our time building, first month included.

jgershen• 15 years ago

I had to reread the article to confirm that that sentence is actually in there. I honestly can't believe that a program which focuses on launching successful companies prioritizes "building your actual product" below meetings and finding mentorship.

I can't remember who said it, but I read somewhere that "the goal of every startup should be to stop being a startup" (the moral was that a startup is a fledgling business, and you should be trying to mature that business rather than staying in the beginning stages forever). If you're more interested in meeting people and talking about startups than you are in actually working on your startup, something is probably wrong. Not that this is a bad thing, but you should reevaluate whether being a startup founder is right for you.

Gaussian• 15 years ago

That comment by the author, along with some others, makes TechStars seem more like going to grad school and less like intrepidly going balls-out to make a company work in the real world. I'm not saying that's the reality of the situation, but that's what his argument seems to posit. If that's indeed the case, I'll pick the latter (YC).

jfong• 15 years ago

"Talk About Something People Want"

dtran• 15 years ago

I don't understand why YC is even mentioned in this blog post if the purpose is to encourage people to apply to Techstars (other than the obvious: to be linkbait). The best way to get people to apply is just to talk about your experiences and how the program helped your company, regardless of how it compares to other programs (Just google to find dozens of great blog posts by founders on their YC experience, none of which trash other programs while claiming to be unbiased).

Sure, the OP mentions that lots of YC and Techstars founders have already sung the praises of each, but I for one still enjoy reading about each company's unique experience, so more posts in the vein is in no way redundant. It's also much, MUCH more exciting than all this YC vs. Techstars nonsense. Let's keep the focus on the startups rather than the startup accelerators.

edanm• 15 years ago

I don't entirely agree. I think of it like source code - sending a diff is much more efficient than sending a completely new file.

In the same way, as someone who knows a lot about YC from reading numerous posts about it over the years, it's much easier to understand TechStars in terms of how it's different from YC.

fedd• 15 years ago

biased or not, the poster tried to make an explicit comparison as he sees it, i didnt read something like that before. posts like this decrease the obscurity.

gyardley• 15 years ago

This article is being misread by almost every commenter on this thread. The author is - very politely to TechStars - pointing out the many good things about Y Combinator, and some of the flaws with the TechStars model.

As currently constructed, TechStars in NYC will benefit a startup that's already built a product and is looking for sales / marketing / fundraising assistance more than a startup that's just beginning to build a product. The relative performance of OnSwipe, Red Rover, and CrowdTwist in the last NYC class serve as examples.

Obviously I don't think TechStars is completely useless for pre-product startups, because I've got an application into TechStars for my pre-product startup. I suspect it'll still be quite helpful. But it would be nice to have a highly-regarded, Y Combinator-style incubator in NYC for those of us who would sooner gnaw off our arm than move to the Bay Area. California is simply not for everybody.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

"Y Combinator is an isolationist model [for lack of a better word I use isolationist, but the negative intention of the word is not intended]"

This like saying "you're fat... no offense".

"This blog post isn't going to sing the praises of TechStars"

It's hard not to see this as exactly that. YC gets "isolationist", TS gets "collaborative"; YC gets several sentences describing cons to their approach, one mentioning pro; TS gets several mentioning pros, one mentioning con.

I like the idea of comparing and contrasting the different "accelerators", but this is clearly biased towards TS and uninformed on the YC side. Of course naturally it will be hard to find someone intimately familiar with multiple accelerators' inner workings. Perhaps external investors or journalists.

replicatorblog• 15 years ago

"Most people talk about TechStars and Y Combinator and interchangeably. But most people don't understand that the programs are radically different accelerator models"

Yes, YC has a track record of large exits (Heroku), high profile companies (Drop Box), and buzz/relationships with the most important investors (Sequoia/SV Angel).

TechStars is "Different" and lacks all of those things to this point.

Granted TS is a little newer so its not an apples to apples comparison, but does anyone seriously think the benefits are at all balanced? The press does, but mostly because it helps them fill out a narrative, but YC and TS belong in the same category the way a Maserati and a Schwinn both fit in the category of wheeled transportation.

All accelerator programs are not the same

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