Capital Factory - Austin-based YC Style Incubator

http://capitalfactory.com/

by jonmc12 • 17 years ago

41 47 17 years ago

capitalfactory.com

quellhorst• 17 years ago

Nice. Austin is a really nice place to run a company too.

Good weather, not too expensive, educated population.

lliiffee• 17 years ago

This is obviously trivial, but why have a "* - required" thing on the application form when every element is required?

owkaye2• 17 years ago

The fields are not all required, but the web page itself is certainly bad -- it's black with gray text that has so little contract to the background that I have to "Select All" just to be able to read it. They may be capable of doing great things but I am so turned off by their failure to provide a comfortably readable web page that I question whether or not they can handle the bigger issues.

joshuabaer4• 17 years ago

Thanks for the feedback Owkaye - the current website is just a Typepad blog that we threw up for the launch, but we have a designer doing a custom template for us that should be up there soon. We'll focus on making the text more readable.

joshuabaer4• 17 years ago

It's a Google form that pipes into a spreadsheet. We can't really control the display of the * but its important that they are all marked as required so it won't let you submit the form with a field that's missing.

okeumeni6• 17 years ago

Kudos! I love Austin.

The more these YC style company exist the better chances are good startup will get exposure. Who knows the ones PG missed can actually become tomorrow’s big idea.

wavesplash• 17 years ago

May be a great group and a terrific location, but what an awful name.

Allocator2008• 17 years ago

Actually this could be a take off from "Nightmare Factory", a haunted house here in Austin that was around for a few years (Not here anymore - House of Torment and the Horror Haunted House are the two big ones now.) When I saw the name, "Capital Factory", I immediately thought of "Nightmare Factory" anyway, but maybe that's just me! :-)

natrius• 17 years ago

I like the name. It's in Austin, so lots of stuff around there is called Capital something or other. This takes that trend and makes it punny.

ksvs• 17 years ago

It's better than most of the YC clones' names.

pxlpshr5• 17 years ago

I love Austin as a town and people have that southern hospitality charm. The university and talent pool is great too. However, Austin suffers from the big fish, small pond syndrome. Things are changing slowly but surely, hopefully Capital Factory does well and empowers young entrepreneurs. Josh Baer's OtherInbox is a kick ass product too. But idk, ycom is difficult to reproduce if your intentions are fiscal bound.

In other big cities, finding mentors is a dime a dozen. In Austin, it's a lot more difficult to find that type of leadership which is why so many talented people leave and gravitate toward the coasts I think. The new Mayor seems to be a lot more progressive, he's got a twitter account even. yay!

http://twitter.com/bmccracken

I'd also say that with the economic squeeze taken into account, TX is still relatively shielded. It's a great place to be doing business, and a relaxed low cost lifestyle. I've been seeing a lot of out-of-town plates lately, but we don't spit on you. ;)

pxlpshr5• 17 years ago

Sorry, I should say that he's not the new mayor... yet :)

old-gregg• 17 years ago

Agreed 100%. I've been here for 9 years and while I love this place, I'm considering to move. "Small pond" indeed: 3 out of 4 recruiters who called me within last half year were all looking for RoR coders for Baer's startup (1st mentor in their list), the other Rails shop in town being FiveRuns. This applies pretty much to everything software: the city's tech scene is divided between about 4 well-known "gangs" of execs and entrepreneurs with essentially the same people running the show.

aminuit• 17 years ago

It's true about there being a ton of talent in Austin. The problem is that most of it works for the really big hitters like Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, AMD, Dell, etc. Most of the entrepreneurial focus seems to be centered around well-paid consulting work.

When Google opened their soon to be closed downtown office, they had a mixer and invited alot the Austin tech community. I went expecting to find a serious startup crowd, but it was largely the same big names you see everywhere in Austin. It was rather disappointing.

I hope that Capital Factory is successful if for no other reason than to give some of us the opportunity to escape our corporate jobs and do something really interesting for a change.

joshuabaer4• 17 years ago

Our intentions are not financial (see the philosophy page). All of the mentors in Capital Factory are doing it because we love working with young entrepreneurs. We've all built and sold companies and even getting a 100x return on $5k won't change our lives.

Putting up some money and getting some equity is analogous to playing poker with dollar bills instead of chips. It increases our emotional attachment and shows that every mentor is really committed.

pxlpshr5• 17 years ago

That's an awfully crass analogy to make.

khangtoh• 17 years ago

yea, Austin has quite a tech scene going, affordable city to live in and it's actually quite nice city to live in too. Don't forget Texas BBQ all year round!

Russpd• 17 years ago

This is cool, are there any other programs like this out there except Y Combinator and Capital Factory? I would have thought that the success of Y Combinator would launch a lot of copycats

incomethax2• 17 years ago

There are a couple, Techstars [http://www.techstars.com] in Seattle is one that comes to mind. Another is iVentures10 in Chicago [http://www.iventures10.com]

However, YC still has the brand and the experience with this format.

okeumeni6• 17 years ago

What do you mean by "YC still has the brand"?

Raphael• 17 years ago

It's actually http://techstars.org/, and they operate out of Boulder, CO. Were you thinking of Founders Co-op?

ardell4• 17 years ago

Shotput Ventures is a new one launching in Atlanta this summer. It will follow the YC model to the letter.

http://www.shotputventures.com/

pg• 17 years ago

Man, there are getting to be so many of these things. I hadn't even heard about this one myself yet.

sachinag• 17 years ago

This is much better than third-rate wannabe programs like iVentures10 and whatnot - all the free services are explicit and from top-tier firms. This is a serious option for people considering YC and TechStars. I'd venture to say that this is superior to LaunchBox, as well.

zhyder• 17 years ago

It seems like a well-designed program, but why are they targeting only 3 selections? Seems like a lot of work for just 3.

joshuabaer4• 17 years ago

We're just doing 3 companies this year because it's the first year and we want to start simple and make sure each company gets lots of attention. We'd like to see it grow to 10 companies in future years.

Capital Factory - Austin-based YC Style Incubator

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