Y Combinator — Why most successful Startups come from Silicon Valley
If it takes more than a sentence to explain what you are doing, it’s almost always a sign that what you are doing is too complicated. — Sam Altman
In the United States most of the people know Y Combinator. For those who don’t, I will explain in short. It’s an early stage investment firm and probably the most famous and most successful seed-stage startup accelerator on the planet.
Twice a year they invest $120k in a number of startup in return for 7% of the company’s equity. The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months, to refine their pitch to investors.
Some of the most popular startups which have completed the Y Combinator Accelerator program are Dropbox, Airbnb, 9GAG and Reddit. Here you can find a filtered list with 700 companies shown.
I think today one of the reasons why most of Innovation and successful startups comes from US, especially from Silicon Valley is Y Combinator. In Europe for example you have no Y Combinator. When you think about startups in Europe you think first about Zalando (Zappo copy) and Wimdu (Airbnb copy) . It’s one of the early investment by Rocket Internet.
The difference between Y Combinator and Rocket Internet
What Rocket Internet is to execution, Y Combinator is to product. Y Combinator would never dream of accepting a startup copying an already existing product or business model. Y Combinator tend to have a new product or business model that builds or combines elements of other business models to offer something unique that solves a problem or makes life easier, faster or better for the end user.
An important reason of many reasons why Europe for example is failing to create more unicorns at the same pace as the US is
European startups ask for permission instead of forgiveness.
To truly innovate a company has to break conventions and sometimes go to the edge of what is legal and deemed acceptable.
A great free resource for everybody which is interested in Startups is the series of video lectures, initially given at Stanford in Fall 2014 How to Start a Startup
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