I believe YC's program is quite revolutionary, both in terms of supporting innovative businesses and also as an educational opportunity; I agree that right now, they are probably the best model to follow, but copying the application verbatim doesn't reflect well on your organization.

For example, do you have any other ideas you thought of applying with? One may be something we've been waiting for. I'd be very surprised if at the first time of execution, you are already so confident about your judgment of the internet startup landscape. It's reasonable to assume that YC really has things in mind. In this case, you are only waiting for things to come into your mind.

If the YC method is good, people will learn from it, and it will flourish. But seeing how yeurope does it right now, I will be wary.

i know that this is a big problem, and does not reflect well on us.

we've had some failed startup attempts 4 years ago, e.g. in the area of social sorting. we certainly can't provide the level of depth and experience pg has, but we've been trying our best to learn for a long time now. we're talking to lots of people in austria and throughout europe, and are trying to get more people to support and make this work.

we have been working on getting things going fulltime for 4 years now, but the situation is a lot harder in europe. once there are some successful startups around, we hope to convince them to join the board. we just don't have any people to look up to here, and got to bootstrap somehow.

we've been pretty busy in preparing the ground for this, both with our hacklab, but also with contacts to all kinds of people who might help out with this, private, corporate and political. we even founded an interest group for startup founders (IG Startup), to lobby with politics, and are actively discussing their ICT funding strategies with the respective politicians and decision makers.

our hacklab launched one year ago, after 2 years of trying to finance it, and has a few hundred users already. the problem is the financing option for yeurope has just arisen half a week ago, and if we don't launch now - we might never do it.

It speaks well of you that you're willing to address criticism on here. Good luck, I hope it goes well for you.

I second rms... but again, you shouldn't skimp on your website and your app, in any way; it's your public face. If you want to tailor the program to local apps, then it needs more thought. "We're looking for great people. We don't care that much whether your idea is the best thing since sliced bread."

How in the world are you going to measure "great"? It's definitely not going to come through via just the 28 YC questions. They have a news site for what it's worth. A monster hacker team that cannot come up with a sellable idea is merely a great team of coders -- nothing but.

And why does politics need to be involved?

well, these are tough questions. the answers to these questions heavily involve european culture, so i'm having a really hard time accurately portrying the situation. but i'll try my best to answer.

europe probably has just about as much cash, and as much education as the US. but according to the aho group report (http://ec.europa.eu/invest-in-research/action/2006_ahogroup_en.htm), named after the former finnish prime minister esko aho, the ICT field, despite having some of the lowest initial investment costs in all of high tech, is the most severly underdeveloped.

the reasons for this, he muses are both a lack of entrepreneurial spirit, and a lack of funding in the pre-seed areas.

i'd like to believe the first point is not an absolute. we have great people with the skills and desire to create cool applications. on the other hand you can't just walk up to a rich friend here, who'll give you cash if your idea is great. there are no rich friends, and even if you know one or two, they haven't made their cash in a startup, or even in the off chance that they have, they're a business guy. businesses are started by business people here. if you want to start a business, you have no chance to get cash from someone from your world, who has been on that path before.

so you're left with public funding, and public funding involves politics. but public funding doesn't work for tech founders either - the lisbon goal of 3% GDP for r&d mostly goes into empty tech parks and research centers by big corporations. incorporating a limited liability company here requires at least 17000 euros, with a liability of up to 34000 euros.

if you want to apply for any kind of funding, you require months of meeting bureaucrats and writing applications - a different one for each place. these people will tell you after months your projects are either not innovative, or they won't work. but the budget is there, so people claim everything is alright. then they fund projects by friends, or stupid things with avatars running around in browser plugins.

the only places to get entrepreneurial information are bureaucrats. you're very unlikely to know anyone who started his or her own tech business without sheer luck and without their own money. there's no place to get advice, except other people who are on the same path right now. you usually don't start businesses before you've saved a significant amount of money and are probably well beyond your 40s. also people will discourage you, because it is seen as very risky.

we are adressing these problems both by creating non-profit community centers where you're surrounded by like-minded people, and to which we invite people we think of as insightful, and by actively lobbying for better legislation to support startups, and by making access to initial cash easier. of the few techie-founders we have here, most are single-founders, because it is really hard to convince two friends to found with you if they can barely pay their rent while studying and working at the same time.

for the argment about our capability to accurately judge the merit of the applications i have to say: you're unfairly postulating that we're unskilled because we have no huge successes to show yet. i have a hard time to counter that argument right now, but trust me, we're working hard to do just that.

Thanks for the excellent response; it contrasts interestingly with the most recent Global Competitiveness Report: (Finland 2nd, USA 6th) http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/gcp/Global%20Competitiveness%20Report/index.htm

I don't know the scene over there. But I'm guessing this is why Wikio got 12M(!) in funding?

To clarify, I'm definitely not calling you unskilled and am not qualified to do so. I'm attacking your copying of a question that implies you have solid experience in the field as a seed funding organization, operating like YC. I don't even know their inner workings.

But public funding + politics + international applicants seems to entail a lot more than seed funding + support. In another message (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15641) you said work permits are available if the idea is good enough. Do the politicians have a say in the selection process?

I think your effort is great. Lots of people will be watching; I hope things can go smoothly for you.

btw. this is an awesome quote from the aho report:

"Apart from more resources for R&D and innovation, a paradigm change that would preserve European values in a new social structure is needed for the achievement of the goal of an Innovative Europe." - Aho Group Report "Creating an Innovative Europe" (January 2006)

You should add a disclaimer to your site that says, "We are not affiliated with Y-Combinator, we just ripped off their name, funding model, and application." Otherwise, people may get confused.

done

A general question and a specific one:

Who are you? Metalab has an extensive website, but who's behind YEurope? You know that the funding is only a small part of what YC provides -- you won't be able to live up to pg, rtm et al, which is expected, but right now you don't say anything about yourself, so why should a prospective applicant value your connections and advice?

And: One of the things YC does is that it sets up a company for you. YEurope is in Austria. Austria is a country where it's expensive to incorporate (pg has written about how that is one problem for startups in Europe [1]). What are you going to do about that?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

hello benja, i'm paul and i'm the one who mainly started this. your reservations are absolutely justified. who am i to think i can do this? i haven't had any huge successes to show yet, and i really didn't want to launch like this. i had big plans of launching with my own money, and then i'd have prepared some nice texts telling my success story.

as things went, we are launching early. i'm certainly in a different league than pg, but i try. being where i am now, i'll also write down some more information about me and the other people involved, so that you can get a better idea.

basically i'm a computer security guy. started programming with 8, and then later spent a lot of time at university to get cheap net access using the DLX single-floppy linux distro that my brothers had developed in 96 (of course i had no student account at 14). met cool people there, tutors and such, and was trying hard to keep up with them. i started the teso security group in 98, and have been a computer security person ever since. i got involved with many NGOs, am really interested in game theory and reputation systems, co-wrote a paper on quantum cryptography, and started a company first trying to do social sorting, but ran out of money quickly (i wasn't checking against my own reality, but the reality i knew from my friends in SF, and expecting to get VC easily, so i rented an office, got myself a friend as a CEO who was good with words - i certainly wasn't back then). then i developed a bootable usb stick with a crypto IFS filesystem driver for windows, and loopback-aes for linux, to sell to local banks. we had a customer, and we finished the code, but my ceo got lovesick and didn't answer my calls for weeks. then i got a loan, hired a project manager to do this stuff for me. we didn't get anywhere, but she was really expensive. in early 2004 i had to close shop because we could neither get any funding at all, nor get anyone to manufacture the product. i made lots of mistakes. i got back into security consulting, and spent the last 3 years paying off my debt, and learning from these mistakes. i never managed to incorporate beyond my one-person-company. i spent my free time during the last 3 years building up the metalab, probably the most active non-profit and self-funded project center in europe. We have about 110 members, who pay 20 euros a month to finance our location. We are completely nonprofit and independent, and will remain like that. But one of the goals of the lab was to prepare both for my own next startup, and the startups of other people. so far we've been quite successful at sharing knowledge, experience, and instantiating projects. being wary of big endeavours with too many unknown factors, i'm organizing a computer security conference (http://deepsec.net/) right now and had planned to use that money to finance yeurope in a year. my startup probably is the most risk-averse of all we have in the lab right now. i was urgently aiming for success and start cash for yeurope. half a week ago, because we started lobbying as IG Startup (interest group of startup founders), an opportunity has arisen to do YEurope right now, by taking an angel on board. we certainly have worse cards than YC in the US, but i'm confident we can do this, or i wouldn't try.

i'll try to write these things down in a more readable fashion in the future. in the meanwhile you can read a slightly outdated but less prosaic CV here: http://kybkreis.org/~enki/cv_paulboehm2007.pdf

regarding the incorporation question: we have a harmonization regulation in the EU which allows us to start companies anywhere in Europe. we could start cheap LLCs or LLPs in the UK and still use them in Vienna, with Viennese law applying to all business except shareholder disputes which would be under UK law. for non-EU citizens we might have to find special arrangements. i have no idea how this might work. i'm not a lawyer though, and i'll leave this stuff to our lawyers.

Many European countries have minimum capitalization requirements for limited companies, as well as high transaction costs (you've basically got to pay the notaries' cartel their monopoly rent) and background checks. Holland got rid of an EUR 18k (!) minimum cap requirement a few years ago, after a court decision made clear that it was perfectly legal to incorporate in England instead. Even now, the transaction costs associated with starting a Dutch BV are easily twice what you pay for an English Ltd., and reporting requirements are more complicated too. The Chamber of Commerce, a QUANGO that is supposed to advise new companies and which doubles as the registry of companies, likes to claim that a Ltd tends to have a harder time raising capital than a BV, presumably because it sounds weird and foreign; but I suspect that the fact that you pay a low fee to Companies House in London instead of a high fee to your local Chamber of Commerce is also part of the reason why they discourage jurisdiction shopping.

Having recently relocated to Innsbruck (from Padova, Italy, and originally from Oregon in the US), I'm curious about utilizing an LLP from the UK. I'd be really interested to hear if anyone has more information on that, because as things stand, starting a company in countries like Austria or Italy is absurdly expensive.

the company form you would typically choose is actually the Ltd. rather than a partnership; there is really nothing special to it, you can self-incorporate online for a few hundred EUR and will only need a mail forwarding agent

having gone the AG (company by shares) route before i would agree the legal expenses associated with the traditional legal forms are insane, plus you need a significant minimum amount of founding capital upfront

being in Innsbruck right now (for non-startup reasons) I wonder what brought you here?

My wife's post doc. I tried to send you some email, but didn't see an answer. I'm at davidw -[at]- dedasys.com

Thanks for the answers! :-)

enki-

You need to set up a forum for prospective YEurope startups to communicate about the idea. I don't think this discussion is going to happen on this thread.

great idea!

i've set up a google group (both forum and mailinglist) at http://groups.google.com/group/yeurope/

i'll link this from the main yeurope page too, after getting some well deserved (i hope) rest.

i'm not sure if ggroups is the perfect communication medium - better ideas welcome! if you want to insta-chat with us, we're big fans of jabber. my jid is [email protected]. lets hope feedback stays on a sane volume so i can directly stay in touch with all of you.

paul