YC has actually become much later than it was originally, many companies going through YC already have a working prototype or even a fully launched product before they start on the YC program.

asking a prototype helps to understand how the team can execute. as far as i understand, the point is that the costs of having a prototype have reduced dramatically with all opensource and cloud hostings, and that's why investors gave money for YC, TS and SC. (imho as usual)

interesting article. i have similar thoughts. Seedcamp team is awesome and visionary selecting finalists. but when it comes to selecting winners, they have voting, and only the minority would vote for a non-consumer web startup that they can not be confident that it would win, or for a team on a too early stage, while there are products that are almost ready. that what i think, i may be wrong.

in some situations, groupthinking can't help find the really big thing early.

A list of startups from both incubators. Seedcamp doesn't seem to have a single exit - is that correct?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkkhSN3vaY4jdF90b1l...

Mobclix (SC 2008) http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/30/mobclix-acquired-by-mobile-... (50M+)

And one small acquisition: Talasim http://www.thenational.ae/business/media/jeeran-acquires-tal... (1M)

Thanks for the links; I just updated the spreadsheet.

Seedcamp and YC follow different models, some startups get the mentoring of Seedcamp week without the funding and so aren't included in the list, but's it not clear they should be excluded from consideration (AdTaily and Zoombu are two startups which fall into this category and have since exited)

We also fall into this category. We get all the benefits of being a Seedcamp winner but without the funding.

Mobclix was acquired by Velti last year for <50M. So Seedcamp has had an exit.

The online programmer testing site mentioned in that story (http://codility.com) is pretty slick.