Kudos to the launch.

The makeup of the founding team thing will be the make or break. I've barely seen a recent success story of a startup where less then 100% of the founders were technical. It used to be possible but I expect that times have changed in this regard.

Bluntly, this approach sounds wrong to me from an investment portfolio strategy point of view but I'm glad you are taking the risk and try it.

I definitely think that being in Minnesota will be a competitive advantage however. The area is vastly underrated and pretty incredible talents live and work there. Best of luck to your team and project.

What is your sample size for your observation about 100% of the founders being technical? a) "startups" doesn't just cover high tech and social networking. b) There are a lot of quiet successes out there.

I agree, I think there are a ton of quiet success out there now.

I'm currently working for a Minneapolis startup (based in the skyway downtown coincidentally) that has raised 10M+ in VC funding in the health insurance area. None of the original 3 founders are technical.

You won't see us on techcrunch because health insurance isn't sexy, but we're having more of an impact on big businesses than 99% of what you will see on there.

I'd be interested in hearing more about it. Health insurance may not be sexy, but solutions to extremely complex business problems are, and I imagine there's some element of that in a health insurance startup.

That domain seems to be one of the most intractable around these days. It seems the gist of the situation is: There are four parties - doctors/staff/hospitals, patients, health insurance industry, and government/taxpayers. Effective reform is going to mean at least one of them gets [screwed|insert nicer word here]. There just isn't enough margin for all of them to make out comfortably.

Or is there some elegant solution hiding in the morass, waiting for some clever entrepreneurs to find and implement it?

There are actually 5 parties, you missed the Employer and that's the part of health insurance that we're trying to solve.

Currently in America, if you're not on medicare/medicaid, the vast majority of people get their health insurance through their employer (this is called a Defined Benefit). Providing this benefit to employees is a huge burden on employers for something that has nothing to do with their core business model.

What my company is doing is moving this to a Defined Contribution, where an employer gives $X/year to each employee and the employees can use that money to purchase whatever kind of health insurance fits their situation best.

Employer benefits:

- known, controllable costs

- get out of health insurance negotiation/shopping for their employees

- better awareness of employees in how much employer is contributing

Employee benefits:

- more plan choice to fit needs (ex: mental health, substance abuse, pregnancy coverage as options)

- many times cheaper for healthy individuals (encourages more responsibility for employees staying healthy)

- more transparency into total compensation by employers

The same transformation happened in the 80's with pensions moving to 401k. The move from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution is coming, and there's a huge market out there to make that transition happen.

Pension : 401k :: Defined Health Benefit : Defined Health Contribution

There's also a HUGE opportunity coming up with Health Reform where companies that didn't previously provide health insurance to their employees will now be mandated to (or pay a big penalty). Going with a Defined Contribution model is their easiest route to satisfying the mandate. Simply fork over a pile of money and you're done. No other screwing around with health insurance companies/brokers every year to do something new.

That's silly. We are discussing a tech accelerator here. But even if I accept your rebuttal I'd like to see the amount of Plumbing businesses that are bootstrapped by people other then plumbers.

> I've barely seen a recent success story of a startup where less then 100% of the founders were technical.

Groupon and Zyngas's founders aren't programmers. I'd say they're the two biggest hits of the last 5 years.

Correction: Andrew Mason actually is a programmer. He built Groupon in Rails.

Also, as the other commenter pointed out, Mark Pincus's co-founder Justin Waldron is a programmer, but Zynga's probably a bad example anyway because Pincus was very much an accomplished entrepreneur with a lot of resources at hand prior to founding Zynga.

Incorrect, at least one of Zynga's co-founders (Justin) is a programmer -- though he's probably not doing much of that anymore. One of the common misconceptions is that Zynga has only one founder ... it actually has many.

But I get the point you're making and it's still valid.

Fair enough but both of them are highly technical people. Not programmers but that's not the yard stick that I put down here.

Additionally it's not a good idea to use critical successes like that to extract any kind of lessons from. Groupon won the business plan lottery and found a real need in the market that wasn't being served. Zynga rode the coattails of facebook.

Obviously i'm not dismissing those companies accomplishments. The founders are idols to me.

This smells strongly of 1999. What equity stake do the ancillary developers get? Sorry, but all this news of late of tons of startup accelerators and incubators popping up everywhere is a little unnerving. What is the rational of all these? Did all the RoR startups that will shake up the world have so much trouble finding funding that they need a new one every week?

There will always be a demand for good mentors. Accelerators imply that more than funding can help talent get their business to market ASAP. Like 1999 these times certainly smell like ASAP whether fortune or bust is the end result.

I don't think I understand... Do the full-time developers that are provided become partners?

Hey guys, I'm cofounder of Project Skyway.

Ownership is a sacred thing -- we don't tinker with that at all. The dev team takes no equity. After all, you're running the company, not us. We just help with the resources and motivation. The dev team in India (which my cofounder Cem has worked with for years) are merely a perk we provide to our companies. It's one benefit of many.

If there's already a CTO in the company then great, he can focus on what's core and have the offshore team work on secondary stuff.

If it's a team of 3 business guys who have the right approach and the right knowledge then here's their chance to get the prototype figured out and raise that first bit of money to plow into a full time developer.

Make sense?

It does. Being from MN, I really admire what you're trying to do, so I don't know how to ask this nicely, so I'll just ask it... how do you justify your terms being the same as YC when your value proposition is so much less? You can't possibly argue that your network is as valuable as YC's.

Your point on network value is an excellent one, one definitely worth challenging us on. I suspect almost no accelerator in the next 5 years will touch YC's network, especially since they're right in the heart of M&A-land.

However every accelerator, except for dopey government-run ones, needs an ROI. The numbers we came up with were our attempt at a happy medium. "Price"-wise, we can be lower than others (TechWildcatters, Shotput Ventures, SproutBox, Momentum) but we also add value and perks that few others do. We also have massive pent up demand in our region.

Value prop is a tough starting point because it means different things to different people. And you know what? Maybe we'll find out our terms aren't right and we'll pivot. Just like almost every entrepreneur does on pricing.

But then again, until you can find another accelerator that is open to single founders, open to non-technical founders, provides a dev team in India to support, and that has a selection process that includes a educational mini-bootcamp...then it's a tough comparison.

No, our network isn't 1/3 as valuable as theirs (although we will have a few mentors from SV). But we've got plenty of tech entrepreneurs banging down our door so I think, for now, we're on the right path to helping them change the world.

Do you have to use the offshore dev team?

No. Heck, we might not have any of our companies interested in going that route. But the option's there and we'll have a BA at their disposal. How many business minded entrepreneurs do you know that couldn't manage a contract developer if his life depended on it? We teach them how.

The bigger point here is that for the first time ever guys who are non-coders but have domain expertise and the ability to take the product to market now have an option. Every other accelerator will slam their door in your face.

We're pretty pumped about this. Having a tech cofounder is massively helpful, but we don't feel the lack of one discounts your value to zero.

Sounds like you guys have identified a problem in the startup incubator business and are attempting to provide a solution for it, though from reading PG it sounds like there are very good reasons for the existence of that problem. Good luck!

Thanks for the well wishes, SkyMarshal.

We just think it's something worth experimenting with. PG (and David Cohen et al.) are engineers. We think their bias towards developers is natural but until we see empirical data showing otherwise we think there's still potential for non-coders to successfully start and grow a product company.

There's no question there's pros and cons.

The only question is can we address the cons and accentuate the pros. (See Quora: What are the pros and cons of a non-technical founder for a start-up: http://qr.ae/clRm )

The good news is we'll find out fairly quickly!