Re:First Round Capital Open Application for Startups
by kentonv on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @06:14PM
(#9423929)
Well... maybe. Keep in mind that the way YC judges candidates involves spending almost no time evaluating any particular group, because they have so many to go through. Even those who get an interview only get 10 minutes to talk after which the interviewers spend 5 minutes making a decision before moving on to the next group -- and ~90% of those decisions are rejections. Since the interviewers don't actually have time to review the next team's application between interviews, much of the 10 minutes is spent introducing the idea and people from scratch.
It's an approach that has clearly worked very well for YC and you can't fault them for doing what works, but it's good that not everyone uses this approach since a lot of good ideas and good people would never get funded this way. It's also pretty costly for founders: each team spends hours or days putting together their application and potentially several days traveling to the interview (unless they're lucky enough to be in the bay area already), all for a few minutes of YC's time and a tiny chance of acceptance.
On the other hand, most VCs, if they're going to talk to you at all, will schedule a one-hour meeting, which they're happy to do over Skype if you aren't local. Meanwhile, getting an intro typically requires far less time investment on the part of the candidate compared to a YC-like application process (you just need someone to send a short email). But, yes, you have to get that intro, so if you don't have connections, it's a problem.
I don't think you can really say that either method is objectively more or less fair; they are simply different kinds of processes that have different kinds of bias and costs. I think it's important that YC exists as an opening for the large number of great teams who aren't well-connected, but I also think that if every VC worked like YC it would make fundraising much more costly for founders and a lot of great ideas and people that get funding today would not succeed under such a system.
Really, the best thing is for lots of VCs to be doing lots of different approaches, even if each one has biases.
It's an approach that has clearly worked very well for YC and you can't fault them for doing what works, but it's good that not everyone uses this approach since a lot of good ideas and good people would never get funded this way. It's also pretty costly for founders: each team spends hours or days putting together their application and potentially several days traveling to the interview (unless they're lucky enough to be in the bay area already), all for a few minutes of YC's time and a tiny chance of acceptance.
On the other hand, most VCs, if they're going to talk to you at all, will schedule a one-hour meeting, which they're happy to do over Skype if you aren't local. Meanwhile, getting an intro typically requires far less time investment on the part of the candidate compared to a YC-like application process (you just need someone to send a short email). But, yes, you have to get that intro, so if you don't have connections, it's a problem.
I don't think you can really say that either method is objectively more or less fair; they are simply different kinds of processes that have different kinds of bias and costs. I think it's important that YC exists as an opening for the large number of great teams who aren't well-connected, but I also think that if every VC worked like YC it would make fundraising much more costly for founders and a lot of great ideas and people that get funding today would not succeed under such a system.
Really, the best thing is for lots of VCs to be doing lots of different approaches, even if each one has biases.