A famous incubator in Silicon Valley: 25-Year-old Youth is best for entrepreneurship

Yes, they only graduated two years ago, they were in contact with alma mater.

Kevin Wang (Kalvin Wang) and Landipang (Randy Pang) are both hackers who are good at writing software. Jessensen (Jason Shen) is different from them, in his own words he is a "start-up salesman", and has the pursuit of this goal in all aspects of quality, his personal blog name "The Art of ass kicking." All three are new graduates from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, about 24 years old, who live in San Francisco with roommates.

The trio plan to start a joint venture, but have not yet identified which industry to devote to, as new ideas emerge every day. At the same time, they have been selected as the final shortlist for the YC2011 Summer Bulk investment program, and some 170 other teams have been invited to a brief interview in King, which is still too early to call them "the company." Kevin Wang and his partners have only one idea of entrepreneurship, and the idea seems fragile, as weak as the seed in the incubation stage of investment.

In the early stages of entrepreneurship, these teams do not have to name the companies they envision, and most of them do not. YC's partners will give them a temporary team name using the name of one of the founders or the online account name they set up on the hacker News Network, which also receives applications from YC investors. Kevin Wang is the first contract person on the application, so the company is called Kevin.

At the end of April in 2011, Kevin was brought into a small meeting room at YC headquarters in California State Mountain View, where five men and a woman were seated opposite and on both sides of the table. They are partners in YC, some are only a few years older than Kevin's team, and some have stepped into birthdays. Everyone is sitting in front of a laptop computer, looking at Kevin's online application.

Kevin knew this time in the YC Company's communication only 10 minutes, the talks seem to have just begun, but the bell rang, they have to obediently exit, let the next team come in. The moderator of the talks was Paul Greham, along with three other partners at the senior YC Company-Jessica Livingston (Jessica Livingston), Trever-Blecquevelle (Trevor Blackwell) and Robert Morris (Robert Morris) , but the interview time is not evenly distributed to every interviewer, and in fact it's almost Graham's solo.

Kevin sat down. Graham Mubuxieshi at the computer screen and said, "OK, without mentioning your entrepreneurial ideas, we are more interested in the three of you." ”

The reason why Graham said that the "idea" of the product or service that the start-up company wanted to provide would vary from the time the applicant submitted the application report to the interview. The idea that Kevin had submitted a few weeks ago was shelved as a "memory of the Past" in the Inbox. In a Skype interview with YC's partner a week ago, the interviewer has encouraged them to conceive of other ideas.

"We have a little bit of a change in our thinking," said one Kevin team member, whose name is Jessensen, but in the eyes of YC's partners, these final candidates are just vague faces with no names. "We want to create a photo album of Mint.com." We will organize and arrange your Facebook content so that you can easily create paper albums and present the best photos of you and your friends. ”

Another Kevin team added: "There is a recorder in every dorm room in the university to make this album--there are dozens of dormitories in Stanford University." This is a necessary job, but it often gets out of business, even halfway. We can make it very simple. ”

"Are you guys still connected to your alma mater?" Graham asked.

Yes, because they just graduated two years ago.

Entrepreneurs themselves are more important than business ideas

Graham is more interested in the founders themselves than in the business ideas they put forward. If the entrepreneurial team had the qualities he saw as inseparable from success, it would have impressed him, however humble, with the powerful team.

"I believe it will become Altair BASIC. He said to Kevin. The first microcomputer Altair was born in 1975, and it was Kevin's team who had been alive for several years. "You know what Altair BASIC is, right? Microsoft's first product, right?" Printable albums may be their first step, their Altair BASIC, but Graham wants to know: "What are you going to do next?"

We mainly want to use the power of memory, with the help of people's nostalgia. We can move on to a lot of physical products-"says one Kevin team member.

Then another YC partner interposed. Sam Altman is a graduate of YC's first batch investment program in the summer of 2005, and Altman as CEO of Loopt, the company that stands out from the program. But he also worked part-time as YC's partner, and had time to attend an interview with the final candidate.

"I agree with your thoughts about memories and nostalgia," Altman said, "but will people still be printing albums like this now?"

Will。 Last year's album Printing market output was more than $1 billion trillion, and in Europe the growth rate reached 25%. ”

Another Kevin team added: "The industry has been growing steadily since 2005, and the numbers are constantly rising." ”

Kevin is trying an impossible task from a non-digital product: "If you have such a physical album, you can flip it, put it on the coffee table, and show it to your friends-how valuable it is!" We've all bought photo albums for friends and family, but that photo album Sucks. Take a few hours to organize and look for photos. "Every dormitory in the university prepares such albums every year, and the printing shop charges 20 dollars per copy, and students often buy at least 100 copies a day."

Instead of answering Graham's question, he asked, "What's the next plan?"

A Kevin team member offered to sell a record book based on the customer's personal calendar and Foursquare check-in information on the footprint site, or a full year of microblogging content.

"Joking, does anyone want to print a one-year microblog?" The 41-Year-old Trever-Blecquevelle asked that the other three elder partners were of the same age. He also has another full-time job, the CEO of Anybots, and the robot company and YC are in the same building.

Despite the age gap, the older YC partners were not aware of the convergence between social media and print, but Kevin did not quit. "In fact, I have such a micro-blog booklet," One of them said, "The microblog has been popular since 2007." What one company is doing is basically printing your latest 2, 000 tweets. ”

Jessica Livingston seems to know something about it: "It's like a microblog diary." She made an analogy.

"Blurb.com is like this book printing company, its net worth in two years from 1 million dollars to 3 0 dollars." What they do is basically print out our blog posts and become books, "said one Kevin team member," but their software is very bad--very slow. ”

"Maybe you can go further and replace the yearbook," Graham had to ask himself, "That's the high school yearbook, and I think it's time to keep up." If you could replace the high school yearbook, that would be a huge asset. The business has a good prospect, waiting for someone to do it. ”

Kevin's team made a good impression on the interviewer in the time that was set. When they left the room and closed the door, Graham couldn't help admiring: "I like them!" But the idea is still a little warm! Livingston echoed. "Alas, it is Altair BASIC." Graham once again pointed out that this was only a starting point.

If there is a golden age for entrepreneurship, 24 years old just right

If there is a golden age to start a business, Kevin's members are right on the line. They are a little more mature than recent graduates, and have little mental burdens or parental pressure to brave the traditional well-paid jobs in a stable, well-paid company. Still, Graham wants to see the team's ability to collaborate during the interview, a necessary condition for survival under pressure from the start-up process. Kevin's team at this point to show their own, and no one of the team alone, we can equal. You can't even tell which two are hackers and which one is not. YC's partners are most wary of finding the so-called "caged hacker" team structure, where a non-tech entrepreneur is in power, and other hackers are subordinate.

Of the 2 000 teams submitting applications, YC only invited less than 9% of the teams to participate in the final selection interview. The YC company's partners will have a simple interview with 170 candidate teams in 8 days ' time. During the rest of each interview, the partners input their evaluations into YC's internal database, and other partners can view the evaluations. And at the end of each interview, they will give the team a ranking of the team they have interviewed that day. The final investment decision is made at the end of the day's interview. Of the 22 candidates in the day, the top 8 of the team can be invested. The teams will receive Graham's call, and he can finally stand up and talk on the phone while pacing.

"We're going to fund you guys. Graham would usually tell them the good news on the phone. "You have three people, right? You will get 17 000 dollars, we want to hold 7%." "Whatever the investment case, YC's claims are almost identical, but the amount of investment is slightly different: Each team first gets 11 000 dollars, and when the entrepreneur is over one person, each additional entrepreneur can get an extra 3 000 dollars, with a maximum of 4 20 dollars for 000 entrepreneurs.

Most entrepreneurs will take the investment right away, but Graham will also provide time for thinking about people who want to think carefully. But the only answer Graham can accept is "yes" or "no" and not bargain with entrepreneurs.