Declassified YC: How does Silicon Valley's top incubator create entrepreneurial millionaires?

Note: The incubator for the top-notch incubator in Silicon Valley has now created more than $30 billion trillion in market capitalisation, and the most contributing (more than 20 billion dollars) is two companies: Cloud Storage Services Inc. Dropbox and shared house short rental platforms Airbnb All other successful projects have created the remaining 10 billion dollar value. In the Silicon Valley investment circle to YC's incubation mechanism is mixed, this pioneering incubator's pioneer constructs the entrepreneurial ecology and the culture, but outside the incubator investor, also often has the criticism to the YC to its outstanding entrepreneurial project full Control. But that doesn't stop YC from continuing to create myths, what's the secret of YC hatching? The following is an exclusive decryption from a titanium media author:

The world is becoming more and more like a giant computer, and technology is gobbling up the world (tampering with Anderson, the famous venture capitalist in Silicon Valley). People's lives are surrounded by ever-changing technology products, the people behind the creation of these products are also increasingly coming to the fore, appearing in the spotlight as often as stars--a group of would-be leaders who have gradually turned entrepreneurship into a fad and an ambition for countless young people to plunge into technology start-ups.

If you happen to be a Silicon Valley apprentice aspiring to entrepreneurship, it's not enough to know Jobs ' garage and Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm. More and more entrepreneurs choose to enter the incubator or accelerator, hoping to embark on a shortcut to success. However, jobs and Mark Zuckerberg do not often, and that seemingly cool entrepreneurial life is actually as hard as practice, and a good technology is not necessarily a guarantee of success.

No, go look at the top polar incubator in Silicon Valley. Y Combinator (YC) How many of the projects that have been hatched each year have persisted, and how many have finally become the Reddit, Airbnb and Dropbox that people relish? The success of these 1% may be a stepping stone to 99% failure.

The YC business camp, for the first time, has decrypted the unique set of YC's mechanism to build the Silicon Valley's future star, which may provide a practical reference for the "entrepreneurial rookie" who still lingers outside the entrepreneurial circle.

Millionaire manufacturing Plant

YC is famous in the field of science and technology and is the pioneer of business incubator. It has sprung up in the dotcom boom era (after the dotcom bubble), in Silicon Valley, where founder Paul Graham is a successful internet entrepreneur, well-connected, and with a lot of investors ' eyes focused on it, YC is a good place to be. Every entrepreneur in YC has access to resources beyond Silicon Valley, and startups that go out of YC turn into Silicon Valley's resources. It turns out that this virtuous circle is an important reason for YC's success, and it builds a huge network of relationships.

However, YC's most popular way is its unique entrepreneurial project selection and training mechanism. These groundbreaking initiatives are also largely a template for the latter: arranging short and intensive programming training for entrepreneurs, giving each team a fixed small seed fund and asking for a certain equity ratio, regularly inviting professionals to carry out lectures and specific questions, and organizing "prototype days" that will enable the entrepreneurial team to understand each other, And the final "show Day" for investors.

Among them, YC's investment is a key link. It is not new for angel investors to provide seed funds to startups, but YC has taken a new approach by taking a two-time bulk investment in a year in winter and summer to produce startups on a large scale. So it is said that YC is a "millionaire manufacturing plant". This is a "wide net, more fish" ingredients in, but each team are carefully selected, can not be denied the huge amount of investment behind the enormous self-confidence. In the winter of 2011, YC provided 150,000 dollars in investment for the 44 start-up teams that were in the quarter, and the case for a one-off investment in a large number of start-up projects was unparalleled in the VCs ' world.

Aside from confidence, YC is unique in its detail. YC, for example, is most valued not by the entrepreneurial project itself, but by the entrepreneurial team itself. One of the problems with YC's interview is: "Please use one or two words to introduce every entrepreneur in your team who has an ' animal ' trait." "The purpose of this problem is to understand the collaboration of the members of the entrepreneurial team, to determine whether they have the basic quality of entrepreneurship, whether they can withstand the double pressure of mental strength in the entrepreneurial process." Reddit is the first successful case to emerge from YC, the founder of Alexis Ohaine (Alexis Ohanian), when he saw the problem, responded: "Animals?" We're a wild zoo, all right? YC likes such a hacker style team.

Even if the original idea of an entrepreneur submitting an application is lost, they still have a chance to get in. If YC feels that entrepreneurs themselves are worth investing in, they will help them to choose more successful projects. That's Reddit. At first, Alexis and his partner, Steve Huffman, wanted to make a mobile booking service, but the mobile internet was not mature enough to start a Web site that could serve as "the home of the world's Internet", inspired by Paul Graham. Is reddit.com. In short, Reddit is a news aggregation site, the main feature is that users submit links and votes to select the most popular posts, this innovative model at that time refreshing, but also greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of internet users. After 16 months, Reddit was bought by the world media giant Nast Group (Nast) at a price of $200 million.

As Alexis recalls this experience, he sighs: "Steve and I went into YC with a failed application and came out and created one of the 50 most popular websites in the world." "They also became millionaires 16 months after they graduated from college, which is the YC's alchemy."

Hackers are born wild.

Throughout the book, you will find that although YC has other partners, the soul figure is definitely Paul Graham. He has a Ph. D. in computer science, claiming to be a hacker, and is now occasionally writing code for YC's website hackers news. YC's hacker genes are innate.

In Paul's view, hackers are inherently bohemian, a group of computer geeks who do not act in an ordinary way, and sometimes even break the barriers involved in some restricted areas. 15 years ago, Robert Morris, the co-founder's partner, was also a hacker, who wrote the "Morris Worm" in 1988 and made his names in the history of computer development.

Of course, people like Morris are not the only ones in the word "hacker". According to Steven Levy, a "hacker: the Hero of the computer revolution," the word "hacker" means "computer programmers and designers who see computing as the first thing in the world", and the hacker culture dates back to the Technical Model Railroad Club of MIT in the the late 1950s.

Such people are closer to the "hacker" nature: they have not only programming skills, but also endless enthusiasm-that is, in this sense, we can say that the future belongs to geeks and technical houses, because they hold the tools to change the world.

Paul's hacking obsession has laid out the YC's strong hacking style, which makes the latter tend to be a team of pure hackers when choosing an entrepreneur. What YC does is train hackers to be business people who can change the world in product and business vision. After all, only a good business model can really let good ideas spread out, infiltrate ordinary people's daily life, and then can change the world.

In turn, the unruly style of hackers has helped YC create miracles, and they are actually doing business together. Kiko is a web-based short-lived calendar application, born in 2005 YC first summer start-up training camp. Initially, Kiko founder Jianyanhao and Emmett Hill (Emmett Shear) were rejected in the interview of YC on the grounds that "promising people are worthy of a dead-end idea" and later agreed to modify the product to get two interviews. This time, two young entrepreneurs spent 40 minutes defending Kiko in front of the interviewer and eventually settled into YC. However, once again, the fact that YC's judgment is right, Google Calendar turned out, Kiko really dead.

But the bright spot is that they choose to auction Kiko's source code on ebay, and give back the money to the investors--yes, the Kiko team didn't leave without a beat, but thought of such a style extremely "hacker" the aftermath of the way. You know, at that time people on the application of the Electronic business site is far from the current so common, not to mention the auction or "source code" this abstract product!

Similarly, YC is right about Kiko founder Jianyanhao and Emmett Hill. Before the deadline, they first thought of how to repay the investors, not their own failure. They also regarded the sale as a transformational opportunity, not only did not give up entrepreneurship, but more determined the road to entrepreneurship. By 2006, the two had once again acquired YC's investment on video-live web site Justin.tv, becoming an unofficial project member of YC. In the 2010, they had another idea for "mobile video sharing," which developed the app called Socialcam (social camera) and developed in parallel with Justin.tv. As a result, two products have reached or exceeded expectations.

From the first Kiko to the later Justin.tv, and to the current two entrepreneurial ideas in parallel, Jianyanhao and Emmett Hill were the two founders who presented the most new ideas to Paul in the YC history. They thanked Paul for his constant encouragement and spiritual support when he was losing his power. Jianyanhao said: "I think very few people have such energy." ...... When you communicate with Paul face-to-face, he may dismiss some of your thoughts as rubbish and may even negate all your thoughts, but when you get up and leave, you will be convinced to do something new. ”

Indeed, only real hackers understand hackers.

Entrepreneurship is Life

Two years ago in the summer, I met a 16-year-old entrepreneur. At that time, he had just graduated from his home town from his hometown to an entrepreneurial café in Zhongguancun, Beijing, because on the internet to see this is the accumulation of entrepreneurs, but also often investors patronize. This little boy is not undressed, talking about programming and products to be very well. In a few short days, he really found a "partner" in his old age, and they started their first career--the first thing in the morning--to work in a café until they closed at night, and the product was planned to be a demo for investors at the conceptual stage.

They regard entrepreneurship as their daily life. This is the norm of the entrepreneur. Finally see how hard it is for jobs and Zuckerberg before they succeed!

In fact, this "entrepreneurial life" is what YC has been advocating. On the contrary, if the life in YC camp is not like this, it's strange! Every start-up team that comes into YC will move to Silicon Valley for three months, during which time of day and night programming, brainstorming, rapid iteration of products, meeting with users and investors, and so on, can occur at any time.

At first there was a lot of criticism that YC required entrepreneurs to move to Silicon Valley, and as time passed, YC proved it was right to stick to it. There is no second Silicon Valley in the world, it is a "crazy is normal" place. Remembering that he had just moved to Silicon Valley in 1998, Paul said: "Every one is elated, healthy and rich, and a better new continent is reflected in the present." ”

However, not everyone can afford this "entrepreneurial life," the state, because this first means that the founders of the basic need to sever all contact with the outside world, including relatives, friends. The other half of the entrepreneur who is not single is more difficult, so there is such a sad and awkward term: the entrepreneurial widow.

In addition, YC does not provide office space and accommodation, which means that entrepreneurs want to find their own place in the expensive Silicon Valley, to rely on YC to provide start-up funds to maintain including food, shelter, transportation, server rents and other expenses. This is not an easy thing to do. As a result, YC members have a very American-style minimum standard of living: eat only hummus for meals a day.

In the 1995, Paul and Morris teamed up to start a business with endless energy and no family or financial burden. Many years later, the ideal entrepreneur that Paul paints is a template for his image-poverty, ignorance and fear. He believes that the most suitable age for entrepreneurship is 25 years old, and is the most likely to bear the pressure of the age. 25-year-olds who start a business even if they fail can not return to the campus ivory tower, which will motivate them to do their best. If you have a few more nights, you will have more and more. Yes, who wants to be an "entrepreneurial widow"? Energy, poverty, lack of root, ignorance, fearless, this is the most powerful weapon of the entrepreneur.

Two years ago, the two teenagers who fought in the Zhongguancun Café, in addition to their age, coincided with all of Paul's demands for an ideal entrepreneur. In fact, YC has also voted for a teenage entrepreneur, because as long as mature enough, age is not a problem at all. The domestic entrepreneur is not so lucky, plus the domestic overall entrepreneurial atmosphere is far worse than the Silicon Valley, let alone two middle school students. At the outset, people gathered in the entrepreneurial café in addition to admire the courage of two teenagers, or the general hope that they go back to learn the end of the venture. It can be imagined that their entrepreneurial path is not very promising.

Entrepreneurship is a way of life, not glamorous, but may change the trajectory of your life thereafter. In fact, for a young entrepreneur, success is not important, it is important that you want to change the world with technology. And, in those passionate months and even years, a group of like-minded people and you are working together to achieve this ideal. I think this should be the greatest fortune anyone goes into YC's start-up.

"Ti Media Note:" YC entrepreneurship: How Silicon Valley's top incubators Change the World "(the Lauch Pad) has been published by the Cham-Lu culture, the author of Randall Stross (Randall Stross)"

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)