Silicon Valley Dream Traveler: Combinator's entrepreneurial incubation

Sina Science and technology Zheng from the United States Silicon Valley youth is a dream without regrets, entrepreneurship is the journey of chasing dreams. Countless young people came to Silicon Valley, in this dream of heaven to sway their youth. The dream-chasing journey is hard but not lonely, because Silicon Valley has the best entrepreneurial environment in the world to help young people realize their entrepreneurial dreams.　　Business Incubator y Combinator (YC) is one of the most famous dream travellers. YC's seven-year tour in March 2005, Paul Graham Paul Graham said to himself, "I should do something for the young." He had just finished his entrepreneurial speech at Harvard and compiled his speech into a book on how to start A business.　　Harvard is Graham's alma mater, where he got his PhD in computer and started his own entrepreneurial journey. Graham is an excellent programmer and entrepreneur. In the 1995, Graham and his friends founded the first Web application Viaweb, three years later, the price of nearly 50 million dollars sold to the then-heyday of the Yahoo.　　In addition to entrepreneurship and programming, Graham also pen his website (paulgraham.com), published several professional and entrepreneurial works, and has great influence in the business circle. When he returned to Harvard to talk, he saw the same young man with the entrepreneurial dream, as if he had seen the time go by. That year, 41-Year-old Graham and Teville Blackwell (Black Blackwell), Jessica Levingston (Jessica Livingston) and Morris (Robert Morris) founded YC in Boston,　　The aim is to provide seed money and entrepreneurial guidance to startups, especially those who are skilled young entrepreneurs. The story of the Dream Traveler in Silicon Valley begins in Boston. YC provides the start-up team with 14,000 dollars of seed money to start a training camp for them, and the training camp's graduation show is Demo day. When YC first hosted demo day seven years ago, only 8 start-up teams and 12 investors participated in the event.　　Graham also admits that most of the investors at the time were friends of their own. In the first few years, YC held a two-year training camp in Boston, Cambridge and Silicon Valley. In the past seven years, YC camp has emerged from nearly 400 start-ups, including companies such as cloud services platform Dropbox, rental website Airbnb, web review platform Disqus, social news website Reddit, and travel search engine Hipmunk.　　The recently celebrated draw something developer Omgpop also graduated from YC training camp in 2006. 2009, Graham began working with Sequoia Capital and legendary angel investor Ron Conway, and the YCDepartment and activities are transferred to the entrepreneurial paradise in the heart of Silicon Valley mountain View City (Kings).　　After a select group of start-ups, the team arrives in Silicon Valley and receives YC's 3-month entrepreneurial training to show investors their dreams and prospects through Demo day. The secret YC of the entrepreneurial training camp picks up the most promising start-up teams from thousands of start-up projects every year, bringing them to Silicon Valley for two training sessions a year. Graham they provide seed money and entrepreneurial guidance to the entrepreneurial team, build the networks they need to succeed, and attract investors to turn their ideas into real products. In return, Y combinator a partial stake in the start-up company (on average, 8%).　　The number of start-up teams in training camps has soared from 8 to 66 this year, from seven years ago. The 3-month entrepreneurial training camp is divided into two stages.　　In the first half of the time, more than 10 YC partners and trainers, such as Graham, Hall Tagger (Harj Taggar) and Levingston (Mrs. Graham), will have a one-to-one business exchange with each entrepreneurial team to help entrepreneurs find the most suitable development direction and provide targeted training and advice. In the past, about 15% of the entrepreneurial team will create new ideas through this exchange, thus changing the direction of entrepreneurship. But that does not affect their financing prospects, as long as they are able to showcase their entrepreneurial prospects on demo day and get the financing they need.　　Many investors will also be generous because of the background of the entrepreneurial team. YC hosts a weekly social dinner for entrepreneurs, including successful entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg, to invite celebrities from Silicon Valley. They will share their entrepreneurial experiences and success stories at a dinner party and have face-to-face conversations with entrepreneurs. Because YC and most of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have a very close relationship, won the trust of these successful people. They don't have to worry about what they say at the dinner party to become tomorrow's media coverage, so they usually reveal a lot of industry insider and trend forecasts.　　This is the best way to learn from entrepreneurs who are thirsty for knowledge. The second half of the training period, the entrepreneurial team will be mainly faced with financing problems. To train the entrepreneur's outreach capabilities, YC will require each start-up team to present its own project on the whiteboard in front of the YC partners, hoping to impress investors in the future.　　Entrepreneurs are asked to express themselves in plain language and avoid using overly professional or empty wording. After this process, YC will organize the demo files of the entrepreneurial team, and send to TechCrunch and other cooperative media. Long-term cooperation with YC is an important reason for TechCrunch to become the first blog for Entrepreneurship reporting. In addition, YC will provide the most professional lawyers for the start-up team through its own network, and the budget-strapped entrepreneur will not have to pay the high legal fees immediately because the financing law service will be postponedWay to pay. As the training camp nears completion, YC will set out to develop the most appropriate financing strategy for the entrepreneurial team: when to finance, how much to invest, how to finance from, and how to deal with different investors. These specific and professional issues, YC will be with the entrepreneurial team one by one discussion implementation. YC has long dealings with major Silicon Valley investors, familiar with the characteristics and direction of these investors, and the two sides have also established mutual trust.　　Graham they can even take the place of the entrepreneurial team and negotiate financing directly with investors. Of course, YC does not excessively pack up the entrepreneurial team to cheat the investment, because the mutual trust with the investor is an important reason for YC's success.　　Some bright-looking start-ups may easily raise money, and YC will help them contact angel investors for small sums of money, and then consider follow-on financing for the start-up teams that are temporarily struggling to get investment. The 150,000 dollar gift package 3 months after the training camp is over, is the grand graduation ceremony demo day. The goal of Demo Day is not to persuade investors to write cheques on the spot, but to build a bridge between the entrepreneurial team and investors.　　While some investors will decide on the spot, most investment decisions are made in follow-up talks after Demo day. At the end of demo day, YC will also keep in close contact with the start-up team to help them negotiate financing with investors and analyze the information that investors sometimes blur.　　YC also uses good relationships with investors to judge the true intentions of investors and to contribute as much as possible to investment. As a result of YC's reputation, investors usually rely on the start-up team that YC supports, so the start-up team can get a higher valuation when it comes to financing. One entrepreneur once said: "Perhaps because of the YC, I am [a start-up company] with a significantly higher valuation, maybe even a double."　　But for entrepreneurs, perhaps getting to know the investors they want is more important than valuations. In addition to investors, there are many entrepreneurs to Demo day to find potential investors. Steve Huffman, the founder of Reddit, Steve Hoffman the activity from the SV Angel Foundation of Ron Conway, and founded his other venture company, the travel search company Hipmunk.　　One entrepreneur said that taking a demo day would give him an idea of the latest entrepreneurial trends and technological trends in Silicon Valley. Since 2011, Ron Conway and Russia's Big Henyuri Mirna (Yuri Milner) have started a new fund start Fund, which provides 150,000 of billions of dollars for each start-up team participating in the YC training camp.　　And they have not even studied the project books of these start-up teams, investing solely in the trust of the quality of YC training camp. It is worth mentioning that the money is invested in the form of convertible bonds, when the start-up team to obtain a certain size of financing, the 150,000 dollars will be converted to the financing value of the corresponding shares, and does not set a valuation cap and demand a discount for most convertible bonds.　　Such a generous investment, TechCrunch regrets: "This is the entrepreneur's most coveted investment, on the poor send money." If more than 60 start-up teams accept the investment, Conway and Milner will have to invest more than 9 million of dollars every six months. But for them, who are worth billions of, the investment is nothing. Mr Milner has an billion-dollar mansion in Silicon Valley and spends $ millions of a year on property taxes and management fees.　　And, judging from the past successes of investment Dropbox and Omgpop, the $150,000 trillion is likely to yield tens of millions of dollars in investment returns. Seven years after the big parade in Silicon Valley, YC's demo day has become one of the biggest start-up parties in Silicon Valley, a big time for the best entrepreneurial team and the best known investors. To accommodate more attendees, this spring's demo day will select the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.　　It is located next to the 101 Freeway across Silicon Valley, to the north, the headquarters of Google (Weibo) and the Microsoft (micro-blogging) Institute, and the road to the south leads to the Cuptino (Cupertino) of Apple's headquarters. In this year's demo day, 66 start-up teams and more than 400 investors turned the computer History Museum into a bustling, 30-minute traffic jam outside the museum.　　But the number of investors is not what Graham values, "the important thing is who these people are and attract so many of the world's leading VCs to come together and review the young entrepreneurial team like a parade, only YC can do it," he said. The star's brilliant investor team, with the exception of Ron Conway and Milner, as well as Anderson Hollowitz (Andreessen Horowitz) fund, the Accel partner, which has earned hundreds of thousands of earnings from Facebook, and many other well-known VC companies And just left Yahoo Jerry Yang also in the crowd smile.　　Hollywood star Kutcher (Ashton Kutcher) and Moore (Demi Moore) are also frequent participants in Demo Day, who look for suitable investments through YC. From 10 o'clock in the morning to 6 o'clock in the afternoon, each entrepreneurial team has two and a half minutes to stage to show investors their dreams and prospects.　　Christine Herron, Intel's investment, shows that Demo day is like Fashion Week (Fashion Week), with a variety of entrepreneurial teams such as models on the catwalk, and "investors make choices under the table." This year's entrepreneurial team hopes to include: recruitment software developers Hireart, music playback control application developers flutter, Cross-platform im application developers sendhub, social game developers Lvl6, and so on. These entrepreneurial teams are already very much in the limelight when they attend training camps,Some entrepreneurs have already got seed financing, but more are new start-ups, even student entrepreneurs. "These new startups, like fresh blood, inject fresh energy into Silicon Valley," said TechCrunch, a leading tech critic and Mack Al (Mike Arrington). Smart Arlington will not miss the chance to "rub the car". After he left TechCrunch, he founded the investment fund Crunchfund, and the demo day activity is clearly the best time for investors to find good investments.　　Of the 66 start-ups participating in the event, Arlington has been eyeing 15 of them. "This is an incubator era, and Graham's YC is the forerunner and leader of this era," San Jose Mercury said of YC. Today's Silicon Valley has sprung up with many entrepreneurial incubators, accelerators (accelerator) and training camps (Boot camp) to provide a variety of training and assistance to the entrepreneurial team.　　Next week, another incubator, innospring, will open in the Santa Clara Conference Center. At Demo Day's venue, the Scent of youth and dreams is everywhere. The most talked-about topic is changing the world, and many entrepreneurs will talk about "our applications (or software) will appear on every networked device in the world." It may sound a bit arrogant, but this is Silicon Valley, a place where dreams change the world, and Graham's YC is the best dream traveler for these young dreamers.