Silicon Valley Dream Traveler: Y Combinator's entrepreneurial incubation

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 journey

In March 2005, Paul Graham said to himself, "I should do something for the young Paul Graham." 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.

In 2009, Graham began partnering with Sequoia Capital and legendary Angel of the Angels, Ron Conway, and shifted YC headquarters and activities to the heart of the valley, the heartland of Kings, in entrepreneurial paradise. 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 secrets of the start-up training camp

YC picks up the most promising start-up teams from thousands of start-up projects each 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 in Silicon Valley to the entrepreneurial team through its own network, and the budget-strapped entrepreneur will not have to pay high fees immediately because the financing legal services will be deferred.

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.