MattMaroon.com

I saw on TC that TechStars applications are now open. That organization has been humorous to me since its inception. I had a hard time taking them seriously before I even thought of applying to Y Combinator, and my opinion hasn’t gotten better since.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for learning from stuff that works and incorporating good ideas into your own. All art is derivative, and business is certainly an art. And I also think that YC’s business model is definitely worthy of imitation, at least to some extent. But TechStars copied their application form almost verbatim in the early days (I think they made one minor change). That really made me question their credibility from the start.

They also seem to be sort of aggressive toward Y Combinator, almost openly hostile. In addition to the application being blatantly plagiarized, from what I understand (and I could be wrong about this) they ran theirs early last year, forcing any team that applied to them to accept before even having a chance at Y Combinator’s summer batch. They also scheduled their demo day at the exact same time as Y C’s, which I’m not sure was intentional but certainly seemed to have been. (Either way, it seems incredibly foolish, and was probably a large disservice to their startups.)

And there’s the fact that they’re in Boulder. Really, Boulder Colorado, which I think is about the 48^th best startup hub in the U.S., right after Sheboygan, Wisconsin. P.G. has said many times that you aren’t doing anyone in the tech industry favors by asking them to relocate to anywhere other than the Bay Area or Boston, and I even disagree with him about the latter. I can’t imagine Boulder Colorado being of any use to anyone. You might as well seek funding in Butte, Montana.

I think if I were a brand new startup I’d go ahead and pass on TechStars. I’d wait for the next Y Combinator session, or just move to the valley and start hacking away, then decide later. A tech company being anywhere other than SF/The Valley is like an aspiring actress living somewhere other than L.A. It might be possible to make it, but why fight one more uphill battle than you absolutely have to? A startup is hard enough, there’s no sense making it harder.

To be fair you really don’t need either of those two seed funding firms, or any other for that matter. Plenty of successful startups were started by people with few or no industry connections, though these days that seems like the exception rather than the rule. We all love the underdog stories like Plenty of Fish or whateverlife.com, which are tech news sensations. But if you look at the Alexa Top 100, you’ll find far fewer of them, and far more sites that were churned out by the Silicon Valley funding machine or built by publicly traded corporations. In fact, if you don’t include porn, it’s nearly universal.

Still, if you build something people want, the industry will find you, even if you’re in Boulder. Get a million users (or fewer paying ones) and you don’t need any introductions, just come to The Valley and start shaking hands. But for an early-stage startup, Y Combinator adds a lot of value, and I can’t imagine TechStars adds as much as living in BFE subtracts. Maybe I’m wrong, and they are new, so they haven’t had a lot of time to prove themselves yet. But I just can’t see why any startup would apply there.

This entry was posted on January 21, 2008 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Startup . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.