90% of Y Combinator Startups Have Already Accepted The $150k Start Fund Offer
Yuri Milner invested 150K$ by just trusting the judgement of Y-Combinator team in all the graduated ventures...
If we read the comments of the article we noticing immediately, how bitter they are...
Why so bitter on this act, of funding all?
In Greece we have a say: One day, a Genie appeared to a Shepard, the Genie said "You have one wish that I can materialize for you, it can be everything, I can make you the richest person on earth, so what is your wish?", and the Shepard answered "I wish the goat of the neighbor to be dead...!!!"
Did we Greeks spread the dead goat disease to the world?
In fact what we all western countries need is to invest in the real economy to tackle the Financialization monster that eats up our jobs and increases our deficit.
I might totally disagree with Y-Combinator that the idea doesn’t matter, but what they do is a good method to evaluate ideas and teams. Although it’s not perfect since its limited to the expertise of a handful of experts, I have a very strong feeling that Yuri will not loose his money… Yuri actually targets to what I call massive innovation…
Marc Dangeard from Entrepreneurs Commons did a research and found that just the 2% of the fastest growing startups are really founded by VC’s and Angels. The rest 98%, that were in some point in time disqualified by VC’s and Angels, were they bad business?
Or did the current system of evaluation failed to pinpoint them as valuable?
In reality as we can’t predict the stock markets, the same way we can’t predict the success of a good idea unless we test it in the market.
Most of the time VC’s and Angels, are just waiting for someone to take the risk and bet first. I’m using the term “bet” because most of the VC’s and Angels see it like gambling. As a society we are used to consider the placement of capital in a venture, a signal to further invest. This sparks a "chicken and egg" circle, in which ideas lost, because none did the first step...
At the end, because there are other ways to make “easier” money like, stocks, commodities etc. we just finance this 2% of the good ideas that are out there, and we see China taking over the real economy every day…
Our Governments are spending trillions of tax payer’s money to save casino banks, why don’t we do the same with our startups? A billion dollars could finance 1000 startups 3000 seeds and 6000 pre-seeds, an investment that could change the life’s of hundreds of thousands of citizens…
But how we going to invest? What will be the filter if not Angels, VC’s and experts?
What we missing is a scalable mechanism that will do all that with transparency, entrepreneurial excellence, derived from the people and be there for the people, with extremely low managerial cost.
We need to democratize access to capital especially on the early stage, seed and startup.
What really Y-Combinator does, is using the business sophistication of a handful of experts, which first evaluate massively submitted ideas and then foster the selected ideas along with the teams behind them, by investing primarily their TIME with them and NOT always their capital for a share of 2% - 8%.
So what actually Yuri did, was to trust the TIME investment of the Y/C team to these ventures in order to invest. He relied on Y/C experts business instinct. Actually he relied to what I call Innovation Dipole, the matching of an experienced business mind set (Y/C team) with a creative mind set (idea promoters, entrepreneurs).
There is a novel system which is doing a similar thing, but in a more scalable way and geographically independent, that it doesn't rely in a handful of experts but instead in the community. The system is called iDea, the acronym comes from Innovation Dipole Entrepreneurial Assessment. It’s like a massive Y-Combinator driven from the people.
iDea concept claims, that TIME is equivalent to CAPITAL (we always say time is money isn't...), so if someone invests his time to an idea, the idea must be a good one. So people that don't have capital they can invest their TIME on ideas with the help of a system. That TIME investment triggers a series of events that aiming to foster ideas and form good teams that are willing and able to innovate.
The philosophy of iDea concept teaches that, innovation is all about ideas and people, not only capital.
More about iDea concept @
Check out also the theory about Innovation Dipole and notice how it resembles to what Y/C does.
