The Launch Pad. Inside Y combinator Silicon Valley’s most exclusive school for startups. Randall Stross
The Launch Pad. Inside Y combinator Silicon Valley’s most exclusive school for startups. Randall Stross. 2012. ISBN 9781591845294. The author( a good writer) spent the summer of 2011 with the 64 start-ups funded by Y combinator and recored what happens. It is three month uber intensive (selective 3% of applicants get in) program ending in a marathon Demo Day in front of several hundred qualified investors. The book has similarities to Tracey Kidders 1981 classic , The Soul of New Machine, in that all the covers are off and you get to look right into how it is done – warts and all. This makes this a new classic. Y Combinator is really Paul Graham the founder, and his core of follow on investors who put up $150 00 for every company that demos. About 2/3 of the companies each session get even more follow on investing, 1/3 a small amount more and 1/5 none at all. The success rate shows that by 2010, Dropbox exited for more than the next 199 all together , and No 2 OMGPOP exited for more than the next 198 cos altogether. Perhaps you can add up 21 of non exiting stars who had a value of $ 4.7 b. So the odds are long, but this model appears to work better than any other startup model. You need highly selective auditions, companies that had a killer coder and a killer salesperson, non stop attention to the job at hand and sufficient guaranteed follow on funding to make the time/effort expended worth the while of the participants.
Related articles
- How startup sausage gets made: The Launch Pad reviewed (arstechnica.com)
- 5 Things You Didn’t Know About Y Combinator (inc.com)
- What numbers and a new book tell us about the Y Combinator way (gigaom.com)
- Q&A: Randall Stross on the World of Y Combinator (allthingsd.com)
- If you want more women in Silicon Valley, start by giving your girls Legos (qz.com)
- Y Combinator Gets an Historian: Inside YC’s Summer 2011 Session (xconomy.com)
Category: Leadership, Strategy, Technology Industry
-
Reg Nordman is a founder and Managing Partner for Rocket Builders. - @@post_notification_header
- A Brief History
- Contact Me
- Customer Testimonials
- Google Reader Notes
- In the News
- Search Me and More
- Ready to Rocket 25
-
Feed on