Show me someone who is qualified to be a founder but happily shrugs about his/her utter lack of ideas... and I'll show you someone who should be in a corporate sales job making $600K per year, not someone who has seen a glimpse of the future and is driven to make his/her vision a reality.
Hmm, maybe selling companies to investors is a form of corporate sales after all.
Most successful entrepreneurs have ideas that seem bad for various reasons. YC's focus on critiquing founders' ideas (PG's sneers about mobile/social/local) suggest that YC is very confident that it knows which ideas will work and which won't.
In terms of predicting which companies will be successful in 10 years, nobody would ever have sufficient hubris to claim such foresight. But if the goal is to sell a company to VCs in 6 months, it's not hard to have a pretty good idea of the market dynamics.
Personally I'd rather see YC post "drafts" of business plans and let would-be teams start their own incarnations of those businesses and apply to YC with them. At least then it feels more like an authentic entrepreneurial spark than a search for pedigrees the VCs will buy into a few months down the line.
This bothers me too, perhaps it's romanticism, however I feel it's taking away from the authenticity of the process. VCs investing in a company are investing in the team. The team should be more than some technical folks.
This situation makes me wonder how much of the ideas and direction came from the incubator, and how much came from the team - and who's specific vision, etc.. I don't know how far ahead, long-term thinking (re: strategy, future features, etc) could be figured out if ideas weren't solidified over a period of time. The depth of the ideas I don't think in most cases would go very far.
From my own experiences putting time into development without first having a solid idea of what you're wanting to create ends up being a lot of extra development time.
For myself, I have spent years evolving my ideas and now I'm very ready to find technical co-founders / core team members. I've been told by some very experienced and very wise folks that I have everything else figured out.
Also, I don't see any company posting drafts of business plans. It would give away too much. I do always wonder where these 'other ideas' come from though. I would think people would keep their best ideas that they'd hope to be able to do someday, for themselves, and only share their secondary ideas that they'd never see themselves doing.
I do see this being beneficial for incubators in being able to experiment with relatively minimum costs to them, though is this really going to yield big results for the team members or are they selling themselves short?
Most sales roles are commission based, and it's hard to get solid numbers. http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Oracle-Sales-Manager-Salarie... lists 5 Oracle salaries averaging $211K (including commission), but that almost certainly under measures those making really good commissions.
Disagreed. I'm on my 2nd startup (b2b SaaS) with 2 other cofounders. We're profitable but stagnating with $6,000 in revenue per month for each of the last 3 months. Although we are working on interesting problems, we aren't exactly passionate about what we are doing. We've been talking about a pivot for a while now but nothing compelling has come up. I have always wanted to go through YC and this sounds like an amazing opportunity - I love it. Now I have to run it by them....
Our margins are really good and we don't make a lot - the only reason I listed numbers was to highlight that we are a capable team that has track record of being able to make at least some money. We work well together and I think what we are working on now is small beans compared to what we could be doing. Applying to YC without an idea would be a really cool opportunity for us and other groups like us.
Hmm, maybe selling companies to investors is a form of corporate sales after all.
Most successful entrepreneurs have ideas that seem bad for various reasons. YC's focus on critiquing founders' ideas (PG's sneers about mobile/social/local) suggest that YC is very confident that it knows which ideas will work and which won't.
In terms of predicting which companies will be successful in 10 years, nobody would ever have sufficient hubris to claim such foresight. But if the goal is to sell a company to VCs in 6 months, it's not hard to have a pretty good idea of the market dynamics.
Personally I'd rather see YC post "drafts" of business plans and let would-be teams start their own incarnations of those businesses and apply to YC with them. At least then it feels more like an authentic entrepreneurial spark than a search for pedigrees the VCs will buy into a few months down the line.