The Q Score: How Y Combinator's Startups Are Like Broadway Musicals - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology. Finding just the right mix of old friends and new colleagues may be more important than finding the right idea for a new company.
Robert Scoble/Flickr The standard operating procedure for most start-up incubators is something like this: Bright entrepreneurs submit their million-dollar ideas; a select few get some money, mentors, and time for developing these ideas; at the end, they take the ideas out to the real world in search of capital. Y Combinator, perhaps the top incubator in the world, is now planning to dispense with one of the core ingredients in that formula: the idea. It will now accept applications from entrepreneurs with no particular idea at all. The Y Combinator team explained their reasoning in an announcement yesterday: Why are we doing this? The important thing for success isn't the quality of an idea at the outset but its development. Research into creativity and how the human brain processes ideas supports this decision. Paul Graham: Why Y Combinator Replaces The Traditional Corporation.
If Y Combinator is the next PayPal Mafia, then Paul Graham is Silicon Valley's godfather.
Graham is the cofounder of Y Combinator, the investment firm that plugs seed money ($18,000 on average) into early stage startups in exchange for mentorship and access to its ever-growing network of alumni. It's the latter benefit that's truly made Y Combinator a Valley powerhouse--YC's vast network of influential entrepreneurs that includes breakout Valley stars such as the founders of Dropbox and Airbnb. (We attempted to capture this network on our list of the Most Innovative Companies in Business with this fantastic infographic.) Early on, Graham envisioned this network as a "replacement for the traditional corporation.
" "You know what’s great about the YC network? The YC network, he says, now operates as a "distributed peer-to-peer replacement" for the traditional company. “As YC grows, the number of startups we’ve funded in the past keeps getting bigger," Graham continues. 4 Elements That Make A Good User Experience Into Something Great.
In the main, entries to this year’s Interaction Awards were good.
The apps, the websites, the interfaces, and the games were slick and sleek. For the most part, they checked the design boxes we have all come to expect. Sure, some seemed to have beamed in from the early days of Netscape, but overall, buttons, pushed, sent you somewhere you thought you might go. Screens, swiped, loaded the information you expected to see. So far so good, right? As it happens, some clues about the future of the discipline lay among the category winners in the awards program (of which I was a juror). Building Platforms Best in Show went to "Loop Loop," a musical application for Sifteo, which neatly turns the 1.5" blocks into a tiny interactive music sequencer. Moving Beyond the Screen The People’s Choice award went to "Interaction Cubes" by Fundação Oswaldo Cruz/Museu da Vida, from Rio de Janeiro. Seamlessly Integrating Data.