Final countdown for the YCombinator ’09 camp

yCombinator, a venture company and the invester of lots of successful web services such as Reddit and Justin.Tv, organizing another web camp in LA for this summer. If you have a startup which is already working or just an idea fill in the application form through the yCombinator web site till March 18th, and wait for their answers. If they accept your project, you will get $5000 for the project and another $5000s for each member of your team. You will also be hosted in their camp in LA for the whole ’09 summer and be together with lots of welebrity in dinners every week. Another good news is yCombinator promises to do all the paperworks for your company to be established. After all these, they only want 6-7 percent of your web service. I think it is a pretty reasonable offer for startups to get their first seed investments. And it seems it is also gonna be fun being that camp. Here are their own words about the organization:

How do we choose who to fund? The people in your group are what matter most to us. We look for brains, motivation, and a sense of design. Experience is helpful but not critical.

Your idea is important too, but mainly as evidence that you can have good ideas. Most successful startups change their idea substantially.

We're more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments on Hacker News. In fact, that was one of the main reasons we wrote it: so that we could get to know people before they applied.

The ideal company would have two or three founders. We'll consider those with four or five. We're reluctant to accept one-person companies, though we have funded a couple.

We don't expect you to have a formal business plan yet. All you have to do is fill out our application.

$5000 + $5000n is not a lot, but it turns out to be enough. It will cover at least 4 months' living expenses, and that is enough time to build something nontrivial. It's in your interest to take little money in the earliest stages, because you give up less control for it.

The original motivation for Y Combinator was benevolent, but this is not a charity. If our investments pay off, we can invest in more startups, and if they don't, we can't keep doing this indefinitely. So we're looking for startups we think will succeed.