Jay - From reading your blog, we’re probably on the same wavelength on many points.

My feeling is, one shouldn’t take advice from people who haven’t done it yet.

You wouldn’t want a doctor performing surgery on you if it was his first go around, or if he had tried this surgery 3 times before and failed / “broke even” on his previous attempts, now would you? =)

Mod +1 “Founders at Work” too.

Secondly, I feel the success factor for “incubators with a twist” could be a little shift in focus from ‘resource provider’ to ‘accountability/responsibility sharing’ in making the product/idea a success.

Do all what it takes to market/sell/develop the product well and make it a success rather than giving resources to the entreprenuer and making him responsible for the success or failure.

cheers
nilesh

Shanti - I don’t want to keep copying my TechCrunch posts on here, but read my post on why I think Y-Combinator should be renamed Y-Bombinator

If you have a good idea, the moxy to make it happen and just a little luck then you don’t need any direction from me.

Good luck to you, Obvious and everyone involved in the combination of Combinators.

You guys are obviously millionaires then from hitting it big on your own successful startup or venture, right?

Please direct us, oh masterminds, to the proper place we should learn how to properly build a startup.

ps. re: the post… who knows? Obvious Corp seems to be doing pretty well for themselves. YCombinator also has an impressive record, even though they are nothing like an incubator at all, simply angel investing on a micro scale.

And from India side, the entrepreneurs here are hungry for collaboration and access to capital. And the market itself is ripe for testing a first version. I wonder if we will see more such startups emerge…

What concerns me more than anything about most Web 2.0 companies is the focus on “free”. It is very difficult to have a large enough userbase to make a pure advertising play work. What ends up happening is that potentially profitable niche internet services are not developed and everyone goes for the “TechCrunch/GigaOm” readership as their market since they can get quick adoption. Well think again, we’re also very fickle. We check out a site and forget about it. If it doesn’t give us immediate value, we won’t be coming back. Chances are that if it’s completely free, it’s not that great either.

Love the comments. In perfect agreement with you. The tech blog space is in dire need of a skeptical/realistic voice. I’d gladly sing the praises of Arrington or Malik (more so that I do already - one cannot reject their solid contributions outright) if I felt that they would demonstrate a little more discrimination and even a touch of skepticism in their reviews.

If you are an entrepreneur you know the keys to starting a business and any business for that matter.

What would be nice is see an incubator that matches MBA business entrepreneurs with talented coders. Match them up and help them with a few thousand dollars to start things up and guide them when it makes sense.

Allow them to be unique and show them the importance of when to share ideas and when to hold it back and close to the vest until it is time to share.

Maybe i should start in incubator…lol

No real entrepreneur with a real product goes for these types of YCombinator’ish setups.

It is absolutely amazing how much hype is going on around Twitter. It’s pure hype because continued public adoption and monetization has not been proven or even shown to be a possibility. It may be used as the basis for some future apps but that’s about it.

There’s too much hype about worthless companies in the web 2.0 blogosphere. Now add to that: hype about companies that incubate worthless companies that will only get more hype.

I think that hype, not the wild investment capital, is the signal for the bubble.

And another thing, give Jay a column. Tech blogs needs balance. A voice of reason if you will.

Om - I’m happy to write for your blog :)