Why is everyone who invests small amounts of seed funding a "YC clone"? The implication is that the people they fund are "YC rejects" (YC people have explicitly claimed that on this site).

It seems tantamount to wishing to constrain the number of seed-funded startups to the ones 4 people (PG & co.) can advise at once.

Are more startups a good thing, or not? If it is, don't deride newcomers by referring to them as a clone of what already exists.

I completely agree. Seed financing is inherently unscalable. Investment partners need to spend a lot of time per investment and that severely limits their output.

Just like Sequoia are not a 'clone' of Kleiner Perkins, the same is to be said for competition: because both are unscalable businesses they can successfully co-exist and it certainly isn't a winner take all market. Indeed, the market is crying out for more firms, but the contraint is skilled early stage investors.

Also, Andy and Chris (who this article is about) both rock.

>Why is everyone who invests small amounts of seed funding a "YC clone"?

Because the first one to launch was a YC clone... Techstars even copied the application verbatim. I think a better term for the YC clones is micro-incubators -- most of them offer office space.

Yaw, attacking the same market/problem, but decidedly NOT a clone.

I _really_ like the co-op twist.

I think shared office space, however, is a LOUSY idea. Adding to my list of things to blog about!

It depends on what they mean by "shared office".

If they share a secretary and some meeting rooms it can work well.

If 20 companies are in the same cubicle farm, not so much.

"optional office space"

I don't think it's correct to call this a YC clone, but it's cool to see more startup-investment-related activity coming out of Seattle - there's a lot of great talent and ideas there.

> Five percent of the equity in each company will be distributed in a pool to be shared by other Founders Co-op firms.

Smart way to encourage people to help each other.

I dunno how I feel about that - it depends on the size of the pool (# of companies). Could get distracting in the long run.

There's an economic principal on how specialization can increase output for the same amount of work. Otherwise, clearly some failed startups can tell that they're doomed before they finally give up and this might give them something more valuable to do?

Will be interesting to see this strategy tested.

They share office space, own stakes in the other's companies. It sounds like an incubator, no? These solutions are appearing all over the place. Are incubators now a good idea? (YC is NOT included in that category)

The major difference this time around is that the incubators are going for much smaller dollar amounts: they're doing YC magnitude investments. I'm not sure if it'll end up being a profitable experiment or not, but I understand why people are trying.

Don't YC companies also work together or at least use each other's products? Co-oping sounds great, but only when it actually benefits users.

i like this idea, sounds like a great way to build a community

calling it a clone is misleading. exciting since personally i'd like to see some more VC action in the Pacific NW