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.
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.