Zoetrope

A post by livinginfirstlife titled Paul Graham and Y Combinator - True Lies and Damn Lies really cracks down on Paul Graham and YCombinator. It offers commentary on the recent Newsweek article Meet the Next Billionaires about YCombinator.

Opinionated on the amount of funding Ycombinator provides (only avg. 20.000$ for a 2 man corp.), the startup lifestyle they promote (a.k.a. sleep under your kitchen table and don't spend anything) among other things, the post smells quite sour to me.

I think it's always good to be critical - especially when something is hyped a lot - and I agree that requiring that a YCombinator applicatant decides within 5 minutes if he accepts their funding or not seems a bit despotic.

But I still think that the YCombinator approach for funding these companies is a good thing. Just consider this: how many people (especially between 20 and 30) do you know who are working fulltime on their own idea's or companies? I think the main problem in doing so if you're already consuming a monthly income is that income. Someone giving you a couple of months worth of income for you to pursue your idea fulltime is a good thing.

Sure, Ycombinator could fork over more cash so the applicants should not need to live on each others couches, but I think they like to see their 'flock' give it their all. A 9 to 5 mentality isn't going to cut it when only execution matters in this 'Web 2.0' culture.

Which brings me to the title my own post: Just Do It. YCombinator enables a lot of people to build it, live it and actually produce something. Even if the revenue model stinks or you're eating only pizza's (which I'm doing anyway) ; you're doing it, and learning a lot in the progress. And that's something a lot of us can't even pretend to be doing. Idea's are plentifull, well executed idea's - not so much.

I've only learned stuff by actually doing it, wether it was building a web application in Lisp or Rails or setting up networks and servers to host them. If you don't quit procrastinating and do it and pursue things with all you've got, you're not going to learn something, let alone accomplish anything.

And that's something that's true to a lot of things in life, including starting up a company. So kudos to YCombinator and their flock for just doing it!