I know that by writing this I may well be killing any chances at future funding from Paul Graham and Co. over at Y Combinator, but this was downright atrocious. Let me preface this by saying I am personally disappointed because I applied to the Summer Founders Program and was rejected. From what I can tell, I can reproduce in a weekend what took these people 3 months to accomplish.

Background

Paul Graham started a VC for mini startups called Y Combinator. They gave 9 groups $6,000-10,000 PER PERSON to work on any website they wanted for 3 months. My entry was Web Collaborator. During my summer, I created Print Promotion, worked on a top secret project with Adaptive Path that will soon change the way you feel about blogging, and am now working with O’Reilly on an amazingly innovative project. Quite productive for 3 months.

Conclusion

In that same time, 2 of the 9 groups (groups consisted of at least 2-3 people) came up with the following:

Reddit: A rip-off of the ideas behind Del.ici.ous and Digg built in Lisp. (there apparently is more to the application than has been released, but I am not impressed so far)

Brain Guppy: A cheap rip-off of Hot or Not for narcissistic geeks built in Ruby on Rails.

Stuff Guppy: A cheaper rip-off of Hot or Not where you rate whether “stuff” is cool or crappy, also built in Ruby on Rails. Their best dud ideas include selling crappy Cafepress t-shirts and showing ads. Question someone should have asked them: who wants to look at crap after 8 hours at work?

What do they all have in common?

They are all cheap rip-offs of other people’s ideas

They are hardly innovative

They have little-to-no technical merit, I can reproduce Stuff Guppy in a weekend. Alone.

They are not very popular

None of these have the potential to be a self-sustaining business

What a waste of over $30,000 for the above web sites. Some of the sites made during the 24 hours of Rails Day were better than what these guys came up with. 24 HOURS! I am sorry Paul Graham and Co, but if this is what you have to show, I am totally unimpressed (though I still want the money to work on some ideas of mine :) ).

As a friend pointed out, “the key criterion here seems to be ‘would be fun to code’, not ‘people will want to use’ or ‘will make money’”. Which is terribly ironic since Paul constantly harps on people to focus on the later. Another case of do what I say, not what I do.

Update: Maybe 3 of 9 isn’t as big a sample as I thought. I just came across another one: ClickFacts. It seems that ClickFacts has attempted to assert itself as an expert on ad fraud. To me though, this seems like they were thinking “what would Google buy?”, which is better than the 3 mentioned above but to me it seems cheep and shallow. Just my impression.

This account says that “at least half of the startups in the program are seriously cool” so maybe I have just seen the bad half.