The incubator bubblet: YEurope, Techstars, HitForge…
We were just talking about the buzz YCombinator has generated with its incubator model.
Now others are copying it. Paul Böhm has launched a European clone, called YEurope, and his site is awfully similar to YCombinator’s. (Techcrunch has more about YEurope’s copying of the investment model too, which is based on the number of founders, i.e., 5000€/each, and taking a 2-10% stake in the company.) Eight start-ups travel to Vienna to work on their companies.
Others are popping up, another strange reminder of the good ol’ days of 1999, when incubators were all the rage. We’ve mentioned Techstars in Colorado. And most recently, serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant of San Francisco has launched HitForge. He calls it a “cooperative,” where entrepreneurs apply to join HitForge and then they band together in teams to launch companies. If projects fail, fine, the team moves on to something new. We pressed Ravikant for more details, such amount given to sustain entrepreneurs and the project’s stock structure, but he said it’s a work in progress.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
