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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