Why are so many people fretting about not getting into YC and why do crappy stories like this get upvoted? If getting into Y-Combinator was your idea of validation, your startup is doomed anyways.
I simply don't understand the obsession of founders with getting into YC. If you are a founder and you are really passionate about an idea, you simply don't have time to think about "how to game the system and get into an incubator". You have more important things to think about - like product-market fit, hiring the right people etc. etc. In Aileen's Lee recent article about unicorns or billion dollar startups - 2 out of 39 were YC companies, the rest 37 were not.
Being part of YC adds a whole new dimension of political clout and credibility irregardless. It's definitely a 'who you know' rather than 'what you know' notch on the belt beyond simple validation. Saying you were part of it may be worth something to the right people at the right time, one day.
So, it's "bragging rights". But, temporary bragging rights considering the fact that they have at least ~100 teams per year and unless your startup goes somewhere after YC, you're just wasting your time.
I run a startup in Bangalore and Chennai, so I can explain the costs involved:
In Bangalore
Your cost for 2000 square feet office space would be at least $2000/mo in a fairly decent building; add to this 10 months rental advance which is $20k
Your cost for each developer would be between $1k - $2k - this of course depends on the kind of work they'd need to do as well as how much experience you're looking for in people. Do remember that almost everyone in India expects a 10 - 20% raise every year. Senior level PHP folks will cost you $1,500-ish considering the fact that freshers out of school get paid $600-ish a month.
You'd also need to invest substantially in management staff in India because it's very hard to get anything done unless you have a manager for every 4-5 people, unless you get really good self-motivated guys who'll cost you a bomb. Managers will end up costing you $2k+
And, I forgot to mention - laws and the government are a bitch here.
I think you're just a few years late in jumping to the Bangalore bandwagon :)
For starters, you'll need to start doing the following:
1. Register a Pvt. Ltd. to do business <-- hard to do unless you're Indian or someone who's Indian on board
2. Register with the RBI and get stamped from them every time you remit money from outside India <-- painful
3. Not be able to use a majority of payment gateways that collect payments in foreign currency if you want to directly tie it to your Indian co.
4. Process ESI if you're paying under $400/mo
5. Process PF if you're paying over $400/mo and have more than 10 employees
It's paperwork, paperwork and more paperwork!
As for being late to the party, cost of labor has gone up at least 4 times in the past 10 years and it's going to probably go up another 3 times in the next five years. Smart people are no longer that easy to find and very few folks actually are interested in working for startups. Cost of infrastructure, electricity, broadband, everything is higher in Bangalore and more at par with Austin or Boston tbh.
Game Theory. If everyone joins Medium to "get on the front page," then the probability of getting on the front page becomes that much lower.
Also, getting on the front page of Medium is mostly irrelevant since you have mostly nil personal branding anyways. If you're going to hit #1 on Hacker News, do it on a website you own with your own content.
You're right. I was more active on Inbound.org vs Hacker News simply because I used to primarily write marketing content. The post I wrote yesterday which was actually a rant about the growth hacking buzzword hit the first page of HN momentarily. That obviously caused a server crash which made me want to switch ship to Medium / Quora.
Great argument. But, not quite the same. I run my personal blog on a $5/mo digital ocean box - I'm too cheap to shell out $100/mo for a managed SingleHop box.
I don't know how to use terminal too much, I just learnt how to reset mysql AFTER my server crashed yesterday.
