Editor's Note: Unicorn-Making Machines
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But how do you learn how to create a company—let alone an important, influential, and lucrative one? There’s no entry level job or terminal degree to get you started, no readily available Jedi guide with a 1-800 number. This absence of structure has bred new kind of institutions, with remarkable power and influence. Call them incubators, accelerators, seed funds: By whatever name, Silicon Valley is teaming with this new kind of power broker—one that amasses people whose job it is to build and shape the fledgling businesses that may be our future unicorns. In the US alone, there are roughly 700 accelerators, a cluster that grew at a rate of 50 percent each year between 2008 and 2014. The most elite of this set, institutions like Y Combinator and Techstars, boast acceptance rates lower than Ivy League universities. That makes sense: A tour through YC’s startup boot-camp offers just as much (maybe more) assurance of a prosperous future as a Harvard degree.
Alexis Sobel Fitts is Backchannel's senior editor.
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This week at Backchannel, we’re examining these businesses that build businesses, starting with Steven Levy’s insider look at YC’s wild expansion. Y Combinator may have started as an informal apprenticeship with a bunch of hacker-savants, but over the last few years the program has exploded—hosting expanded startup classes, launching a research division studying AI and Basic Income, and building a network of open classes. Steven charts its growth from a group designed to launch startups, to a group designed to launch the startup mentality throughout the world.
Not all startup-launchers so readily own the name incubator. Backchannel’s Jessi Hempel has the story of the Kairos Society, a networking group, club, and mentorship alliance, with a fledgling seed fund. Its charismatic 27-year-old founder, Ankur Jain, provides all the tenants of an incubator—and by eschewing the label, he may just have built the most successful incubator of them all.
Yet the idea of business incubators is so much more than the Silicon Valley companies that have popularized the phrase. In fact, the term originates in the rust belt, in a former factory turned egg farm. Justin Peters pays a visit to the Batavia Industrial Center, the very first incubator (it coined the term in the early 1960s), to take a look at how a local business aide is now wielded to launch unicorns.
Still, businesses outside of Silicon Valley need tools to keep up with the thriving enterprises on the coasts. Backchannel’s Miranda Katz takes a look at a common branding cliche many have developed: The Silicon Valley of X. Finally, Matt Dunne tackles local businesses from a different angle—chronicling the simple tools they need to be able to flourish.
- Alexis Sobel Fitts
Singularity
via https://www.wired.com
June 28, 2017 at 03:27PM
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