I, for one, think this is misguided. While I agree that team is one of the most important important aspects to consider when funding a startup, I fail to see how a team without a vision or an idea will have the passion necessary to stick with it.
Even though many companies pivot to ideas nothing like their original, the original shared vision by the team is what keeps it together and unified.
I have no doubt that there are groups you could hand an idea to that would go at it with gusto, I just don't think most will.
Like I said in the announcement, one of the reasons we're pretty sure this will work is that we're already doing it. I.e. a lot of the people who applied to YC in previous cycles were applying without a viable idea; they just didn't realize it at the time.
Also (I'm starting to wonder if you read the announcement) we don't hand people ideas. We encourage them to solve problems they already knew about but had been overlooking.
I didn't mean to imply that you would force an idea upon them, but helping someone come up with an idea can easily turn into that if you're literally accepting people with no ideas (which you state you are and yes I read the announcement).
In the end, the person is going to have to become passionate about the idea. That's hard. When you're talking about a group that comes in together and wants to start a company together, it is much harder.
Honestly, if someone comes in just wanting to start a company without an idea, it sounds to me like they are more in love with the idea of being a founder than solving a problem close to their heart. I don't think that I would be interested in people like that.
What's up with all the negative attitude at HN that's being up voted for things that until recently at HN would have been applauded. This announcement is one. Sam altman's exit also had a negative tone. Also fred's post on yahoo also had some BS comment about VCs encouraging patents being up voted.
This is a great idea and people at most should at least have a neutral approach.
edited- I didn't mean this as a comment to Daniel's comment. It was meant for the grandparent
People calling it as they see it, by nature of this place YC is going to be very popular and generally have lots of fans and positive feedback. Not everything they do though has to be agreed with all the time by everyone.
Same with Sam Altman, just because someone is a very prominent YC founder doesn't mean everyone has to agree with everything they do.
It would be interesting to run sentiment analysis on the archives of various online communities to figure out where the likely phase transition point is. Probably a PhD in it for someone.
As HN gets larger, it gets more and more likely that there will be some negative comment made. When it was smaller, there was just a greater chance that no one would make the negative comment.
When helping brainstorm ideas with founders, YC takes strong consideration as to what type of startup the team is best suited to build.
We considered switching ideas in the middle of YC. One of the reasons the partners talked us out of it was that we weren't particularly well suited to tackle the new space we were thinking about.
I agree with this. PG responded that he believes in the idea because they already did it, but it doesn't seem quite accurate.
Teams initially accepted by YC were accepted on the basis of an idea. I am going to take a bit of a leap of faith and suggest that a significant portion of self worth was placed in the nurturing of that idea. When it came time to pivot or in some cases completely alter their business plans, I suspect that a lot of that initial value was then grafted on to the new plan as a way of salvaging ego meaning that the same level of devotion then seeded the second idea.
Will this work? Who knows...it is certainly an interesting experiment. To be frank, it seems like a step away from the wild west toward the corporatization of start-ups. Essentially hiring talented people, pushing them in a direction and seeing what they develop.
I agree that the original shared vision is crucial, but I don't see why they can't come up with that after acceptance.
If a team knows how to go quickly from idea or concept, to market definition, to customer discovery, to validation very quickly it's not a problem. Most people don't even get out of the building to talk to customers routinely. They build something and see what sticks.
I would rather take a team with no idea but were really good at customer development over a team with a concrete idea but no customer development experience. The no-idea team can quickly figure out if an idea solves a problem for a big enough market and if they are willing to pay it.
Even though many companies pivot to ideas nothing like their original, the original shared vision by the team is what keeps it together and unified.
I have no doubt that there are groups you could hand an idea to that would go at it with gusto, I just don't think most will.