I think the headline is misleading. This seems to be an alliance of startup-oriented folks. Hackers would generally avoid the weasel-words and centralization: "virtual incubator" and reliance on a site that presents itself as more or less a monolith. I also don't see where investment and sponsorship fall into hacking. Computers are cheap enough that neither is really necessary to do interesting work, even if new hardware is required.
My guess is they said "hackers" when they meant "Hacker News readers".
Word. It's nasty how HN is diluting the term "hacker" to include things like "an MBA dropout with an idea". The whole assumption that "if you're a hacker, of course you want to start a business" is just so far away from reality that it's silly.
I don't know, I regard it as pretty hackerish to solve 'the money problem' once off and spend the rest of your life hacking.
Getting crazy rich and becoming a rockstar entrepreneur, not so much, but automating the rent and bill problem once and for all by coding something to bring in money, just one in a long string of problems a 'hacker' might consider solving in their lifetime.
The use of the word "hacker" itself should be considered ballsy. (Though 3rd parties have diluted it enough to weaken the conviction the phrase allegedly once held.) To put "hackers" in the organization name implies that all members are wizardly to some extent.
But a good magician demonstrates through magic tricks and sleight of hand.
Not trying to be argumentative, but I think you may be misreading what the headline is really saying. The idea is an 'alliance', which by definition requires more than one person. Multiple 'hackers', not just 'hacker'. Some of us 'hackers' would like to work with other 'hackers' in order to build things that we cannot build alone.
Perhaps our understanding of the word 'hacker' is evolving to the word 'hackers'. And given your presence and comment here, aren't you by definition a "Hacker News reader"? Just sayin'
Ease of implementation mainly. Plus one less email/password to have to worry about. And what founder doesn't have a twitter account, it's sort of as essential as email at this point.
We won't post tweets. We added write permission so we could help organize groups together. Twitter doesn't really make it easy to choose exactly what permission you want to pick. It's write all or nothing.
Not to hijack the thread too heavily, but is there an easy way to add Twitter handles after you've signed up as a startup? I submitted just with one cofounder's and need to add more (forgot to throw them all in). Thanks, and this is a great idea; looking forward to participating.
Thanks for the reply. I don't use Twitter, hence the minor frustration. Also, wouldn't FB Connect be about as easy to implement while supporting many more potential users? Anyway, I really like the virtual incubator idea; I hope it works out well.
I am much more skeptical of using FB connect than using Twitter for authentication as a user.
I guess this is because connecting my Facebook account will mean that I am sharing a lot of new information about myself with the service whereas with something like Twitter there's just the authentication bit that's shared - there's no new data that now becomes available to speak off. My tweets were already public.
The ease of implementation is actually specifically because of twitter usernames. We can do stuff like team permissions via just a comma delimited list of @handles. Pretty handy
I've joined as part of the NRS12 batch and I can't wait to collaborate and share my progress with other founders.
Hopefully the community will graduate some awesome startups and will give the next batch some program klout.
My biggest worry is that this batch works well and a number of companies raise investment and we see thousands upon thousands of startups flooding the process the next batch.
I think the great thing about this is that it's scalable. It's purely a community driven effort - you host dinners at your own location, collaborate with other teams, get mentors. The benefit of nReduce isn't it's selection, like YC, it's the community. So, if this grew to thousands, that would be great, making everyone better off and more successful.
I'd like to think that local communities will have at least somewhat of a filter for ignoring people who don't consistently make progress from week to week.
Unfortunately it's kind of hard to kick someone out of a meeting when everyone is just a member and on equal footing.
I've been in so many meetup groups which started off with really smart hard working people that have been slowly run down by tire kickers and dreamers coming along each week but never actually making any progress on their company.
EDIT: Ah just noticed in the FAQ that they kick teams out who don't ship, awesome, good to see them keeping the quality high.
I get your point and you're so right a larger community could only benefit N-Reduce.
In my opinion if a few gems make it large from the program then the crowds will flock to be part of the program, misinterpreting it as a get rich scheme.
However, I'm sure this could be easily solved and is a scaling issue N-Reduce will be happy to have. :)
@nReduce I think this is a really nice approach and I´m pretty sure I will join the demo day. It´s a nice experiment and taking "self curing" patient communities into account, an evolutionary and self organized community can work really good.
Hint: The more you want to be like YC, the less you will be like YC. nR is nR, give it it´s own shape in the communication.
I run Startup Riot (startupriot.com) and we'll be in Seattle on August 8th for our event. I would love to figure out a way to have nReduce teams attend/participate/present at our event. Joe or whoever can hit me up if you guys are interested. @sanjay or hit the contact form on our site. I would have pinged you guys directly but there isn't an easy way to do that on your site. Regardless - good luck with the first class. More startups making progress can't be a bad thing.
I can only speak to my industry (public accounting) in my location (Texas, US), but there are a line of qualified candidates ready to fill my seat should I choose to quit. Or should I choose to ask for a leave of absence.
Note: this comment is just about my experiences. I'm not trying to make a broad statement about all companies.
I think it depends. A lot of organizations would rather terminate the employee and find a replacement than wait for their leave to end.
Alternatively, many will replace the employee without terminating them; after their leave, they'll re-hire them if the position is open (aka they're hiring), otherwise let them go.
Actually, the main motivation for me to start nReduce was so it would exist, and I could be part of it. I really wanted something like YC for my startup lizibot.com, and since YC wouldn't have us, we figured we'd try to solve our own problem.
I'm also thankful some great people (like Joe) have stepped up as partners and will be taking it over so I can focus on my startup.
I have applied to nReduce but my main question remains, "How are you going to execute this?"
If everyone is at the startup stage someone with more experience (more than one) needs to be available to help make connections. We need someone who can review each other's work and submit to different news site and media. This is a great idea but there needs to be a plan for execution.
A startup or a product without exposure is nothing. The benefit of being part of Ycombinator or other incubators is not the initial funding but the following guaranteed exposure (atleast one writeup by TC, mashable etc) and helping with connections.
We need similar kind of thing and I have got some ideas how we can collaborate on this
I'd say this is in the works, especially if a few great startups come out of it. Y-Combinator didn't start out being well known and covered on every tech site either.
I think this is a neat idea, and I'd love to try it. It seems a bit odd to hold meetings at a bar, but that's not necessarily a dealbreaker.
But sadly, due to random bad luck I can't do it: my Tuesday evenings are spoken for. (It's one of the very few times during the week that I have a fixed schedule. Let's call it a sanity preservation activity.) If nReduce was on, say, Wednesday evening (or Tuesday morning), I'd sign up.
If the expectation is for people to take a leave of absence (or quit) from their job, anyway, then I would have scheduled it during the day, as most extracurricular activities (IME) are in the evenings.
That is totally fine. We are not judges your idea / path.
In fact, inherent in our system is that their is no one person or group of people who can say yeah or neigh on all startups.
What our system does is we document your progress, so we try to answer the question, can this team execute on an idea.
Then the quality of the idea / traction / investor interest takes over from there.
The question is if when I launch an investor sees my progress, what will it say about my team?
Also, some people are joining just to be a part of the community and not really for the demo day. Our goal is to help startups, so we welcome all types.
So how does this work for remote teams that would miss a (full) week? Just update the next week with what shipped?
I am planning on attending a conference at the end of July (BSides Las Vegas/DEFCON, for those wondering), which would probably take me completely out of the running for shipping anything that week.
I am still very interested, but have other responsibilities as well. How would this work?
Signed up, in St. Louis. I can get more teams signed up locally. I'd appreciate any input on how a team farther from the primary tech hubs should take advantage. I figure either we can host a dinner with a few other local teams casually and try to make it out to another Demo Day. Thoughts?
We have a whole system for remote teams. The are treated the same as teams with physical locations and will be meeting with their group mates via video conferencing, online tools etc.
Cofounder already signed us up, I guess I'm catching up still. I think to do it well, I'd like to get at least 1 or 2 nearby startups at our level participating with us. I'm glad the remote components are there too. Excited to be a part of this.
Also, I'm an Associate Partner at a local VC fund. What else do you suggest for how investors can support or encourage this activity prior to Demo Day? Thanks for watching the comments.
I'm most curious about the role mentors will play in nReduce. From what I understand, mentorship is the secret sauce at YC and TechStars. It also seems like the hardest type of person to attract to a fledgling operation (compared to hackers and investors).
We've got some interesting ideas here. From the mentors we've talk to already, a lot of them love the fact that they can start by offering "micro-mentorship". Giving startups advice with just 1 hour a week time commitment (split into 15 min chunks per startup they help). And they can do it from the comfort of their home.
That'll require a bit of curation by the nReduce team so the mentors only see the valid, honest questions submitted. But we're working on a way to manage that workload (between the nReduce partners and moderators).
What mentors get out of it is being exposed to lots of early stage startups and possibly find some great teams that they enjoy working with and can step in as official advisory roles if there's a fit.
Registered from Bangalore, India. Haven't seen anyone from the subcontinent replying to this post.If there are any, we can start a group here or head down to Singapore once a month for the tuesday dinners. Tiger airways has cheap fares.
When you say "Ship every week " what does it mean ? Is it a feature ? Can a bug fix be considered a "ship for a week" ? . Are there any parameters on how you decide someone shipped this week
Application form doesn't seem to do anything (maybe it shut off the day before it starts?). Clicking "submit" just takes you to the top of the page. No contact form to complain to. :(
Just signed Curvio up for it. We're already launched, but we have a half dozen new features/products to launch this summer, so hopefully this helps us stay on track even better! :)
Interesting idea! But I can't understand the practical usage of it. We delivery what we do to our customers, and get feedback, why should we deliver it to bunch of hackers? :)
Great point! nReduce is not your customer. Your customers are your customers. nReduce is there to remind you and to motivate you to ship to your customers every week. Our goal is to motivate, plain and simple.
I just launched last week and still have lot more to do. Can you describe How it might work out with demoday, meetups etc with East coast or folks not in the valley.
I'm in the Boston area and this sounds quite interesting. However, I am by myself and all I would be able to ship are screenshots, logic/sequence diagrams...I am trying to build a web software for small businesses but can only do the graphic portion. Would that work?
I'm working on it. I sent the info to another interested party, but I may know others. I can send it to the Start-up Weekend group, too. How many teams shy?
My guess is they said "hackers" when they meant "Hacker News readers".