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YCombinator clones are now popping up like wild rabbits. Earlier this week we wrote a post YCombinator Gunners to cover the VC firms who now offer seed stage funding on a model drafted by YCombinator. Highland Capital Partners is a new to this club and have launched the Summer Entrepreneurship @ Highland program. I think the summer internship programs offered by companies will also be modified to summer entrepreneurship programs.
The summer entrepreneurship program offered by Highland is open to all graduate and undergraduate students, and Highland Capital Partners will be selecting 8 groups for funding this summer. Selected students will have to re-locate to Lexington, Massachusetts for the summer. A single founder team will receive $7,500 in entrepreneurship grant, whereas a multi-person team will get $5000 per founder. Highland Partners will allocate office space in the Highland E-Center in Lexington and expects founders to reside within the same premise and there is something more
Projects will have access to “Highland Startup School� a series of forums organized by Highland and designed to further inject real-world advice, insight and perspectives into the entrepreneurial and company building process from industry leaders and best-practice experts.
Did that sound familiar ? The application deadline was 19th April, 2007. I have embedded the application form below, but it could be downloaded from here (pdf file) as well.
The seed stage funding market that is mostly dominated by First Round Capital and YCombinator is becoming more and more lucrative for VC’s to resist entering it. The fact that more companies are making an exit with seed funding and the diminishing costs to start a company is making it tough for traditional Venture Capital firms to grab good deals. We have now seen del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Flickr making an exit without knocking the doors of VC firms. Paul Graham already portrayed the future in his essay The Venture Capital Squeeze, its well worth a read.
Our previous coverage of First Round Capital funded companies is here and YCombinator funded companies is here.
Update: The pdf application is taking scribd forever to convert, looks like the servers are over heated. Will embed it as soon as it gets converted.
Great article. I stumbled across it while looking for entrepreneurial lessons. Here’s one you might be interested in:
http://smartstartup.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/how-to-go-from-.html