"Raising an old-fashioned fixed-size equity round can take weeks"
Weeks? Jesus, do things really move that much faster in the valley? Even the hot startups in our area (Waterloo, Ontario) take months at minimum to raise a round. Probably the biggest factor is just that there aren't all that many active investors.
When John Ousterhout and I started Electric Cloud we raised a $7m series A on the back of a PowerPoint presentation and some half written code in less than two months.
We were highly organized about how we approached VCs and we had prepared well before the first meeting, but ultimately it came down to one partner at USVP clicking with the idea and running with it. They called us back for a second meeting and gave us a term sheet.
I respectfully disagree, Paul. Startups going through your program are rated "Grade A Prime" because of your vetting process. Any angel worth his salt in the Valley will talk to a YC company, if for the only reason of not to cheese you off.
A lot of the guys attending Hackers and Founders aren't quite so luck. If you're starting from scratch and going from two guys in a garage, through, getting introductions and meetings with individual angels, and raising a round that way, I it tends to take a lot longer than a couple of weeks. That is, if you are able to raise money at all.
At least that's my birds eye view from the guys attending Hackers and Founders.
It still depends where you live. In some places it takes two years just to find an angel investor, and then six months to make the deal, in which the angel takes 50% of the company whatever the size of investment...
It's funny, the very first piece of advice I got after starting my company was that we should find a way to move to the valley. At the time, I remember thinking "I'm sure it would help, but it's not worth the hassle." How wrong I was.
Granted we're doing pretty well, but my god has it been brutal. And not the good kind of brutal - as in building the product and finding customers - the bad kind of brutal, where you lose good developers because no one wants to live in friggin' Waterloo, and there's maybe 10 active investors in the whole damn city (and we already have 3 of them!)
Weeks? Jesus, do things really move that much faster in the valley? Even the hot startups in our area (Waterloo, Ontario) take months at minimum to raise a round. Probably the biggest factor is just that there aren't all that many active investors.