Even if this was as the title implied, I am doubtful it would be anything worth while without the right people. By right people I mean young, highly amititious, smart hackers.
And I am skeptical that you would find these types of hackers here in Austin. I'd love to be proved wrong though.
Austin has a high volume of both young and smarter hackers but many of those are absorbed out of the city by big business thanks to a school curriculum heavily influenced by the aforementioned. And this has always been Austin's problem since UT became a major player...
However, that does not detract from the able and educated talent pool that spends 4-6 years in Austin before moving on and fresh talent cycles in. The school, city government, and local funds are somewhat involved but it's not enough and that's what we're trying to change -- slowly but surely.
We're getting premature news coverage of the idea(s) as much of this is still in planning, but is being shared at social events to sample interest and demand. However, the co-working space is very close to being secured. There was early discussion that the space itself would operate as non-profit, but later felt that it would slow us down reaching our goal of an affordable and accessible co-working space.
The idea of a Startup District is still very much just that, an idea. Let's not get hung up misinterpreting preliminary planning, or insulting local Austin-ites trying to make a difference for the city and it's people.
We encourage any Austinites to reach out if they're interested in helping/sponsoring.
I met the guy in the article at SXSW, and he is starting a co-working company, which is essentially a group of people who split the cost of a working space. This is nothing like YCombinator. They aren't giving seed money, etc.
His second goal is to network together the various startups around Austin. Austin is always mentioned as a "startup hub", but living here it doesn't really feel that way. Maybe that can change. We tend to take more pride in our live music scene, which is great :).
I think Austin is awesome and there are very smart and creative folks here, but there aren't gigantic conferences every other weekend or a huge concentration of VC's. I do see plenty of folks in coffee shops with TextMate, vi, or Photoshop open. They are usually working on something cool, it's just not hyped up on TechCrunch and such.
I moved from Austin to Silicon Valley. I now know that Austin is not a startup hub (and nowhere else is either). I used to think it was just a matter of degree, but Silicon Valley is really a dramatically different environment for starting a technology company than anywhere else in the world.
I think it's worth noting that even though Boston is considered the "second place" finisher in the startup hub races, not a single Y Combinator company has been funded in Boston, and about 90% of those from the Boston YC programs who keep working on their businesses move to the valley. I don't believe either of these things are accidents of history.
I'll move back to Austin when I "retire", or maybe even sooner, since a large percentage of our customer base is in Texas, but while we're in a position to need to raise money and to stay on top of the technology world, there's just no other place to be.
Just to be clear, I'm one of the co-founders of Conjunctured.
What we're trying to do is eventually get to a YC model or something fairly similar; we're definitely not a non-profit, btw. While initially the coworking space might not be able to provide seed money, what we do hope to provide from the very beginning is an environment where startups will thrive. Maybe these startups will come from two guys working as a freelance designer and developer within the space, but we want them to meet, collaborate on a random project, pursue an idea and have their idea take off. They'll move out of Conjunctured and right next door into their own offce. "Support" from Conjunctured will start out as vouchers for free rent within the coworking space, but will turn into different kinds of support (money, advisors, etc.) given some time. First the coworking space. The fund comes later.
So, calling it exactly like YC is probably incorrect. Kinda like it? You could say that.
And any Austin people on Hacker News we definitely want to meet, so make sure to follow us on Twitter (I'm @cesart). We're always up for meeting and usually at least one of us is at every tech event in town. The fact that we don't know each other already, given how damn small the city is, is the main reason for trying to rally everyone together in the first place. There HAS to be a central location for everyone to go (startups and VCs alike) in order for good stuff to happen.
Feel free to contact me with any questions or arguments. :)
YC is neither of those things. So, the overlapping set between what this blog post describes and what YC provides is nil.
So, this submission means one or more of the following:
1. You don't know what Y Combinator is, and believe it is in some way similar to a co-working environment
2. You understand that mentioning Y Combinator is the best link bait available on Hacker News
3. You don't know what co-working is, and believe it is in some way similar to what Y Combinator does
No matter what, your title is nonsensical for the blog post that it points to.