This evening Y Combinator opened up applications for its Summer 2010 round, marking what will be the fifth anniversary of the program, which has funded 171 startups to date. This round is bringing an important change: the program calendar has been moved up by a month, which means that startups will find out if they've been accepted at nearly the same time that they'll hear back from competing programs like TechStars and DreamIt Ventures.
Interesting. YC is essentially a parallel university with its own faculty, (borrowed) dormitories, and in-house curriculum. It was explicitly set up to target college-aged kids who were more ambitious than their CS courses. The model proved so successful that it attracted copycats and, not only that, but the copycats are also successful. So much so that they are clearly starting to pull talent from the first-mover, and YC doesn't like that.
Now YC is pushing up the announcement date of their incoming class so that this whole segment of youth-oriented VC is now basically right back where it started: YC may have started as a new school, but now it has inadvertently given birth to a whole new university system.
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