So, it's "bragging rights". But, temporary bragging rights considering the fact that they have at least ~100 teams per year and unless your startup goes somewhere after YC, you're just wasting your time.
Why are so many people fretting about not getting into YC and why do crappy stories like this get upvoted? If getting into Y-Combinator was your idea of validation, your startup is doomed anyways.
For starters, you'll need to start doing the following:
1. Register a Pvt. Ltd. to do business <-- hard to do unless you're Indian or someone who's Indian on board
2. Register with the RBI and get stamped from them every time you remit money from outside India <-- painful
3. Not be able to use a majority of payment gateways that collect payments in foreign currency if you want to directly tie it to your Indian co.
4. Process ESI if you're paying under $400/mo
5. Process PF if you're paying over $400/mo and have more than 10 employees
It's paperwork, paperwork and more paperwork!
As for being late to the party, cost of labor has gone up at least 4 times in the past 10 years and it's going to probably go up another 3 times in the next five years. Smart people are no longer that easy to find and very few folks actually are interested in working for startups. Cost of infrastructure, electricity, broadband, everything is higher in Bangalore and more at par with Austin or Boston tbh.
I run a startup in Bangalore and Chennai, so I can explain the costs involved:
In Bangalore
Your cost for 2000 square feet office space would be at least $2000/mo in a fairly decent building; add to this 10 months rental advance which is $20k
Your cost for each developer would be between $1k - $2k - this of course depends on the kind of work they'd need to do as well as how much experience you're looking for in people. Do remember that almost everyone in India expects a 10 - 20% raise every year. Senior level PHP folks will cost you $1,500-ish considering the fact that freshers out of school get paid $600-ish a month.
You'd also need to invest substantially in management staff in India because it's very hard to get anything done unless you have a manager for every 4-5 people, unless you get really good self-motivated guys who'll cost you a bomb. Managers will end up costing you $2k+
And, I forgot to mention - laws and the government are a bitch here.
I think you're just a few years late in jumping to the Bangalore bandwagon :)
You're right. I was more active on Inbound.org vs Hacker News simply because I used to primarily write marketing content. The post I wrote yesterday which was actually a rant about the growth hacking buzzword hit the first page of HN momentarily. That obviously caused a server crash which made me want to switch ship to Medium / Quora.
Great argument. But, not quite the same. I run my personal blog on a $5/mo digital ocean box - I'm too cheap to shell out $100/mo for a managed SingleHop box.
I don't know how to use terminal too much, I just learnt how to reset mysql AFTER my server crashed yesterday.
I agree. The dictionary needs an update, but attaching the suffix to everything is just a tad annoying. My cousin told me that somebody asked her to "hack the computer" when she wanted her to just turn the darn thing on!
I'm not certain if the analogy that news is bad for you is true. I've heard this multiple times from multiple people and practiced going on a news diet (temporarily) even though I'm used to being on top of what's happening.
What I ended up realizing was that the news wasn't really affecting me, because, what I was reading was not the crap about celebs, gossip and other nonsense, but actual stuff around me that was having an impact on the world.
I don't know if I could go on without reading about the Arab Spring, or the Nuclear tests in North Korea, even though they don't directly impact me or my daily life.