I'm not so sure someone would have come up with this exact approach. Incubators have been around for a while, but they seemed to involve less collaborative ment

I'm not so sure someone would have come up with this exact approach. Incubators have been around for a while, but they seemed to involve less collaborative mentoring and higher bars for entry. To my mind, YC was designed to address a specific population and problem space simultaneously. On the investor side, that seems very unique. The best analogy I can think of is a magnet school for tech entrepreneurs. The difference is previous attempts thought more about what could they take from the entrepreneurs than what could they give them (apart from cash). To me, the knowledge and support is the most critical element and YC.news is a very nice outgrowth of that. What incubator ever produced a product to help facilitate knowledge sharing among people outside the incubator?