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> This offer is available to startups that meet the following criteria: > - In an approved Accelerator, Incubator or VC fund Why is this a thing? Not everyone

• xedarius 12y ago
  Couldn't agree more, I even go as far to say Google seem a little out of touch here. Would this offer have helped Google become Google, probably not.
  • meowface 12y ago
    It's how they're handling risk, so that they can give away the $100,000 in credit without having to spend a lot of time doing due diligence and confirming that a certain startup company is at least somewhat feasible.
• morganvachon 12y ago
  Google probably doesn't want every Kickstarter/Indiegogo project applying for the program. It's likely a risk thing; if the startup is backed by a "real" VC firm, that firm is taking most of the risk. Google is just providing a few extra rungs on the ladder others built.
  • walterbell 12y ago
    It's effectively a subsidy to accelerators: $100K of risk capital being matched by $100K of hosting, doubling the initial runway for a startup which needs that level of capacity.
    • alandarev 12y ago
      Though that $100k balance expires in a single year. If your server bills are $100k for a first year start-up company, you are doing something VERY VERY wrong.
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        Or very, very right.
      • walterbell 12y ago
        If revenue is 10X your server bills or is growing much faster than server costs, then you're exactly the customer Google wants for their cloud services.
• lifeisstillgood 12y ago
  Completely agree ... Except from Googles point of view they will otherwise be in the position of deciding "real startups" from wannabes and then deciding which ones are most likely to succeed. At which point google becomes worlds biggest incubator. But yes, I think many many governments could do a lot worse than say "have you got a business plan and two paying customers? Here have enough money to live on, got off the dole and we have 15% equity if you become the next standard oil."
  • dragonwriter 12y ago
    > At which point google becomes worlds biggest incubator. And Google has already setup and helped to setup a bunch of startup incubators, so it makes sense to leverage that investment rather than duplicating effort.
• davidw 12y ago
  > "permission-based" startup ecosystem. What's that?! Startups are getting easier and easier to start with no VC involvement, and there is a large community of people doing bootstrapping. If anything, I'd question who is voting this article up. It's of little use to most of us.
  • Kurtz79 12y ago
    You realize that you are writing in a news site hosted by a startup accelerator, right ? I can´t think of many other places where it would be more relevant.
    • davidw 12y ago
      The number of people who are in some way part of YC here are far outnumbered by those of us just reading the site, so, yeah, most of us are not really going to be directly affected by this.
• trjordan 12y ago
  It's not perfect, but what's a better way? There's a million people who could use this $100k to mine bitcoins, run personal servers, do scientific calculations, or more. Google isn't interested in those people: they want to lock in companies and keep them there as they grow quickly. If you worked at Google, what would you propose to catch these long-term valuable customers, without giving away a ton of free infrastructure?
  • mmariani 12y ago
    As there is another million people bootstrapping their businesses. What they should do is to find additional criteria to augment the startup validation process. A very simple criteria would be to maintain a front-facing service that provides value to consumers, excluding: bitcoin mining, run malware, etc.
    • gfodor 12y ago
      And who verifies these things? How often? And by what rules? And why bother, when just limited it to accelerator startups is much easier and most likely will pick up the majority of successful long term startups anyway? I don't like it either, but it's obviously a logical move. By screening for "you are in an accelerator" you not only have ensured some due diligence has been done, but you also know someone else's money is on the line, so they will keep tabs on them.
  • walterbell 12y ago
    University partnership? GSOC competition? AWS customers with high month-over-month revenue & traffic growth and less than 10 employees? There are many ways of triaging worthy candidates and involving the broader tech community, without further advantaging the already over-advantaged.
    • icebraining 12y ago
      AWS customers with high month-over-month revenue & traffic growth and less than 10 employees? Seems a little late to lure them into the Google Platform.
• spindritf 12y ago
  It's a thing because it's easier and cheaper to let others do the hard job of selecting hopeful startups. Cuts down on abuse, too.
• patio11 12y ago
  Starting a business was quite possibly the first thing in my life that I didn't need to ask anyone's permission for. You don't need Google's, YC's, or a VC's blessing to start. You might need it to get their money, but startup costs for many software companies are asymptotically approaching zero.
  • idlewords 12y ago
    If I could change one thing about business culture in Europe, it would be this. You just start doing something and the paperwork, permits, accounting and so on can all come later. It's a wonderful feeling. My impression is that you can't get started in the EU without at least a little up-front paperwork.
    • tim333 12y ago
      In the UK, which is technically EU, you can pretty much just start, depending what it is exactly.
      • idlewords 12y ago
        I think of the UK as much closer in business culture to the US in this respect.
        • tonymillion 12y ago
          In the UK its actually easier to start a business than it is in the US, and the associated costs are significantly less. *(as someone who has started companies in both the UK and US)
    • jacquesm 12y ago
      In NL it is like that. You can start a business personally and later convert it into a legal vehicle of your chosing, or not at all. When you want to claim back VAT there are some hoops to jump through, but a 'single proprietor company' without shares does not need an act of incorporation to be active. You rarely need permits (if you sell food or medication or something like that you do), you will need to do your filings but you can usually get them deferred for the first year.
• idlewords 12y ago
  I really enjoy the dissonance between startup mythology (bold innovators who play by nobody's rules) and the very conservative reality, as expressed in eligibility criteria like this. Think different, in one of the approved ways. Why this part of our industry is exempt from disruption, while everything else is fair game, is a source of constant wonder to me.
  • patio11 12y ago
    I feel obligated to point out that Microsoft Bizspark will give you free software/services for 3 years and it is "one guy working from his kitchen table"-friendly. If you're building things, they will give you stuff. Bonus: You can help support underdog upstarts like Microsoft against uncaring tech titans like Google.
    • idlewords 12y ago
      Wow, did they change the name of their thing again? I am really leery of these various clouds. They are like architectural catnip-using them requires you to use an order of magnitude greater resources than you would on a single server, but it's really fun to assemble the moving parts. I feel like some people don't fully recognize how much you can do on a single tiny machine in 2014 if you don't have 29 abstraction layers under you. It's not just that the cloud stuff is inefficient, but that it's so much fun to write services across ten ephemeral nodes and play with all the cool tooling, instead of hanging your head and learning the simple apache config that will enable you to do the equivalent stuff on a budget linode.
      • Gmo 12y ago
        BizSpark is called BizSpark since a long time. BizSpark is not their cloud offering, it's simply their program for giving away software licenses to startups
        • idlewords 12y ago
          Ah, thank you!
• eli 12y ago
  I would guess it's a cheap way to try to target the offer to people actually trying to build companies (vs hobbyists or established companies)
• kiriljakimovski 12y ago
  A possible explanation might be that startups that have been selected in these accelerators have more potential to become successful businesses in the future (either in raising money or in building something people want). I mean, someone already placed a bet on them. You get the free cloud for only a year. After that you start paying, and since you’re already there it’s very likely that you’ll proceed with Google. So, they’re not giving away anything, they’re just trying to grab market share before the competitors.
• mrcwinn 12y ago
  For what it's worth, folks with their own unfunded startup are free to use services from other places. For people in an accelerator or funded by a VC, this is a meaningful service that could extend their runway a bit. Of course, it also locks them into Google's ecosystem (practically) when they do hit it big - but I think that's obvious upfront. Why should Google, a for-profit company, gain nothing for its $100,000 (at most)? If you are in one of those accelerators and have a concern about being tied to Google, you're, again, free to go elsewhere.
• simonswords82 12y ago
  Yep, I got really excited about this for our bootstrapped app www.staffsquared.com only to read the small print and realise we couldn't use this as we're not VC backed. Very frustrating.
  • psykovsky 12y ago
    Small print? May I suggest you reset your browser zoom level?
    • simonswords82 12y ago
      :)
• arikrak 12y ago
  This isn't charity, their goal is to lose money initially and make it up in the long run. They only want to give it to startups who will be likely to spend lots of money after year 1. This is a simple way of making sure the company has money.
• tzm 12y ago
  This program is a scalable way to find growth startups that are validated and on pathway to revenue. It's not an open check book. If you don't meet the criteria for this program, I'm sure there are options for you. Google is actively looking for startups of all types and are willing to invest resources. I recommend talking with an account manager (ping me if you want a starting point).
• tonysuper 12y ago
  Yeah. This was pretty disappointing for me. I'm in the process of starting a company with a friend, but neither of us are 18 yet, so the chances of us getting into an accelerator or VC fund are next to zero (not that it's going to stop us from applying). We could have really used this service. Oh well. I understand why Google is doing it, but it's still disappointing.
  • miles932 12y ago
    What are you working on? Maybe I can help?
    • tonysuper 12y ago
      It's an image-search site. We have the core product (searches) about 99% finished. We're mostly trying to make the frontend as responsive and intuitive as we want it to be. I want to work on it with my partner a little bit more before we get outside technical help. I'll keep you in mind, though.
• joeblau 12y ago
  It may be seen as a decent way for accomplishing due diligence. Most accelerator programs will check out the company, product and team. This also helps Google avoid being the first investor in as most accelerators usually invest in projects in their program. That being said, you can still use Google's services for free as long as you're below the cap.
• dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Why is this a thing? Because this isn't free for Google, so they are expending resources building relationships with the customers they think are most likely to provide more business in the future; so they aren't giving to any small business, they are giving it to businesses that have been vetted by groups they trust and are receiving capital with some kind of plan for expansion that would grow the startup's business -- and therefore the business that Google would see from the startup if the startup stayed on Google's platform. > Not everyone wants to build their startup through venture capital, or an accelerator. Sure, but the cost to Google to vet each individual startup to see if they were the kind of potential customer they'd like to expend these resources for would drive up the cost of providing the service. Google isn't a charity, its a for-profit business. $100,000 in service credits plus 1:1 technical architecture reviews plus 24/7 support isn't something even Google can afford to provide to everyone. So they outsource the work of screening by instead screening a smaller number of accelerators, incubators, etc.
  • Jun8 12y ago
    It's up to $100K credit, not all startups may use all of their credits. And this is not the cost to Google. But nitpicking aside, why not have two tiers, one $100k for approved startups, and another with, say, $10k credit and with some support. Google championed the idea that the road to classification success is a (relatively) simple algorithm paired with a lot of data. This way they could get hundreds, if not thousands of startups to hone their company success estimation algorithms.
    • jiggy2011 12y ago
      If you don't have at least some approval process then people will just take advantage of your free credits by running minecraft servers or mining dogecoins.
• fifthesteight 12y ago
  My partner and I feel this way, but we often feel entirely alone in the opinion. It's refreshing to see it written here, knowing that there are others of this mindset.