Kickstarter's terms of use explicitly say you can't Kickstart a Kickstarter competitor on Kickstarter. I wonder if YC would accelerate another accelerator?
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
30. Startups for startups. The increasing number of
startups is itself an opportunity for startups. We're one;
TechCrunch is another. What other new things can you do?
It sounds like some preposterous way to break the speed of light; we'll just accelerate the accelerator, and it's turtles all the way down.
On the one hand, it reduces YC's risk even further, by giving them a miniscule stake in a wide range of companies. But I don't think they would be content with helping the meta-accelerator; they'd want to be hands-on with every node on the tree. That's a lot of time investment with little capital investment, which is not really their bag.
The proposition generally seems less like an accelerator, and more like a small-scale VC fund. Less intensive, less structured, just a way to invest money in startups.
It probably wouldn't be in their interest to accelerate a web startup accelerator. Maybe an accelerator for some other field. It would be interesting to watch this artificial organism reproduce.
