As startuppers ourselves, at Keplar we do a lot of thinking about what the future shape of the startup ecosystem looks like in the UK, Europe and beyond. Yesterday Fast Company ran an interesting profile of successful West Coast incubator Y Combinator, entitled “Paul Graham: Why Y Combinator Replaces The Traditional Corporation”. The article broadly set out how Y Combinator is building a sophisticated ecosystem of complimentary, collaborative startups who help each other out on their path to building traction and profitability, in ways which rival the more ossified, hierarchical form of a traditional corporation; the piece has engendered a lively debate on Hacker News.

Pilot fish accompanying an oceanic whitetip shark in the Red Sea

In my response in the thread I agreed with the underlying trend (keiretsu collectives of innovative, smaller companies outcompeting traditional corporations), but argued that Y Combinator is the wrong posterchild for this movement, for a couple of reasons:

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