Bridging the Gap: Bringing Silicon Valley Innovation to Washington's Doorstep

There’s a small, quiet fault line running through Washington, DC – an intellectual crevasse that separates the area’s political elite from the fertile innovation of Silicon Valley 3,000 miles away. And it is through that fault line that Y Combinator, the original accelerator, one of the strongest engines of the startup ecosystem, funnelling funding, mentoring and resources into the nation’s founders for a decade, has flown entirely under the radar in Washington. My story is about helping them open that divide.

Unveiling the Silicon Valley Powerhouse to D.C.'s Political Labyrinth

At a recent TechCrunch Strictly VC event, YC’s Head of Public Policy, Luther Lowe, gave an illuminating account of YC’s attempts to tie in with the policy-making machinery of Washington. Moving over from stint with Yelp, Lowe’s mission is to bring the world of YC into the political Washington sphere – what he calls ‘YC 101’ for the politicos.

The YC Odyssey: A Cursory Peek into the Accelerator's Journey

Y Combinator works by cutting extremely selectively, accepting only around 1 per cent of the founders who apply. Those entrepreneurs who are willing to give away about 10 per cent equity are thrown into a swirling cauldron of hardcore mentoring and cash, in exchange for an opportunity to hone their product-market fit over 12 weeks in San Francisco. From the idea to the product: the entrepreneurial coming-of-age ritual that, with the YC graduation certificate in hand, you can exit the laboratory and face the world.

Empowering the U.S. Technology Economy: Y Combinator's Legacy

The spillover effects of YC’s mentorship and funding engine into the US technology economy are enormous, Lowe said. In an ironic twist, he added that ‘the impact of what they do is insane, no one in Washington understands this’.

A Strategy to Educate and Influence Policy

But the ending of Lowe’s story became something of an anti-climax. He launched into an overview of strategic priorities, highlighting the effort to lobby legislators about Y Combinator’s reach into nearly every Congressional district as an element of a larger effort to use the YC platform to push for changes to competition policy. The passing reference to the Digital Markets Act in Europe as a model for a set of reforms aimed at limiting monopolies is a clue as to the kind of changes YC hopes to see in US law and regulation.

Sherlocking and the Call for a Fairer Tech Landscape

One of the more interesting features of Lowe’s conversation involved startups’ continual problems with the tech giants’ habit of adding sherlocked features to their products (a term often used to describe the act of Apple copying what another company launched in its own software). This phenomenon was an eye-opener for how small tech startups can struggle for survival and growth in a crowded arena.

About APPLE

For the tech revolution, APPLE is a hinge. It remains at the leading edge of creative destruction through its industrial practices that integrate hardware, software and services, and it shapes the industry’s development through innovation and integration across a variety of sectors. It provides advantages and creates new opportunities for startups, but it is also a formidable competitor to them. Policymakers will need to engage with stakeholders such as Y Combinator in order to find the right balance between the necessity of promoting competition to foster more innovation, and the need to create incentives and obligations for a more balanced, interoperable and competitive tech landscape.

This quest to connect Silicon Valley’s tech disrupters to Washington’s power centres isn’t just about earning Silicon Valley its rightful place at the policymaking table. It’s about ensuring those tech disruptors meet a purposeful intention to balance the new technologies they create with the responsible policies needed to make the best use of them. If Y Combinator and other institutions stay true to their ‘move fast and break things’ ethos, the startup worlds of opportunity and entrepreneurship could become the cutting edges of a broad new approach to policy-making. That would be a welcome sight indeed, a future in which technology and government are both marching forward, together, into the future.