Y-Combinator vs Seedcamp - Paul Graham nailed it?

Update September 2011: This blog post was one of the most popular on my blog because it was a rant. I will rant no more. I wrote about it because a few years ago I felt I didn’t like what the Seedcamp was up to but it has changed since then. Both Seedcamp and Y-Combinator (along with TechStars and others) are great ways of stimulating entrepreneurship and I support them all. I didn’t want to hurt anyone with this post and if I did, I’m sorry. This blog post is no longer relevant. The comment thread below it is still interesting and I recommend you go to comments directly. Thank you.

- Michael Sliwinski

— Original post back in the day:

Last week while watching the talks from Startup Bootcamp by the founders of some really cool web apps like Dropbox, Reddit, Justin.tv - I couldn’t help noticing that these are some really good web-businesses founded initially by Paul Graham powered Y-Combinator. If you add Posterous (which I’m using for this blog), RescueTime or Xobni to the mix, it’s quite a lineup… whereas Seedcamp in Europe still waits for their startups to mean anything in the web 2.0 world…

Last week’s LeWeb conference tried to prove a point that we have cool startups in Europe too, and I think we really do (I’m European and I’m proudly based in Europe) but just as I mentioned earlier in my last blog post, there is still a substantial gap between Europe and the Silicon Valley in terms of entrepreneurship.

This year Codility - a company led by a friend of mine won Seedcamp and they moved to London so I’m hoping they’ll be one of those Seedcamp winners who will prove to be really successful. Fingers crossed guys!

The curious thing is that Seedcamp actually failed in one regard - they evolved from an idea of a place where startup founders really start (the founders have roughly an idea and want to move to London to make it big) to “yet another startup competition” where all the startups have already launched, have customers and have even received a round of funding… In this case I’d probably could try to submit Nozbe (founded in 2007) to them and would have a chance to win :-)

I’m not saying it’s really bad… but I really dig the fact that Y-Combinator has maintained its profile of being a seed funding for fresh-out-of-college founders who want to make it big in the web world. They have the energy and ideas, so they receive a few bucks from Paul and work together to make it happen… and as you can see from the list of startups I’ve mentioned earlier… some of them are pretty darn successful.

What do you think? Any opinions or experiences in submitting your startup to Seedcamp or Y-Combinator? Which model’s better for you?