My Visit with THE LORD OF THE STARTUPS: Y Combinator's Paul Graham

After filming so many successful graduates of the world-famous preparatory academy for entrepreneurs, Y Combinator, for A TOTAL DISRUPTION, I was inspired to journey up the river and find their leader.  I quickly discovered that Paul Graham doesn't like the word "incubator."  Or, for that matter, "accelerator."  The "guru of startups" prefers to compare himself and, Y Combinator (affectionately called YC by its legions of believers) to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings - in that it invented the genre. When I caught up with Paul after one of his famed Demo Days, he explained: "Tolkien didn't think of himself as inventing the fantasy novel. He thought of himself as having written The Lord of the Rings and then a bunch of other people write books about elves, and he probably looks at these books and thinks what a crappy imitation of The Lord of the Rings."   Idea Lab in Pasadena, CA, founded by Bill Gross back in 1996, is oft-credited with creating the first-ever incubator - but Graham's Y Combinator has certainly sold the concept with its meteoric success.