Saeed Amidi (who was involved in PayPal early days) hosted our visit to Plug and Play, an incubator in the Silicon Valley.
Plug and Play Tech Center is a strategic partner to technology start-up companies in Silicon Valley. Based in Sunnyvale, they are home to over 100 start-ups offering a full range of services from full service office space to strategic advice to direct investments. It seems that they are also well connected to the SV entrepreneurial community, with partnerships with universities (MIT, Stanford, Cornell) and several VCs. Plug and Play can also coinvest in the companies through Amidzad. It seems like a nice place to be in the early days of your startup (full of other young entrepreneurs in startups of less than 5 employees). I also met a guy from Secuware, a Spanish startup that has a small office in this incubator. For more information about Plugh and Play, the NYtimes published an interesting article about Saeed.
Plug and Play is launching a new program to accomodate startups during the summer providing limited capital to cover the founders' summer expenses and initial capital requirements: e.g., ~$200K in exchange of ~5% of the equity. If your startup reaches some milestones, they invest another $2 million one year later in exchange of ~15%. Saeed told me that he would like to have about 3 startups from MIT :-)
Other VCs are launching similar "summer in entrepreneurship" programs, such as LightSpeed Venture Partners (what they call summer grants) or Highland Capital Partners (with their "Summer Entreprenuership" program). These programs give you some money to cover basic expenses over the summer (e.g., ~$10K per founding member) and in the end of the summer they might invest in your company, similar to what YCombinator or SeedCamp do.
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