In a recent New Yorker I read about a Silicon Valley accelerator for start-ups called Y Combinator. It’s headed by a super-smart 30-year-old gay vegetarian Jewish man (yes, all that essential info was offered gratis in the article) named Sam Altman.

Sam is a god to supplicant start-ups. His wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command means life or death to these poor hopefuls. Have you ever seen Dragon’s Den? It’s like that, but with real money. When fotoLibra was a start-up our accelerator was called an incubator, and we were carefully shielded from risk-hungry investors. All the people we raised money from seemed to want it back.

Smart Sam dropped out of college to work on a mobile app which told your friends where you were. Within a couple of years the app’s valuation was $175 million, but unfortunately people didn’t actually want their friends to know where they were so he sold the company for $43 million and became a guru instead.

Are people mad? Why spend $43 million on something people aren’t interested in? Facebook sold about 20% of its shares a year or so ago and raised more than the value of Belgravia. A little program that allows you to call a taxi is valued at more than Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, Guest Keen & Nettlefolds and Reed Elsevier combined, and makes spectacular losses — $1.2 billion in the first six months of this year. Now we’re getting silly. No, I will not invest in your cash-incinerating start-up.

Two postulants from Norway came to see our Sam. They had the concept of an on-line temp agency, handing out freelance jobs for businesses around the world. I guess the big traffic would be linking Indian coders to American start-ups. But we can all use some outside help from time to time so I checked them out. They’re called Konsus, and of course being a child of the Cold War I read it as Konsum, the Tesco of East Germany (but without the stock).

Konsus has a clear, legible website, which you’d expect as they’d raised $1.6 million in capital before they’d ever met Sam. To my surprise one of the services they offered was content provision, which is what used to be called writing. I’m never averse to an extra buck, so I thought I’d put my name down.

I had to answer a quick-fire timed questionnaire and submit an example of my work.

So I corrected the copy on their website and submitted it to them.

I wonder if I’ll hear from them?

The educated among you may have spotted a reference from Ozymandias. You’ll remember how the C21 South Sea Bubble all ends, then:
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Oh, I’ll take Belgravia.

konsus

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