I am the founder of a HackFwd backed Company, but we just started this month. Of course its not cheap for founders with a good prototype, but the landscape in Europe is very different from the US. You dont have a lot of Angel Investing in Europe and VCs often only start at 500K EURs...so they are really filling a gap here, which is pre-seed/seed funding.
Besides the money you get to know some of europes best and most successfull entrepreneurs who might make finding a Series A funding much easier as if you were on your own.
You could also view it as a very special 1 year program in entrepreneurship because they teach you alot of things. We are really happy and look forward to the ride!
Our project wouldnt be able to take off with the money Y-Comb provides because its just too complex for that, heck we even invested twice that amount of our own money before getting HackFwd funding. If you have a pretty simple product and can show its potential with 20k$ and score a Series A, then YComb is probably a better fit but moving to the US from Europe for 20k$ wasnt an option for us anyway.
If you get accepted you will also be a referrer for the program, that way they want to built a big network of passionate founders/entrepreneurs in the future. Sharing knowledge is a big part of that and founders can say "Thank you" to anyone in the HackFwd network with the 3% equity reserved for that. You can also view most of their great talks at the quarterly events at http://www.passionmeetsmomentum.com
I think the most important point there is that the European start-up environment is just simply very different that the U.S. that's something I don't totally understand being a U.S. citizen and not having traveled much in Europe but makes complete sense in looking at the difference in structures.
Our project wouldnt be able to take off with the money Y-Comb provides because its just too complex for that, heck we even invested twice that amount of our own money before getting HackFwd funding. If you have a pretty simple product and can show its potential with 20k$ and score a Series A, then YComb is probably a better fit but moving to the US from Europe for 20k$ wasnt an option for us anyway.
If you get accepted you will also be a referrer for the program, that way they want to built a big network of passionate founders/entrepreneurs in the future. Sharing knowledge is a big part of that and founders can say "Thank you" to anyone in the HackFwd network with the 3% equity reserved for that. You can also view most of their great talks at the quarterly events at http://www.passionmeetsmomentum.com