There was talk on stage of "secret sauce"

If you want to take the measure Ray ban sunglasses of the influence of the incubator Y Combinator, all you had to do was stop by its Demo Day on Tuesday.

The event is a series of 21/2-minute presentations from the latest class of 66 start-ups to finish Y Combinator's program. But to even get in, you had to brave the 30-minute traffic jam outside the Computer History Museum. After several years of holding the event at its cramped offices, Y Combinator had to move to a larger space to accommodate growing demand from potential investors.

You'd also be hard pressed to find a higher caliber of venture capitalists gathered in one place to poke and prod a parade of entrepreneurial hopefuls.

"#YC #DemoDay feels like Fashion Week," tweeted Christine Herron, an investor at Intel Capital. "Buyers making picks and tweeting trends on the catwalk."

The Y Combinator phenomenon points to a much Oakley sunglasses larger idea that has gripped Silicon Valley. This is the age of the incubator. Where Y Combinator was a pioneer a few years ago, the valley is now home to countless incubators, accelerators and boot-camps, all hoping to provide money, mentorship and networking to entrepeneurs who need all three to refine their idea into something investment worthy.

In recent weeks I've received several emails from large media corporations and overseas countries announcing plans to open some kind of center in Silicon Valley. These add to the more established incubators
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such as 500 Startups Accelerator, The Founder Institute, Plug and Play, and Dog Patch Labs.

Even among this crowded field, Y Combinator stands alone. Consider some of the 500 people in attendance.

There was Ron Conway, burberry handbags of course, who along with Andreessen Horowitz and Russian mogul Yuri Milner, gives each company accepted to Y Combinator a total of $150,000. Then there was Timothy Draper, Jeff Clavier, and blogger turned VC Michael Arrington. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang could be seen smiling and shaking hands. And PayPal co-founder Max Levchin was working the crowd.

In short, it's an insider's insiders crowd. And they had come to sit through five rounds of presentations from entrepreneurs who had spent six months honing their pitches and developing companies with names that seemed like achingly familiar remixes of start-ups names you've heard. Medigram. Flutter. Givespark.

There was talk on stage of "secret sauce" and "paradigm shifts." It's about the only room in the world where an entrepreneur can say in all earnestness things like "We are the Github for everything" and "We want to be the Trulia for burberry watches Commercial Real Estate" and people actually understood them.

"We're gearing up to be the Zynga of mobile," promised Alex Lin, co-founder of LVL6.

Some critics have worried that a glut of incubators are pumping out too many start-ups with ideas that are too small. But if there is was any ambivalence on the part of potential investors, it seemed to be more than balanced out by the fact that they felt they couldn't afford to miss this day.

Jessica Livingston, a Y Combinator co-founder, said it has held the past 13 Demo Days at its offices, but had to move the event to a larger venue to accommodate demands from investors for invitations.

But still, I wondered, why has the incubator concept so completely gripped Silicon Valley?

Graham said the burberry ties proliferation of incubators is really a response to the exploding interest in starting companies. Starting tech companies seems to get cheaper by the day. And the concept of innovation seems to have a strong grip on the national psyche.

"When something gets cheaper to do, the number of people doing it increases hyperlinearly," Graham said.

Incubators, he said, provide a first step cheap burberry shirts for women in winnowing down the best ideas and then passing them along to investors.

Deepak Kamra, a venture capitalist at Canaan Partners, said Demo Day was valuable for helping him keep abreast of the latest ideas and trends. He also makes a short list of companies to keep his eye on down the road to see if they get any traction and might make good investments.

But, he also acknowledged, keeping all the companies straight is a growing burden.Juicy Couture sunglasses, cheap Juicy Couture glasses sale.

"Someone should do a start-up to help me keep track of all these start-ups," Kamra said. "It might not have a huge audience, but I could really use it."