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The ways to grow a tech startup company are outnumbered only by the ways to skin a cat.

In between multiple rounds of venture capital from investment groups and skin-of-your-teeth bootstrapping, there exists an ecosystem of organizations designed to grow startups with a mixture of business acceleration, development assistance, small rounds of funding (usually just enough to keep Top Ramen on the table), and general advisement. Each organization has its own trademark way of doing things, and here are five that we find fascinating.

For the fifth in our series of interviews with investors, we decided to do something different. Elliott Dahan, of the START Fund, cannot write you a check. At least not yet; he is working on that. But he is trying to do something much more ambitious, which is to create a totally new model for funding early- and seed-stage ventures. VCs love to fund disruptive ventures. But the VC model itself has been pretty immune to change for decades. So Elliott has set himself the tough job of disrupting the disrupters.

3 year old seed fund Y Combinator has funded over 80 companies and seen a handful through to Series A round funding or successful exits. Given the amount of money that Y Combinator invests in each startup (in the order of $10-20k), it would be hard to classify their oft emulated model anything but a success. Though many of Y Combinator's alumni have blogged about their experiences, what it's like to be one of the few companies selected to live in Cambridge, MA or Mountain View, CA each year remains something of a mystery to anyone who hasn't lived it.