Nice job guys, totally the right call. Is this the beginning of a fully crowd sourced Y Combinator?
Y-not Combinator?
Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
81–90 of 307 posts
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#82can we also increase the 100 slots for the 10k grant, to 400 slots? because it used to be 4000 startups and now it's 15000!
I asked Sam that exact question earlier and he was already working on it. But it's complicated for fiduciary reasons, and not the sort of thing that can be put together in a few hours.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#83For someone out of the loop, what exactly are in the discount code and the 10K equity free grant? Does everyone get it on the completion of the course or does YC choose a selected few?
Since this is a brand new update to Startup School, we're going to work on figuring out how we can offer discounts/deals to all founders in the program. Stay tuned!
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Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
We had originally accepted about 4000 - although our goal has always been to make our MOOC as much about "open" as we possibly can. Our own misstep has caused us to accelerate things.
Could you explain what happened more? 4,000 companies were accepted but 11,000 received acceptance emails?
Yes, that's about right. Companies which were intended to be placed in an audit-only track were accepted.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#85I was so happy seeing the email of me being accepted to Startup School, but then I saw another email about it being an error, I am a bit sad, but then after reading I'm feeling happy again, than you to YC for giving us an opportunity.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#86I can't stay mad at y'all after this response.
I am looking forward to making your application reviewer peeps feel silly after this is all over though. Team 2nd chance has a lot to prove, and I think many of us do really appreciate YC's new commitment to supporting ALL founders at this point, even if it took a mistake to get there.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. We do a little bit of that already with our normal batch applicants, but with the wide net of Startup School there may be more more data available that would be interesting to correlate with long-term success. I think it would be so valuable to have a rigorous study of the factors that correlate with startup success – letting founders know what they should optimize for is an important part of the value we want t…
eg. 40% of VCs went to Harvard or Stanford, so therefore if you want to be a VC or know VCs, you should optimize for going to Harvard or Stanford. /s - because much of the data you'd have on such early stage co's is identity-based, and therefor chock full of bias.
Some of it for sure, but there are a lot of other things to look at. And of course the whole idea of startup school is to try to cast a much wider net, orders of magnitude wider.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#88I think this is the best outcome - cheers to YC for handling this in this way.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#89Very exciting stuff. I hope this experiment is successful and it paves a way towards a completely open model. It seems only logical that any startup should be able to enter the arena and fail or succeed on their actual merit itself, and not some kind of proxy or guess.
This really does seem like one of those magical "listen to your users" moments in a startup's life. Startup School teaching by example and practicing what it preaches.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#90I think this is a great solution! I hope this year will be amazing.