141–150 of 307 posts
Man, credit where credit is due, this showed a lot of integrity. There was one good solution, it was just a painful one, yet they still did it. Well done YCombinator! P.S. They make the point that this is an experiment, and I think all of us who join should prove that it is a good one. Nobody rails against applications and qualifying scores like HN peeps (check the comments of any article, ever, about SAT/GMAT/GRE sc…
Startup School lesson one: keep iterating :)
I 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.
I was the application reviewer and I look forward to feeling silly :) But really, one of the things I've been thinking about for a long time is how YC can help every startup in the world. We're still not there yet but this pushed us some steps closer.
So were all companies that applied accepted onto the Advisor Track? Or are the Advisor Track companies a subset of the 15k companies that applied? If so, what are the numbers like?
I 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.
I was the application reviewer and I look forward to feeling silly :) But really, one of the things I've been thinking about for a long time is how YC can help every startup in the world. We're still not there yet but this pushed us some steps closer.
To me, the biggest thing this announcement signaled is that YC is getting serious about inclusion. As someone from the "wrong" part of the country for technology, I struggle immensely to not feel resentful towards founders and VCs who give preference candidates from their social class, their university, their geographical region.
The whole culture of "founding" and "connections" in general is like nothing I ever had experienced growing up. My parents didn't just "know" lawyers, investors, doctors, researchers, technical experts, we knew teachers and mechanics and middle managers. They barely knew what startups were. How could I have competitively prepared myself for this path when it was essentially invisible to me until I was an adult?
Now I have a CS degree and have proven myself at one of the most intense technical corporations, but I'll still never be as convincing as the person who had parents that encouraged them to apply to Stanford and got admitted, or the person who's family "connections" landed them the opportunity for an investment at a younger age. Or the person who could actually afford to not work part-time or over summers and could do their own projects then and build a portfolio.
The Startup School was supposedly a chance for YC to expand their reach to include people all over the world, but I wonder if the same exact biases around social-class, university, and geographic area were key to the selection of the preferred class.
Regardless, this is indeed huge step forward and on that improves my perspective on YC and tech investment culture in general.
I hope somebody runs the data in the future to see if there was a statistical difference in outcomes between the companies intended to be accepted vs. not :-)
In the next round if they said they would accept anyone, then presumably there would be a lot of low quality applicants (100's of Facebook clones etc).
As someone who was critical at first of the way the situation was handled, I have to say that YC has been exemplary in their followup. The response from all of the YC folks in the threads was respectful and empathetic, and didn't try to make excuses or shift the blame. They just took the heat and acted with honor. I think we've just learned our first lesson from Startup School: how to handle a bad situation with grac…