151–160 of 307 posts
Way to handle a really messy, potentially embarrassing situation. I feel for all of the founders that broke good news and then had to break bad. 10x more painful than just saying 'oh well' and moving on. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes one of the best mistakes YC has ever made.
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?
We mostly removed the differences between the tracks. Everyone is part of the same community. About 4,000 companies will be explicitly assigned an advisor. The other 11,000 companies won't have a dedicated advisor, but the advisors (and YC employees) will participate in the discussion forums with them. Everything else will be the same.
besides having an advisor, is there any difference between those who were supposed to be accepted originally vs the rejected ones?
The value of startupschool (as a previous graduate) is the individual attention we got from a hand selected instructor.
I know yc screwed up with the emails, and their response was to please those that they have misled, accidentally of course. But I think they also devalued the class. It's gonna be much harder to offer the quality attention of the past.
I think the right thing they should have done, which is harder, was for yc to apologize for their mistake and move on. I know it sucked for those who were selected then deselected, but if you are a startup owner you need to be prepared to be rejected, cause someone will reject you.
I don't know what criteria startupschool goes through to select a company, but I think they must have seen something unique in those four thousands.
I do congratulate them for this decision still because obviously the influx of students is gonna be a great challenge to surmount.
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…
I 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.
Making me wonder how many tracks are there? And what's the difference between them? There seems to be no mention about the track in this blog post.