Was this all just a PR stunt? /tinfoil
Any stunt that painful would not feel like much of a stunt. No, it was quite real.
Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
201–210 of 307 posts
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#202Aren't the partners that provided exclusive discounts going to be upset about this? Seems to be fueling the extreme frugal ideology that hosting is an entitlement and free. Reminders me of tee-ball everybody gets a participation trophy, yet in the real world of business it does not work like that. > EXCLUSIVE DEALS Cut startup costs and get discounts from the best in the business (Stripe, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Se…
Presumably the benefit they get from providing discounts to 4k companies will apply as much or more with 15k? It remains to be seen if they'll go for it, but people here are going to try.
The participation trophy analogy doesn't really hold because being open to all startups was what the original planners of Startup School (including pg, Sam, and others) really wanted to do. This forced things back in that direction, which hopefully we'll all be grateful for in the end.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#203[deleted]
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#204I wish I applied :(, any chance for me to get all the course materials?
Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17806627
Is there a mail list or something to get notifications when it's ready?
Would love to see this. Seen many of the https://startupclass.samaltman.com videos
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#205I 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 :-)
Unfortunately there is a huge self selection bias: the majority of applicants would know it is hard to get accepted, so they will have tried really hard to get in. 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).
Maybe they find different reasons to select.
They know who they "would" have taken.
And somewhere in the future they know who was successful.
If that are the companies they wanted anyway, all is good.
If not, they can check what was different and what spoke for and against them
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#206A great way to save the situation. And the resulting community created by 15k startups might lead to interesting directions and developments. I'm looking forward to participating and meeting our peers out there.
I totally agree! I am very excited to see how the community evolves.
This is going to be really, really interesting run!
Super pumped!
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is a big move in that direction then. 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 "connecti…
You will still have to attract VCs at some point. I would recommend you leave the baggage behind when you do.
I hear what you are saying, but someone who wants to build their own custom car garage would complain that he didn't grow up around mechanics.
It's relative, and honestly you know nothing about those people who supposedly 'got a head start', when it comes to their health, their personal relationships, or even who they are as people.
Furthermore if you really want to play that game, why not compare yourself to someone from Syria, or Africa and compare 'unfair advantages' then.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#208Unpopular opinion here. 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…
I intend to help other people and hopefully receive good advice from others who are in the same situation. Why not try to be better than ourselves rather than assume we can't do it because of a factor out of our control (not having input from YC people).
And to be fair, I'm absolutely convinced that we'll still get awesome advice from YC if they see us putting in the effort.
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#209Man, 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 disagree. They didn’t do anything except open up the grant application part to everyone (no cost to them) and promise everybody that they would get some credits (probably no cost to them). The course was always able to be audited.
What this really does is make clear the desire of the people at ycombinator to open their pre screening program (which is what startup school is, essentially) to more startups. The value to them is clear - they now get more companies that have an initial touchpoint with ycombinator, and they can maybe make money off them or whatever. But they don’t have to scale the thing that was most useful about startup school - that is, the advisors and small groups. For ycombinator this actually is a win win - they can now phase out advisors next round if this is a success and then the course would be very simple to run (and mostly free to create!).
The value that they were really providing (advisors, small groups) doesn’t scale for a free program, and with this new method of acceptance they aren’t offering that value to the newly “accepted” startups. For me personally, If I wanted to independently learn the things they teach in startup school, I already had the ability to watch last years lectures and read last years course material.
If there are credits, that will be valuable I suppose. But, again, I want to emphasize that ycombinator isn’t giving startups anything of real value here that it wasn’t already giving away (except, I guess, the ability to save face if you had already excitedly told friends that you were in this program).
Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt you're being down-voted for your sentiment, rather, that a one-word dismissal is lazy. Tell us why, preferably without a rhetorical question.
I’m 100% being downvoted for my sentiment. That’s literally all it was.
I have zero opinion on this topic. Downvoted for the lazy one-word response.
Compare to throwmeoutoft11's comment below.