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This is great! I may honestly be even more motivated now to prove YC wrong for initially declining me :-)
I wish I applied :(, any chance for me to get all the course materials?
Now I'm excited I get a chance to be in a network, compete, and see how peers are handling things on the forums. It's going to be awesome and an excellent motivator. Thanks YC!
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> I was excited by the prospect of being a part of a network of other vetted founders. I mean, that's what YC is supposed to be. Startup school is an effort to bring YC to more people, which obviously is going to involve less vetting. How hard can you vet early age startups that answered 3 questions with 150 words anyway? You're making it a bigger deal of it than it is.
I get that, but there was still some form of vetting - enough to disqualify 2/3 of candidates. I'm not making a big deal out of it. Quite the contrary - I don't care about Startup School anymore, whereas I did before. Note to anyone reading this: please build a mastermind group that requires an MRR of at least $15k. I'd pay good money to be a part of that.
But that's just the thing... nobody actually knows if that level of vetting is meaningful... it may perform no better than chance in terms of identifying "good" startups (however you define that). This experiment will actually be very interesting exactly in that it will help YC see if their vetting IS as good as they think it is.
please build a mastermind group that requires an MRR of at least $15k. I'd pay good money to be a part of that
Sure, having a $15K MRR shows something about a company, but why do you think that is the best criteria to identify founders/companies to network with?
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This – Every serious founder already audited last years startup school via the youtube and podcast. The content was amazing but I saw this as a way for us who don't live in the valley to network our way into YC. However, a YC branded forum exclusively for active founders seems valuable so lets see what happens.
How valuable can a forum with 15,000 companies (most of which are bad) spamming their services ever offer any real value? If you're lucky to have a good group you might find value, otherwise it's going to be pointless. I'd encourage seeking out other, smaller founder mastermind groups - you'll get much more value there.
How do you know they're bad? And maybe it's the case that having ONE person in your group, who is the "right" person, will actually be what makes the group valuable...
Not saying that will prove to be the case, but I think you're rushing to judgment a bit.
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This – Every serious founder already audited last years startup school via the youtube and podcast. The content was amazing but I saw this as a way for us who don't live in the valley to network our way into YC. However, a YC branded forum exclusively for active founders seems valuable so lets see what happens.
How valuable can a forum with 15,000 companies (most of which are bad) spamming their services ever offer any real value? If you're lucky to have a good group you might find value, otherwise it's going to be pointless. I'd encourage seeking out other, smaller founder mastermind groups - you'll get much more value there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This – Every serious founder already audited last years startup school via the youtube and podcast. The content was amazing but I saw this as a way for us who don't live in the valley to network our way into YC. However, a YC branded forum exclusively for active founders seems valuable so lets see what happens.
How valuable can a forum with 15,000 companies (most of which are bad) spamming their services ever offer any real value? If you're lucky to have a good group you might find value, otherwise it's going to be pointless. I'd encourage seeking out other, smaller founder mastermind groups - you'll get much more value there.
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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…
Agreed. I was excited by the prospect of being a part of a network of other vetted founders. If they're letting literally anyone in, it's no more useful than every other founders mastermind group on FB. Huge misfire by YC. Startup School had the chance to be a wonderful network of promising early stage companies - not only that, you've alienated a lot of the promising companies who were properly accepted. YC simply d…
We made a major mistake with the admissions emails – which I still feel terribly about. However, while that mistake moved up our timeline drastically, a more open process was directionally the way we were going with Startup School anyway. In fact, the first iteration of Startup School we ran a few years ago was intended to be open to all applicants. We had so much interest that we had to cap the number of accepted companies to the number we had projected would apply, to ensure our infrastructure and organizational ability could handle everyone.
For the Startup School founders forum, we'll be building in extra moderation features before the course launches next week to ensure we don't get into a tragedy of the commons situation. We'll keep iterating on the community management to ensure the quality of discourse remains high, and relevant to the very best companies (luckily we have in-house expertise we can lean on in the form of the incredible HN team!).
It's true that accepting all applicants will decrease the value of Startup School as a credential. But credentialing was never our intention. Our goal with Startup School is to improve the long-term chances of survival for every participating startup, and we believe that we'll be able to do a great job of that, even with the limitations imposed by serving 15,000 companies with a finite number of resources.
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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…
Hi, I was involved in the decision to open Startup School to all applicants and am the developer primarily responsible for writing the software we’ll need to make this scale. We're all planning on working overtime for the next 12 weeks as we prepare for and go through the course. Although we don't have the resources to assign an advisor to every group, we do want to provide human attention to every single company we'…
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There will be an application process open to all SS participants for the in-person class (unfortunately our room has limited seating). We hope that everyone who wants to will be able to attend at least one lecture in person!
That's exciting to hear! I filled out the class attendance application attached to the mistaken acceptance email before the correction was sent -- is that the form you are referring to or will there be a new one?