281–290 of 307 posts
I really like this response, I would totally understand if they sent up follows ups "we're really sorry...", but this seems like a really neat response. I'd be really interested if at the end of the cycle they published the success stats vs. their original invitee success stats. I would expect a lower overall success result - I'm sure there are startups that would never work ("our business model is to just directly g…
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Team 2nd chance has a lot to prove Hah! "Team 2nd chance"... love it! We should get t-shirts made with that on them and everything. You do make a good point though. This is a great chance for a lot of us to show the doubters that they were wrong, and to prove that we do belong.
What about the #epicbatch instead, for the t-shirts?
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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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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…
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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…
> If they're letting literally anyone in, it's no more useful than every other founders mastermind group on FB. 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…
I would have been excited to be part of a pre-vetted community. Will there be a separate space for the people on the advisor track to be able to communicate and form a community?
Letting everyone in makes it feel like YC is going from “Harvard” to “Khan Academy.” Both are noble endeavors, but completely different brands.
And to your point, it was never about credentialing. It’s about the network. Isn’t one of YC’s main selling points the YC network? (This is repeated in YC branding.) Now people are comparing it to those Facebook entrepreneur groups that everyone can join.
Feels like some serious damage has been done to the YC brand.
Unpopular 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…
It makes the whole thing feel like Khan Acedemy or opencourseware. Both great learning resources, but that’s not why a lot of people signed up.
How can we volunteer to advise groups who didn't get an existing advisor?
Interesting question. Now that the forum is going to be open to all applicants, I guess you (and others like you) can post some information about yourself and how you can help what kind of startups and how many. And then startups can choose whether they'd like you and / or can get you to be their advisor.
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There are so many wantrepreneurs and "founder networking" types that suck up valuable time. I'd hoped that YC had filtered those out and that accepted companies could assume their peers are as serious as they are.
Welcome to the new society - participation ribbons for all!
I really like this response, I would totally understand if they sent up follows ups "we're really sorry...", but this seems like a really neat response. I'd be really interested if at the end of the cycle they published the success stats vs. their original invitee success stats. I would expect a lower overall success result - I'm sure there are startups that would never work ("our business model is to just directly g…
Hey! Our business model involves just directly giving money to our users. =)
I’m not sold on basic income, I think a solid welfare system would in effect be “basic income” for low/no income people, but By essentially having a tapering payout as the recipients earnings increase you resolve a number of issues BI produces.
I do think it’s an interesting idea to have essentially a private fund do a real world experiment, I’m just not sure of the long term feasibility. The problem you have is that the addition of a basic income does not result in any increase in the funds available to you. For a government back system, BI theoretically should result in an over all increase in tax revenue that can then fund said BI, while also reducing the amount spent on poverty related disease, illness, crime, etc. (to be clear I’m not saying poor people are criminals, just that some crime is a result of poverty - theft of food, “crimes” like prostitution, etc).
Anyway, good luck to you fine folk!