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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 grace, and recover well.
Nice job guys, totally the right call. Is this the beginning of a fully crowd sourced Y Combinator?
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Could you explain what happened more? 4,000 companies were accepted but 11,000 received acceptance emails?
Yes, and the 4,000 received rejections. It was a big boolean fuckup.
A bold and compassionate solution, that only YC would have the guts and integrity to do. Well done.
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We had originally accepted about 4000 - although our goal has always been to make our MOOC as much about "open" as we possibly can. Our own misstep has caused us to accelerate things.
Does it mean competition for 100 10k was between 4000 and now 15000?
It would be foolish for the tech industry as a whole to not take significant raised eyebrows at what can come out of this.
Surely there will be some "holy crap we couldnt have predicted this to happen" moment in store for the world to see now...
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This would be a seriously missed opportunity for YC if they dont: Immediately start tracking all the applicants and what stages they are in, how much funding/traction/etc they have and which segment vertical they are in and then seeing how well they all do. This will be a very interesting experiment.
Yep. We do a little bit of that already with our normal batch applicants, but with the wide net of Startup School there may be more more data available that would be interesting to correlate with long-term success. I think it would be so valuable to have a rigorous study of the factors that correlate with startup success – letting founders know what they should optimize for is an important part of the value we want t…
/s - because much of the data you'd have on such early stage co's is identity-based, and therefor chock full of bias.
Hi everyone! I went through SS last year, and I was going to email them suggesting this exact solution. Know that trying to decide 1000 out of 15000 startups is incredibly challenging, especially given the fact that the application asks for very little data. So don’t ever think you weren’t meant for this, because it is a school program and everyone has the potential to dominate. This isn’t a zero sum game. As for sta…