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Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#91

Post by Alex3917 »

jdoliner wrote: post #75
dang wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the 4,000 received rejections. It was a big boolean fuckup.

Cornell University did a similar thing one year, needless to say, they did not resolve it the same way.

While Cornell was the first big example in 2003, it's been done many times since:

http://time.com/3637980/college-admissions-mistakes-johnshop...

It actually happens dozens of times per year on a one-off basis, usually with college coaches telling recruits they've been accepted when the admissions office has only provisionally accepted them.

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#92

Post by jaredsk »

proofread wrote: post #22
sandslash wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for giving us another chance. We're truly sorry for all the trouble this caused.

I truly think that YC is going to be surprised by the entrepreneurs in this group.

The Un-Snappening has occurred

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#93

Post by Tunecrew »

proofread wrote: post #29
mercat wrote: post #6

More than 15000 startups... I wonder how that will play out.

I bet that 25-40% complete the course fully. They expected 4000 so it will be around there. We will see. Great move by YC and really excited to experience the program!

I was thinking the same thing - probably the number that actually starts the course will be in the 90%s of the total and there will be a fair amount of attrition as the course proceeds.

It would be interesting to see what these numbers look like as well over the ten weeks.

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#94

Post by seanlinehan »

snowmaker wrote: post #38
seanlinehan wrote: post #33

I 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 :-)

That is a good idea! We conducted an inadvertent A/B test :)

That's what I was thinking!

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#95

Post by olliej »

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 give our VC money to our users and profit on scale") they would be denied, but it would be curious how the stats diverged.

e.g. comparing overall performance when controlling for gender, race, religion, field, etc

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#96

Post by confiscate »

dang wrote: post #82
confiscate wrote: post #68

can we also increase the 100 slots for the 10k grant, to 400 slots? because it used to be 4000 startups and now it's 15000!

I asked Sam that exact question earlier and he was already working on it. But it's complicated for fiduciary reasons, and not the sort of thing that can be put together in a few hours.

thanks for trying!

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#97

Post by cetalingua »

sudosteph wrote: post #86

I can't stay mad at y'all after this response. I am looking forward to making your application reviewer peeps feel silly after this is all over though. Team 2nd chance has a lot to prove, and I think many of us do really appreciate YC's new commitment to supporting ALL founders at this point, even if it took a mistake to get there.

Agree!

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#98

Post by tlb »

Alex3917 wrote: post #91
jdoliner wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cornell University did a similar thing one year, needless to say, they did not resolve it the same way.

While Cornell was the first big example in 2003, it's been done many times since: http://time.com/3637980/college-admissions-mistakes-johnshop... It actually happens dozens of times per year on a one-off basis, usually with college coaches telling recruits they've been accepted when the admissions office has only provisionally accepted them.

SUNY Buffalo seems to have held the previous record of 5109. https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/18/us/us-university-buffalo-acce...

Re: Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted

#99

Post by pcmaffey »

dang wrote: post #87
pcmaffey wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eg. 40% of VCs went to Harvard or Stanford, so therefore if you want to be a VC or know VCs, you should optimize for going to Harvard or Stanford. /s - because much of the data you'd have on such early stage co's is identity-based, and therefor chock full of bias.

Some of it for sure, but there are a lot of other things to look at. And of course the whole idea of startup school is to try to cast a much wider net, orders of magnitude wider.

Add one order of hopefully serendipitous magnitude. =)

YC has always admirably stretched the scale of vc. This will be an interesting experiment now at this scale--and I'm especially curious how you'll measure progress along the way.

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