YC Fellowship

Kat from YC here. Sam, Matt Krisiloff and I are happy to answer any questions about the Fellowship. You can also send questions to fellowship@ycombinator.com.

This seems really close to what YC started as. Why the spinoff?

Another great initiative from YC, which I'm sure will yield incredible access to talented entrepreneurs. Surely there will be signal-to-noise issues, but if any group is equipped to sift through for (and help develop) talent, it's YC.

$12k is not a lot of money in the grand scheme, but it is a huge grant to many talented founders/teams who otherwise wouldn't be able to take this leap.

So, I read through the description three times. And I'm puzzled as to what the real differences are between a YC Fellowship, and traditional YC investment.

Are the key differences - that the Fellowship is a grant, not an equity investment (for $12K, rather than the larger YC investment), that it lasts for only 8 weeks, and that the Fellowships aren't required to move to the Bay Area?

I think the underlying goal here is to broaden yc network, really to find more workers, not founders.

The fwd.us initiative seems dead in the water, so can't do much there. This is a much more clever, more politically astute approach to finding possible candidates.