
YC will accept 10k new companies into its new online Startup School - runesoerensen
https://qz.com/987043/y-combinator-will-back-10000-startups-to-prove-theres-nothing-magical-about-silicon-valley/
======
bactrian
Funding startups others wouldn't is perhaps the most essential part of YC.

VCs didn't want Dropbox or Airbnb or Stripe without YCs stamp of approval.

YC could very plausible fund as many startups as there are ambitious and
determined founders.

Let anyone participate in the programs and then let the startups filter
_themselves_ out by failing to keep up the progressively more challenging
levels of effort.

~~~
orthoganol
IMO YC depends on its branding as the exclusive, "Harvard of incubators," and
if they keep funding so many startups they are going to lose that edge and
create the space for a new YC.

Each class is like 130 startups now, right? I keep seeing startups that
duplicate other existing YC startups. I just imagine as an investor you have
to be thinking "Ok, now there are 2 or 3 or 4 times as many startups as 3
years ago being pitched to me that are going to fail."

~~~
nandorsky
Or the opposite - look at all this deal flow. As these startups move through
the program I am sure YC is collecting tons of data in regards to how their
trending. Imagine an online portal an investor could log into and within
seconds have access to thousands of startups but more importantly, visibility
into their metrics and traction.

~~~
adyus
You mean Mattermark?

------
dzink
Replying while somewhat under-slept here, but I've been taking the course and
from everything seen so far Startup School is an excellent step in the right
direction. The world today needs more people solving the problems they see in
the world, instead of waiting to make enough money in a job that may be
automated soon enough, or relying on benefits and insurance that can be ripped
apart by a politician's pen. Building something from scratch is hard, and
veering off-road is obviously easy (going to press to early, raising huge
amounts, or not raising when you have a viral product, being scared away by a
patent troll, hiring people for the sake of headcount, you name it). Compound
the problems you have with additional regulatory burdens in other countries,
and it can be downright impossible to make something new (vs starting another
store, or restaurant).

YC tries to make it as simple as possible to make the life of ENTREPRENEURS
survivable(Not just VC-fundable businesses). If that wasn't the case, Startup
School would include an investment that gets you into the feedback loop of
having to produce returns for someone. Not asking for equity is a great
feature, because it encourages experimentation and provides railings to keep
as many of these experiments on the lane that gives them room to validate and
less risk of predictable failures. School may even be the wrong term here, I
would call it an Apprenticeship, because you are practicing and mastering your
craft with mentors and peers in practice.

This Apprenticeship for Entrepreneurs, crafted by YC, needs to spread with as
much quality mentors and talent, as is available, and it needs to have proper
funnels doubling down on people who strike gold by meeting a high-demand unmet
need. Startups at advanced stages should more qualified support and more
funding for equity. (Right now that step is YC Core)

Do that across any country and market segment and you won't need to worry
about Jobs automation. Humanity will have an efficient method to create as
many entrepreneurs out of Job bleeds as it needs and to lead them into fixing
problems that actually need fixing.

~~~
tmaly
I am curious about your experience taking the course. How much time commitment
is it? Is it something I can do while working a full time job?

~~~
adentranter
At min, 2-4 hours for office hours per week ( within my group at least )

However, at the core they are pushing you to grow and build a company.

So within my group there are alot of fulltime founders.

Im a fulltime founder myself and have found the experience to be great. Its
helped me to ask the correct questions and to move alot faster.

Its also great to have a solid network of other founders to chat with.

In saying this, there are members within our group whom have full-time jobs
and simply work alot after hours on their products.

~~~
tmaly
I think I can handle 2-4 hours a week. I am really interested in learning from
YC how to grow

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ryanx435
They don't financially back the 10k startups, it's just an online course where
you get discounts on various online services.

Granted the online courses are supposedly very valuable, but the lack of face
to face with YC's network and lack of available funding makes it hard to see
how they can get away with the claim that they are "backing" 10k startups.

Edit: 200 people related to YC have volunteered to "mentor" the 10k companies.
Let's assume 2 founders per company, that's 1 mentor for every 100 founders.
And the course is 10 weeks long, so assuming the volunteers spend 40 hours a
week for 10 weeks mentoring the founders (which they likely wont), that works
out to be 4 hours per founder over the entire course.

Yeah, not the same as "backing" a company.

~~~
lettergram
Being in startup school, I can say it's definitely useful, and having a mentor
point out when ideas are bad or ways to improve is helpful.

What's more helpful, is that you're placed in a group of say 20 other
companies all trying to produce something, some are making money, some have
literally nothing. You can learn from one another, share ideas, test out each
others products, etc.

One thing most people trying to start a company don't have is a support
network of highly motivated people doing the same thing. I know I personally
do, but many of my fellow startup school colleagues do not. That's what's
helpful: The startup school group office hours (or therapy sessions).

The second most valuable portion of startup school, is that they force you to
be accountable. If I say I'm doing X, they want to see it. They expect
results, and they push you to share.

The finally, and perhaps most valuable portion of startup school, is the fact
you can network. I'd argue this is different than group office hours. There
are many companies that have synergies, for example my project:
[https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/) can help identify
trends, or "experts", which other teams could use.

There are other examples, but it's definitely been useful.

That being said, it is not YC proper. You don't get funds, many of the
founders don't actually have an LLC or C-Corps. Many are in school, or (like
myself) have full-time jobs working 50 hours a week.

Although not being able to work on the project full-time sucks, I've
definitely made progress through startup school. We would have had less
without it, the ideas from the team have bubbled up and the support pushes us
to do better. I would recommend it, and definitely don't think it's "backing
10k startups", however it is helping in a significant way.

~~~
mozumder
Networking only works if you're with a relevant audience. It's probably not
useful to participate in a fashion industry networking event if you're a
startup selling EDA software.

In any case, as long as it's not asking for an ownership stake, I don't see
the problem with it.

------
sergiotapia
Where can I apply? The site says it's already started:
[https://www.startupschool.org/](https://www.startupschool.org/)

> The course will begin on April 5th, 2017

But the title implies they're going to add 10,000 new applicants.

~~~
ukyrgf
The article answers your question:

> Now, Startup School will accept about 10,000 companies in early 2018, says
> Altman, and potentially more after that.

------
jansho
I am super excited about this. The thought of applying for YC was never on the
table because I'm reluctant to move to the US. Startup School is great, but
sometimes I feel that it's a little too condensed and, well, at the end of the
day it's still passive consumption. Mentoring personalises things a little, so
this news is welcoming.

My question is, can this mentoring be as effective as having a 'real' mentor?
I have no doubt that YC mentors are highly qualified individuals, but with
_10k startups_ , I can't help but feel that these sessions would be as rapid-
fire as one of the live office hour videos in Startup School. Nothing wrong
with that, but for me, I look for _relationships_ the most from mentors.

This also makes me think that this may just be a Round One to perhaps a
lengthier process to sift for startups with the best potential..

------
jaclaz
As a side note, the data in the graph "Number of applicants and startups
accepted into Y Combinator", evidences two things:

1) the number of applicants is increasing (which is what the graph was
evidently made for)

2) the percentage of successful applicants is declining steadily actually
halving from (roughly) around 3-4% until 2012 to (still roughly) 1,50-2,00
later

This may be IMHO due to two factors (or a combination of both):

1) Too many startups lately apply without having a sound enough project or not
original enough ideas

2) Y Combinator has become more picky when choosing who to accept

Surely it is not as easy to be accepted (in the actual YC financing program)
as it may sound, I thought that the success rate was higher than that.

------
rdlecler1
This should be good for a large number of startups who are not in the valley.
Structure with an incentive program is a great way to get teams in markets
lacking a SV-style approach to entrepreneurship. I think English speaking
countries have had a big advantage here because there's so much content and
expertise out there. One thing they should do is simulcast the lectures with
professional translators in another langauage or at least crowdsourcing
subtitles. This would be really helpful for entrepreneurs in places like
Japan.

------
dgudkov
I've been saying for long time that YC is just a new kind of university and
now it starts appearing more and more like that. The goal of a traditional
university is to enable financial security for students through high-quality
employment enabled by a skill set provided by the university. YC effectively
does the same -- it provides students with a necessary skill set to enable
financial security through self-employment. The main difference is that
education in YC is paid with shares, not cash.

~~~
adventured
> high-quality employment enabled by a skill set provided by the university

Neither YC nor a university are in the business of particularly providing such
a thing. They provide a stamp of approval, aka vetting, which is what gets you
the job. That you survive it, learn very minimalist skills, graduate and get
that piece of paper in theory increases the odds that you possess such and
such personal qualities. From there, the overwhelming majority of what you
will need for your career, will be learned post-university. The university
isn't doing much more than vouching that you represent at least a baseline,
ideally according to / in-line with the university reputation.

In the case of YC, their stamp of approval is what gets you the big money.
They vet you. They do not make you a great hacker or leader, or give you those
skills, you have to do almost all of that yourself. The best they can do is
sometimes point you in the right direction and offer occasional help.

------
faramarz
I just LOVE the photo used in the article. Is that the very first cohort? so
many familiar faces.. Sam standing next to Paul.. even Aaron!

great piece of yc history! What a great photo.

------
gregpilling
I think this is the money line right here:

The heart of YC’s philosophy is that world has too few people solving fixable
problems, a “bottleneck in society,” says Garg. “If you fundamentally believe
that, then [Startup School] is exactly the right thing to do. You are
empowering a bunch of people to just try and it’ll turn out it’s going to be
way easier than they thought it was going to be. And there’ll be more
progress.”

------
chaostheory
> They chose inexperienced college students over startup veterans.

Is this still true of YC today?

~~~
ksikka
As of June 2016 the average age was around 29.

[https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/](https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/)

~~~
bpicolo
I would imagine the startup life skews young in general because older age
tends to mean more responsibilities, and at some point if you haven't been
successful with a startup you'll tend towards a more traditional position for
those reasons? "Startup Veteran" is kind of an amusing phrase.

~~~
apapli
I disagree. I'd say older people have more networks, more experience and more
resources, hence will find less comparative benefit in giving away precious
equity to YC (etc) than young people who need all the above.

It could be said that YC and other startup incubators have done a stellar
marketing job in taking ~6% equity off organisations by turning the tables on
funding and making companies "apply" to give their equity away. From YC's
perspective they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from this
arrangement, versus the founders who are in pretty much the opposite position.

~~~
bpicolo
That's probably true. I was sort of envisioning bootstrapped, self-funded
businesses as a different category than the YC-startup style business.

~~~
mattmanser
Youre confusing concepts. You can skip an incubator like YC while still
intending to not bootstrap. There is also no such thing as a 'YC-style'
startup, YC was set up to target startups, so can't have invented them.

YC used to only give a tiny amount of equity that any vaguely successful
person could match ($16k?). It filled the gap between starting and series A.

Bootstrapping means avoiding getting a series A.

Basically, YC didn't invent startups, it invented a new, more accessible route
to starting one.

------
exratione
This would be somewhere in the Vingean Scholastics portion of the Venn diagram
I proposed a few years ago:

[https://www.exratione.com/2012/01/the-future-of-the-
venture-...](https://www.exratione.com/2012/01/the-future-of-the-venture-
capital-industry/)

The future is wandering towards Fast Times at Fairmont High, it seems.

------
Mz
So, I am looking at a bit of the transcript from the first course and it is
talking about scaling companies from millions to billions and things like
that.

YC started with this idea that you take a couple of college student hackers,
give them like $20k and let them build something "ramen profitable." The basic
idea was that tech had lowered the barriers to entry for business.

An awful lot of these big companies (Uber, Home Hero -- which is shutting down
-- etc) seem to hire 1099 contractors instead of employees and they often
don't pay all that well. The goal for YC seems to have become grow the next
unicorn.

So, I find myself wondering (having already forwarded this stuff to various
people): Is there anything of use in these lectures if you aren't looking to
become a billionaire and have no desire to grow some gargantuan company that
probably is making the founders rich on the backs of the 99 percent who are so
often underpaid?

Is there any basic business wisdom here for people not looking for some J
curve growth and then cashing out? (Serious question and I know it sounds like
snark. I just don't know how to say this more diplomatically because this is
not how YC started and I have trouble with the direction it seems to have
taken.)

~~~
pw
I think there's _some_ value if you're more interested in creating a lifestyle
business than a unicorn (as it seems like we both are), but it's certainly not
perfectly matched to that goal.

It's a shame there's not a Startup School-like resource for creating a
lifestyle business (YC-like in that it'd have a unified theory of lifestyle
business creation, as YC has for startups, that'd been honed through assisting
in the creation of hundreds of such businesses).

~~~
shubhamjain
There is. It's called Hacker News. There's isn't a better resource to learn
more about starting a small business than HN itself. From starting a
consulting business to creating a passive income, everything has been
extensively discussed. There are tons of inspiring stories here about creating
a small business. (Incidentally, I think it would a great idea to collect all
entrepreneurship related threads in a single place.)

HN's expertise falls short when it comes to adjudicating unicorns as they
don't usually look promising at the beginning. But, in case of a small
product, I think community's feedback and advice can be invaluable.

~~~
Mz
_(Incidentally, I think it would a great idea to collect all entrepreneurship
related threads in a single place.)_

I forward stuff from HN that I think is pertinent to the group I run called
Business Bootstrappers: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/business-
bootstrappe...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/business-
bootstrappers)

So far, that is the vast majority of what has been posted there. As yet,
conversation has not broken out and I don't post very much else there.

------
jaoued
My co-founders and I really enjoyed the 10 week startup school. We're full
time founders and have been working for the last three years on building
MyAppConverter. The course gave us time to really get some actionable advice
on how to grow our business. The greatest thing is that our time committment
for the OH call and weekly reporting on our business metrics made us really
focus on what matters i.e. making and selling as part of daily work. Wether or
not one applies to YC programme, I would highly recommend any founders to join
the MOOC course.

------
Animats
So, YC branches out into the MOOC business.

------
throwaway2016a
I was excited until:

> Now, Startup School will accept about 10,000 companies in early 2018, says
> Altman, and potentially more after that.

2018 seems like an eternity away. I hope my new company is profitable by then.

~~~
a1exyz
whats your new company?

~~~
throwaway2016a
Hi a1exyz,

Sorry for the delayed reply. I wasn't checking in on this thread.

Unfortunately since this is an anonymous account I can't say :)

------
jensvdh
With immigration to the US being as hard as it is (Nigh on impossible for say,
Europeans, to work in the US), and , on top of that, the US government going
full protectionist, this is amazing.

------
tomhallett
Complete aside: am I the only one who imagined Naval flipping through a
physics book to double check his assertion?

------
hoodoof
I'm trying to work out what bothers me about this.

I wonder if it's actually bad advice for all those thousands of entrepreneurs
to be advising them to go for being mega gigantic.

It's bad advice because those thousands of new entrepreneurs have a much
greater chance of long term success by NOT following the "go super big" path.

Indeed it appears that taking a "quite successful" company down the "go super
big" path might lead to a variety of adverse outcomes (as I have gleaned from
reading the stories of many failed venture backed companies).

I suspect that what is niggling me is that perhaps YC and all the other
venture capitalists maybe are really now acting and advising what is in
_their_ interests, which is _really not_ in the interests of all these bright
eyed new entrepreneurs.

I suppose YC's history and origin make it _feel_ like they are on the side of
the entrepreneur, but is that still true?

~~~
dnautics
I dunno. I got accepted into office hours, and yc didn't provide me with
Amazon credits that they said were part of the program, and I didn't feel like
the advice the person gave me was anything I didn't already know, besides "do
what you're doing, but harder". Perhaps it's jumped the shark. I distinctly
got the feeling that yc is now peddling a narrative of the hacker that is
either untrue or no longer true, and is dispensing platitudes instead of
actually getting people help with "the hard parts", as in connecting people
with a real process that helps them get money (or conversely, critical
responses to "stop wasting your time", if that's what's deserved)

~~~
hoodoof
Perhaps they have refined their business down to the essential core which is
to back large numbers of entrepreneurs in the hope they don't miss one that
gets big. Like 500 startups. Hard to believe that backing large numbers of
companies can be much more than betting on lots of horses.

~~~
ericb
They aren't backing any of these companies financially. It is hard to tell
what is in it for them yet. The only way this makes sense is if it is a pre-
filter for their application funnel to increase the quality of their
selections. Contrary to this, they originally claimed that startup school
would not give you any leg up in the application process.

------
lawl
Bullshit, I've attended a startup school event in london and they were very
clear that they want people to relocate to SV.

Is YC backing 10k international startups with funding, or is this just a MOOC?

~~~
_sentient
I think you're confusing the Startup School conference with YC's new Startup
School MOOC. The MOOC is completely remote with no expectation that companies
will move to SV.

~~~
cm2012
The headline before indicated YC was changing its rules.

------
sjg007
Frightenly ambitious.

------
dyarosla
Click-bait warning! TL;DR: YC won't be 'backing' 10k startups in the financial
backing/investing sense at all, but accepting 10k startups into their Startup
School MOOC.

~~~
dang
Agreed. We replaced the title above with a representative phrase from the
article.

------
salesguy222
If I'm making a tech product (not SaaS) as a solo founder, no employees, no
funding, not in the Bay Area, but making a product that people love, would I
be considered a success?

I personally love the Startup School lectures and they have been a great help
to me.

~~~
coupdejarnac
If you're growing and profitable, you might consider ignoring all the startup
culture nonsense.

~~~
bisRepetita
Why would "growing" be a prerequisite to success? Isn't profitable enough,
especially if already decently profitable?

~~~
coupdejarnac
I assume you are asking a serious question, but yes, you need to at least grow
to match the rate of inflation/cost of living. Aside from that, it's up to you
to decide how much you want to grow.

