
YC Startup School: Advisor Edition - tosh
https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-advisor-edition/
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Smerity
This a brilliant move! The most impactful people to me, both in Australia
(Sydney) and the US (Boston/SF) are those who fit an altruistic advisor
archetype.

They're the people I owe the most to and also those who genuinely care the
most. There's hope that the favour will be passed on some day, potentially to
them, but they mostly do it simply as they want to help you and those you can
help.

There has traditionally been less of a formal community around these figures
but for each generation of entrepreneurs and business people we can all
quickly come up with names who fit this exact mold - those who stepped in to
help simply as they thought that was the best thing for everyone, even if it
didn't help themselves much in that moment.

I'll stop rambling but I now feel the sense I need to go write a few thank you
messages =]

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simonebrunozzi
As much as I admire YC, I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of what
they can do here. Let me explain.

I mentored/advised literally hundreds of startups over the last 10 years, in
most cases just out of pure altruism (in a few numbered cases these were
startups where I had invested, so the help was not altruistic). You hear
"hundreds" and might think it's exaggerated - reason why I interacted with so
many startups and they seeked advice was because of the brand I represented
(AWS), and the fact that everybody wanted technical help to start with. Let me
add: perhaps also because I really love teaching and helping, and it probably
showed.

I've seen many other mentors/advisors during these interactions, and most of
the time the truly helpful ones were the ones with real experience and a real
desire to help; their ability to help came mostly from their experience
(sometimes successful; but surely painful and full of great life and
professional lessons).

They say you can't teach experience, and in this particular case I see this as
the biggest problem that not even YC might be able to solve or mitigate.

If you think that an initiative like this can "do no harm", I think you're
mistaken: when too many want to advise/help, but don't realize they lack the
true experience to know what they're talking about, the risk is that they'll
simply damage these startups.

To be clear: I am in favor of what YC is doing here; I am simply sharing my
views on what the biggest hurdle can be.

~~~
Smirnoff
From what I understand the reason why YC is offering this Advisor Edition
classes is to get these non-YC alum advisers ready for the regular version of
the YC Startup school.

Last year YC accepted everyone into YC startup school (due to a Boolean error)
and a lot of groups ended up participating without an adviser. And you get the
best experience when someone actually guides you every week.

This year YC will again open the YC Startup School for everyone and YC can't
scale it without having trained advisers.

Finally, I wouldn't worry too much about "advisers without experience." YC is
smart enough to filter out bad apples from the bag.

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alain94040
Thanks to YC for continuing to support the entire startup community.

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s3nnyy
Good move, in Europe/Switzerland we have more incubators, co-working spaces
and other "helpers" than actual startups.

About time that someone teaches them at least what to do; maybe some will
realize they are not needed or even detrimental.

