
Startup School Online: Registration and Deals - craigcannon
https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-online-registration-and-deals/
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startupdiscuss
Do you (generic you) think this could scale with something like a franchise
model?

Consider: there is a local Startup School "Dojo" where a number of founders
come together to watch the lectures.

Instead of passing through all the questions, they try to solve the problems
themselves and then escalate some common problems to office hours.

I am just trying to think of ways that you -- or anyone -- could spread the
startup gospel to all 50,000 and eventually more.

Someone might say: You can always start your own study group. Response: True,
but you want feedback from people who have gone through a few successful
startup cycles. Ycombinator has credibility.

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SmellTheGlove
I think it's hard. With YC, the ongoing benefit from the founders' end is
really the network. I think a franchise type model would really dilute that,
and you'd end up with the "real" YC and everything else.

To provide an example, consider law schools and the ABA versus medical schools
and the AAMC:

There are many ABA-accredited law schools, from which a degree will allow you
to sit for the bar exam in a given state. The "real" law schools (let's say
the Top 14 for now, with full disclosure that I attended a much shittier law
school) provide a very similar education to everyone else even down through
Tier 4. The network gets you hired into the big firms with greater ease from
HLS and the rest of the Top 14. Everyone else has the same law license
(provided they pass the bar), but the opportunities are markedly different for
most. And before any fellow Tier 3/4'ers want to flame me for this, come on,
you 100% know it's true. I think I've done pretty well, but I also stopped
practicing law to do it.

Now, an AAMC-accredited education, on the other hand, provides a lot more
parity out of the gate when it comes to opportunity. Med school slots roughly
match up with the number of residency slots in a given year, and more or less
everyone matches. Not everyone gets to do Ortho/Plastic, but that has more to
do with how well you did in med school, versus which med school you attended.
The school itself still factors for some specialties, but not nearly to the
degree that it would in law. You can be a pretty average med student and still
walk out with a residency, license and reasonably good income.

YC is more like #2.

~~~
startupdiscuss
Let's say I agree with you that there is a lot of value in the network and the
brand.

The question remains: is there any residual value left in the advice and the
"training"?

Or, more importantly, is there _significant_ value in the advice?

Because if the answer to that question is affirmative, then even if I agree
with you, it is a worthy pursuit.

Note that value in advice is context sensitive. What might be amazing,
valuable advice in 2009 may be standard stuff that you can get off many
different courses in 2019.

But while there are many places where you can learn to put the customer first
and do some prototyping, there are a limited number of places you can learn
what is happening now. ("Sure, in 2011 you could get funding by showing your
user studies, but not an investor expects the product to be smart enough to
learn the user's preferences on the fly" or whatever).

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SmellTheGlove
The advice is probably valuable, but YC (and countless others) make the advice
pretty available already if you're willing to analyze what's already written
and recorded and synthesize their advice with your own facts. I say that to
mean it's out there, but not with any kind of hand-holding, but I would also
wonder how a decentralized/franchised type of YC would really accomplish that.

Beyond that, these sorts of things exist in many cities, they're just not
called YC. I'm not against it or anything, I just think that what you're
proposing exists in some form already, just without the brand. If YC could add
to that experience on a larger scale, it's a great idea. Not trying to talk
you out of it or anything.

~~~
startupdiscuss
I don't know if I can do it, but I will say:

1\. I am in a tiny out-of-the-way place, and nothing remotely like this exists
here (hint: there are three meetup groups, two of which are defunct, and one
of which caters to moms who want to meet with kids).

2\. It doesn't have to be YC. Who else can do this kind of thing?
Onemonth.com? Udacity? They don't seem to be as current as Ycombinator.

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bobwaycott
Seriously interested in this. Was looking over the partner benefits and
noticed the Clerky bit mentioned access to the fundraising beta for people who
use Clerky for incorporating. So ... if someone already did the work a month
ago to incorporate, and was chosen, they'd lose access to that service?

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intrasight
There's more legal legwork than just incorporating. Contracts, Terms of Use,
etc.

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bobwaycott
I realize that. Doesn't actually answer my question.

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meredydd
10:1 (I'm guessing) sounds like pretty a high contention ratio for a MOOC. I'd
be fascinated to see how this compares with the ratios for YC proper (as well
as others like the Fellowships).

[Edit note: I misread the post originally, and got 50:1, which I found more
surprising.]

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Finbarr
Where are you getting that ratio from? We've had about 50k sign ups, and hope
to serve at least several thousand in the Founder Track.

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meredydd
Oops - I misread "several thousand" as "about a thousand". Comment now
corrected. The ratio is a bit less eye-popping now, but I bet it's still high
by MOOC standards.

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baldajan
One clarification: is the Startup Founder track form out now or will it be
published later on. By the text of the blog, it sounds like it's all ready to
go - but no link to such a form can be found.

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eelliott
It is a bit of a shame that Heroku couldn't come to the table and provide
something. I'm currently torn between using them or AWS for a project

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sorich87
You can use Convox [https://convox.com](https://convox.com) to easily (almost
as easy as Heroku) manage deployments on AWS

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wslh
Are [difficult to scale] software developmemt services companies encouraged to
apply? I see YC as a product oriented accelerator.

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fuzzythinker
Will the next "batch" be ~6 months, or a year later?

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Finbarr
Most likely next year.

