
YC's Startup School Relaunching as Continuous Program - kcorbitt
https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-relaunch/
======
blhack
Awesome news. If you haven't done startup school, I'd _highly_ recommend it.
We got paired with lots of people from our local city (which surprised me
since I didn't know there was this much activity around here).

Seriously startup school is great. Cannot recommend participating enough.

And also: do it no matter what stage you are at. Full disclosure: the project
that our team was working has been put on hold by us[1] (and going through SuS
helped us realize we might be chasing the wrong thing), BUT the experience of
going through it pushed me towards working much harder on a project which had
previously just been on autopilot.

[1]We'll probably pick it back up eventually.

~~~
spenvo
Oh getting paired with locals is very cool! I did it a couple years ago, and
it was worth it -- but I wish some in my group had been from around my city,
Austin. My project ended up shipping
([https://www.currentkey.com](https://www.currentkey.com)), and it was nice to
be accountable to a few other people through an important stretch and have
regular reality checks. I'd strongly consider doing this again for my next
project (a mobile game), especially if I could be paired with locals.

If I had one regret, looking back on the experience, it would be a mistake I
made: forming an LLC far before I needed to, largely to be seen as a 'company'
by YC. You can (and I'd say in some cases _should_ ) validate your project,
esp. if you're a solo founder - by launching an app as an individual developer
vs a company account. I know YC itself is only interested in companies, but
they should appreciate that if this school is open to all -- all people don't
need a company to have a profitable project.

~~~
thomasrognon
I'm working on a startup
([https://www.cloudternal.com](https://www.cloudternal.com)) in Austin. If you
want to connect, my email is in my profile.

~~~
spenvo
Thanks for saying hi, and done!

------
benjaminjosephw
Astounding strategic play from YC here. Start up School has become popular
enough to be viable as a social network. Imagine a VC having a live and data
rich directory of most investment hungry early stage tech startups where that
startup has shared its progress from the earliest stages of its development.
What an incredible advantage that is as a VC firm. Even though I love YC, I
find that idea quite worrying.

I've been through SUS and I really valued it. It's great content and some of
the discussions were really valuable. I think it's fair to say, though, that
the content is very opinionated. I understand why - it's trying to prepare
people to apply to YC and YC have a particular way of doing things. I think
that's fine. My worry is that the reach of YC on the broader tech start-up
culture is so broad now (and getting broader) that these opinions and ideas
become broadly accepted norms. When that happens, people stop recognising the
fact that there could be a choice to make and we loose the diversity and
richness of other opinions and ideas.

Here's an example: everyone knows that the only place to incorporate a company
is in the state of Delaware. Creating something in your local region is out of
the question, not because you've reasoned well about the pros and cons but
because the culture has a generally accepted answer.

I think if we don't have diverse views and perspectives on what's possible and
what kind of companies we should be creating, we'll end up with more of the
same. That's a winning formula for YC but a bad one for culture as a whole.

We don't need one VC that dominates the early stage market. We need
competition to keep the ecosystem healthy. Maybe what we really need is the
other VCs, bootstrappers, open-source foundations and NGOs to get into the
startup education/social network business too.

~~~
M5x7wI3CmbEem10
do you have any info on the Delaware vs your home state debate?

~~~
benjaminjosephw
Should companies should be founded wherever the financial and legal friction
is lowest or are there other important factors? What about the social
responsibility a company has towards the community, city and even country that
that company was created in?

I think there are a number of factors to consider here which will be specific
to each individual context but just pointing out that the answer is only
obvious if you've already decided what the important considerations are. VCs
will always have a bias towards ruthless efficency but founders need to be
more thoughtful. Not every decision is about the bottom line.

------
chrisaycock
I did Startup School in 2018 and was one of the inaugural grant winners.

The program was extremely helpful for getting me through to the launch. My
product is a _moonshot sold to enterprises_ , so it took an enormous amount of
work upfront to get something into users' hands.

The accountability of a cohort was critical for the lonely days of coding
something that is both ambiguous and ambitious. Also, constantly being forced
to explain my product really helped me hone my message and sales pitch.

I am still friends with some of the people I met back then. I seriously
recommend this program to anyone who is starting out.

~~~
thomasrognon
I've been working on an enterprise SaaS startup and have the same challenges.
Explaining a general purpose tool and new capabilities that no one has seen
before is really daunting. I'd love to hear more about your experience and how
it turned out, especially the sales side.

~~~
chrisaycock
I was pretty bad at explaining Empirical in the beginning. During alpha
testing, I emphasized the technical merits (statically typed Dataframes!)
rather than an application domain. Once I figured-out I needed to push _time-
series analysis_ , then the user feedback became more focused.

After starting the public beta, I heard the following sentence several dozen
times: "This looks amazing! Does it handle streaming?" And thus began the
quest I am currently on.

About the only advice I can give is to keep practicing and keep an open mind.
The feedback will get less negative the more you hone your pitch.

~~~
andrewnc
Big fan of Empirical! I'm excited to continue following the development.

Do you have customers, or potential customers in the pipeline?

~~~
chrisaycock
The business model I've eyed is to license to service providers, like
securities brokers and data vendors in the finance industry. That way, their
customers can execute queries in the cloud.

For example, a crypto broker wants their traders to write their own models. A
stock-exchange advisor wants their asset managers to compute their own
transaction costs. Etc.

Basically, Empirical will be a value-add component for existing customers of
these larger providers. Instead of shuffling market data over the Internet,
the user will "send the query to the data."

Every firm I've shown Empirical to has had the same word-for-word response
that most end users have had: "Does it handle streaming?" I put the sales
calls on hold while I try to get this done.

------
kcorbitt
Hey folks, really excited about this change. I’ve been wanting to make Startup
School a continuous program for years, but it took a while to get all the
right pieces in place. Here to answer any questions you may have!

~~~
ipnon
What were your initial expectations for Startup School? Where do you see
Startup School in 2030?

Thank you for this work, I've gained interesting and profitable lessons from
the program.

~~~
kcorbitt
Initial expectations: we expected Startup School to be very popular with
founders, and in the long term also hopefully encourage more founders to apply
to YC's core program. It modestly exceeded our expectations on the former
(we've seen over 100k users sign up in the last two years), and has vastly
exceeded expectations on the latter. Concretely, in the latest YC core batch
44% of founders are Startup School alums. That's a far higher percentage than
we were expecting at this point!

In 2030: no idea! Directionally though, I'd like to migrate all the "scalable"
parts of YC (1-to-many lectures/writing, investor/founder matching, community,
accountability) to Startup School where they'll be freely available to
everyone, while leaving the unscalable parts (eg. 1-to-1 advice with partners,
big checks) in the core program.

~~~
sytse
This is awesome!

I love that there a groups later in Startup School that are for later stage
companies.

I can see a progression where based on the stage and growth of your company
you get different peers, investors, advisors, and off the record content.

~~~
kcorbitt
Totally. We're making some early moves in this direction with a private forum
channel for companies that self-identify as growth stage, but we'd like to
take this a lot further.

------
andy_ppp
I was in the first version of the MOOC and it was better for me meeting the
same people over the duration of the time (currently I believe you interact
with different groups each time?).

I found it both interesting seeing how people had evolved during the programme
as well as not wanting to let people down by being late or not attending.

I would suggest using some kind of Karma to improve the experience while still
keeping the people you meet freeform.

1) Meet the same people over 4 weeks (say) for accountability

2) Attendance, Reports, Progress, Peer feedback etc. can be factored in

3) After the 4 weeks you are matched against people who are at your level of
attendance/motivation/productivity/peer review etc. and a new set of group
office hours is started.

Anyway, this would help me better to be more accountable, while job, family,
hobbies friends etc. get in the way.

~~~
servercobra
I've done Startup School for the past two iterations. I really enjoyed meeting
so many random founders in each meeting, but we spent more than half of the
meetings just getting to know each other. Some of my meetings had 7 teams! And
then the next week, you wind up with new founders and you do it all over
again. As time went on, I got less and less from the group meeting, where they
were my favorite part at the start. Having the same group over and over would
be fabulous, since we could really talk about what we did last week, whether
we did it, what's up for next week, continuing talk about issues we're having,
etc.

~~~
vikramkr
I'm torn on this a bit since I enjoyed having to practice pitching concisely
to new companies outside of biotech to improve that aspect, and to get new
perspectives on problems from different people, but I also did enjoy the times
that we accidentally (or deliberately?) got regrouped with companies from the
prior week and could catch up on progress made. Both have their place and
their use, but some level of deeper relationships (as built in the first
version that I went through when there were set cohorts) are definitely
lacking in the current iterations. Part of it might be taking initiative to
stay in touch on your own I guess.

------
bberenberg
Low conversation quality and feedback was a pain point for me during SuS. Do
you intend to implement any strategies to improve the quality (better matched,
not saying anyone is better or worse) of the peers we are communicating with?

For example, can I be placed in a cohort with only people who are doing more
than $100k ARR?

~~~
kcorbitt
Yes, we've reworked the matching algorithm! You can see the criteria we use
for forming matches at the bottom of the weekly update when you sign up.

That said, it still isn't perfect and we have more work planned in that area.
We also dropped the requirement for group sessions from 6 to 1 so that folks
who don't find them a valuable use of time don't need to keep doing them!

------
thecupisblue
This seems mostly aimed at SaaS/Uber4X type of startups where you can
bootstrap an MVP in a weekend and have a customer by the next one. Where's the
content for startups doing innovative stuff in the long run?

~~~
vikramkr
Having gone through SUS/winning a grant with a biotech, I'll say the style of
thinking and the community/accountability was universally applicable. Getting
to the killer experiment as quickly as possible to have a solid foundation to
build on/raise money off of is a very similar and useful style of thinking to
get an MVP launched asap. The more tactical content was sorely lacking for
biotechs/hartechs/moonshots though. For bio and hardware, it would have been
nice to have some co tent specifically around challenges with capital
raising/capital efficiency, how to think about designing experiments. Maybe
for hardware, a how to do kickstarter lecture (since there were some very
granular tactical software lectures), and maybe a lecture on how to manage a
supply chain/inventory. For moonshots, I dont know if theres a playbook that
applies since by definition they're very different, but perhaps similar themes
to biotech of how do you derisk as quickly as possible. Hopefully theres an
opportunity to add content along those lines as they build out the next gen of
SUS

~~~
thecupisblue
Thanks for the experience, your post is encouraging, might apply! The lack of
"more tactical content" is what I noticed and that is what caused me to have
that kind of a perspective at this being aimed at quicker-moving startups.

~~~
vikramkr
It's not an application anymore I dont think, it's more of a just sign up to
participate, but you have to actually participate to get the benefits sort of
thing

------
chews
Glad to see you guys doing this, let’s see how this changes the future of
startups! My feeling is that YC was always AA baseball and now it’s a lot more
like the big leagues.

------
josh_t
Really excited to see this being offered as a continuous program. I’ve
participated in and followed SUS since its launch and I can’t recommend this
program enough!

I’m particularly interested in the addition of streaks as a way to increase
accountability and unlock additional opportunities, have you considered
further gamifying the program with similar metrics?

------
makeee
I've done the program twice and was one of the grant winners. I found the
program super valuable, particularly the groups sessions. I really like the
new continuous format and excited to keep participating. Nice work Kyle and
team!

------
100-xyz
We participated in the last SUS and it was awesome for us. Lots of feedback,
improvement, new users and a successful PH launch.

Its an on line animation platform [https://toonclip.com](https://toonclip.com)

------
elpakal
nice - great program and I really got a lot out of SUS! now can we talk about
the "guaranteed YC partner interview" that was promised if SUS participants
completed a tech quiz from Triplebyte (a YC company). All i got was spam from
Triplebyte...

------
snake117
Great news! Also, thank you and everybody for all your hard work :)

Will there still be the $15k grant consideration if you become certified when
you submit your app for the YC Core program?

~~~
kcorbitt
We aren't currently evaluating companies for grants, but are likely to restart
a version of that program later in the year. If and when we do, founders that
participate in the program starting now will be eligible!

------
hello_newman
for anyone who has been in Startup School and successfully gone through it,
would you say it's best to have a Startup that is a "product" instead of say a
service-type business?

For example, I am working on a side-hustle that is more of a service that
sells a product, versus a traditional app/SaaS app. So I'm wondering if
Startup School is more geared towards product/app businesses than a typical
service-type business.

------
chirau
So if we graduated SUS in already do we get the Startup School Certified
status or we have to go through the program again?

~~~
kcorbitt
You'll need to start again, because the way we're tracking things changed.
That said, if you've been submitting updates consistently those will count
towards certification, and if you go through and mark all the content you
already viewed as complete you'll be most of the way there already.

~~~
aychtang
Are there benefits of being Startup School Certified? It's not clear in the
FAQ

------
EGreg
Does Startup School give $15,000 to anyone who gets in after completing the
basics?

------
rshnotsecure
Can we also get (I mean this respectfully) a specific answer from YCombinator
on who exactly hosts the news.ycombinator.com website?

It appears to be the little heard of and quite hard to track down "M5 Security
Solutions" also known as "M5 Hosting". What is strange is they do say they do
private hosting for the Department of Defense. Can we get an expansion on that
relationship? Thank you.

~~~
dang
It's no secret. We were happy to answer this last week
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473932)),
happy a couple years ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041)),
and happy now: we have two boxes (one active, one failover) at M5, a small
hosting provider that has good support and better tooling than what we had
before. They've served HN well. They seem to be run by engineers, and are
engineer-friendly. The founder has been an HN user for 9 years
([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikiem](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikiem)).

I don't remember how Scott found them, but it was through some HN-sympatico
source like an obscure technical mailing list. We wanted to switch providers,
and it seemed like a good idea to pick one that appealed to people with
similar tastes to us and sympathetic with the spirit of HN. It's worked out
great so far.

Weirdly, this is at least the third time that you've posted strangely
insinuating posts about how/where HN is hosted:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423248)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374955)

Three starts to look like an idée fixe. I still can't figure out what the
insinuation is supposed to be...no, we're not an intelligence front. I really
want to put a joke here, but I suppose it would probably only feed whatever
this is, so I guess I'd better not.

~~~
rshnotsecure
I just saw this sorry. Reading now.

