Say you were given 19 yr olds at the end of Year 1 of Uni. You have 2-3 years part time. How would you get them in? Activities? Interview coaching? Resume building? Portfolio building? Specialised learning?
Intresting question, but the feasibility of it is not dependent on my ability to give a good answer. Regardless, I'll give it a shot for argument's sake. Of course everything you say is valid. you would need to do these things.
I would also mine all the successes, details of interview process and characteristics of successful applicants and their applications for commonalities and then see how many of these can be easily added to an application for 'bonus points'. Of course it depends on how black-hat you want to get about this.
The first thing that came to my mind though, having read pg's essays, would be 'teach them LISP' :)
My intention wasn't to corner you, just to start a discussion. For arguments sake, let's get about as black hat as a Chinese mother with a shot at Oxford.
I don't know much about YC or what influences them apart from fragments from pg's essays.
Insisting that LISP or some other language no one uses is absolutely the best tool seems like it might be a bonus point. But I think that is as a bonus. What would be the core? They say smartness & an attitude that they are going to do something big with or without the program. The latter can be gamed. The former, I don't know much about the criteria.
That's a very interesting question. Above all I'd have them build things. We like anyone who's created an open-source project we've heard of, for example.
I'd also try to get them jobs at existing YC startups. Then they'd both learn how startups work, and (if they were good) get recommendations from people we know.
I'd probably build their social network: connect them to hundreds of influential sources of free marketing. If you're judging performance, the initial performance of a connected founder will greatly exceed an unconnected one. If you don't wait long enough to watch market effects take over before judging which startups to keep, you'll only end up with the networked ones.
If the leading criterion for admission was concrete evidence that the applicants collectively have the ability and motivation build things people want as measured in users and sales...
...then a cram school for YC would be a program much like YC in which younger teams built smaller, more easily guided technology start-ups.
If the leading criterion for admission was concrete evidence that the applicants collectively
Big if. I'm sure that any self respecting University will tell you that the best prep for their University is anything that makes the candidates smarter, more driven & more likely to succeed. Everyone uses indicators. Some are better then others. Maybe some can never be gamed (I doubt it) but as actually mentioned in this essay, the way around credentials is making entry less important.
But on that note, isn't the biggest criterion for university transfer admission is who admitted you in the first place and your consequential success at that school?
It stands to reason if one wanted to predict if a group would be successful creating a successful startup that a good predictor would be if that group had stated a successful startup in the past.
I'd assume there are other criteria, like: is what this group doing within our scope of expertise? Can we add value to this startup? Will admitting this group best add to the quality of this YC class? Will we make money on this investment?
Say you were given 19 yr olds at the end of Year 1 of Uni. You have 2-3 years part time. How would you get them in? Activities? Interview coaching? Resume building? Portfolio building? Specialised learning?