Awesome news. If you haven't done startup school, I'd <i>highly</i> 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).<p>Seriously startup school is great. Cannot recommend participating enough.<p>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.<p>[1]We'll probably pick it back up eventually.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I did Startup School in 2018 and was one of the inaugural grant winners.<p>The program was extremely helpful for getting me through to the launch. My product is a <i>moonshot sold to enterprises</i>, so it took an enormous amount of work upfront to get something into users' hands.<p>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.<p>I am still friends with some of the people I met back then. I seriously recommend this program to anyone who is starting out.
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!
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?).<p>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.<p>I would suggest using some kind of Karma to improve the experience while still keeping the people you meet freeform.<p>1) Meet the same people over 4 weeks (say) for accountability<p>2) Attendance, Reports, Progress, Peer feedback etc. can be factored in<p>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.<p>Anyway, this would help me better to be more accountable, while job, family, hobbies friends etc. get in the way.
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?<p>For example, can I be placed in a cohort with only people who are doing more than $100k ARR?
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?
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.
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!<p>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?
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!
We participated in the last SUS and it was awesome for us. Lots of feedback, improvement, new users and a successful PH launch.<p>Its an on line animation platform <a href="https://toonclip.com" rel="nofollow">https://toonclip.com</a>
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...
Great news! Also, thank you and everybody for all your hard work :)<p>Will there still be the $15k grant consideration if you become certified when you submit your app for the YC Core program?
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?<p>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.
Can we also get (I mean this respectfully) a specific answer from YCombinator on who exactly hosts the news.ycombinator.com website?<p>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.