Early Decision

Interestingly enough I got a YC email yesterday asking me to apply for the current batch.<p>I’d never received that type of email from YC in the past, and immediately thought their application numbers must be dropping. After all YC historically seemed to market and advertise the fact that statistically it’s more difficult to get in than Harvard.<p>This announcement the very next day seems to support YC is looking for more applications. Then again maybe the total application numbers and acceptance rate are public info and I’m way off.

&quot;Early Decision&quot; implies that if a student is accepted they are bound to attend that school. It&#x27;s offered by colleges primarily because it greatly simplifies their yield planning. (Colleges admit many more than they actually can accommodate since they know many won&#x27;t matriculate.)<p>This program should really be called Early Action, which is non-binding!

Seems like a great idea. I would be interested to hear about the indicators used to show that students sometimes didn&#x27;t bother applying in these cases. It seems intuitive that college students, having to plan in Fall of N for full-time employment or even internships in Summer of N+1, would have been adversely affected by the normal application schedule. Were there a large number of potential founders that raised the alarm about this?

Odd. This seems to go against one of PG&#x27;s essays.<p>&gt; School<p>&gt;<p>&gt; That&#x27;s what I&#x27;d advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about &quot;entrepreneurship.&quot; &quot;Entrepreneurship&quot; is something you learn best by doing it. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup — becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas — by spending time learning about the easy part. Especially since you won&#x27;t even really learn about it, any more than you&#x27;d learn about sex in a class. All you&#x27;ll learn is the words for things.<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;startupideas.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;startupideas.html</a>

When I read the title, I assumed it worked like college early decision, where admission is binding. This is not the case, so this sounds like a great thing for YC to be doing

The down side of this is that someone accepted then will focus on the startup instead of finishing up their studies. You could argue that would happen either way but I think &#x27;having it in the can&#x27; means more chance of doing so. And perhaps also not uncovering and turning down other opportunities or overlooking them. (Similar to when you buy a house you are not going to any other open houses..ditto for buying a car and many other things).<p>How are you supposed to focus on learning and school work if you already known that you are getting in YC to do a startup? Which more often than not is going to fail instead of focusing on your studies which you are paying big dollars for (potentially at least).<p>Also to a smaller degree you are giving up info to YC which in theory would also allow them to identify a trend to fund someone else ahead of you. (Relevant if they turn you down).

Early decision plans for colleges are not without their disadvantages, the biggest being that it forces a decision before the student has the time to know what all of their options and offers may be. This is frequently mitigated by financial aid packages that compensate for the loss of choice, but even so, such plans have the downside of not knowing what other packages might have come to fruition.<p>YC seems to be walking that same path - seeking a commitment before the student knows all the choices that may be available post-graduation. Is there an intent to also give some incentive to compensate for that? Or is YC not asking for a commitment, and instead just making it an invitation that can be taken or not?

Kudos to YC for taking this approach. A lot of founders want to quit status-quo and pursue startup full time but are not able to due to a number of reasons including college, immigration, teams being risk averse etc. With this, they get the validation that they have a good investor backing them and also get the time to test out their PM fit before getting into the batch, giving them enough time to learn and iterate on their mistakes.

Can you also get early rejection? Asking for a friend ;)

Interesting, YCombinator is now working hard to attract recent college grads out of school!

I&#x27;m surprised to hear YC courting would-be founders who are more interested in finishing college (grad school, even!). Affinity to the norms of academic institutions (not unlike large corporations) and to converging on their pre-formulated problems would seem incompatible with the traits of successful startup founders.<p>It&#x27;s even more surprising given research correlating founder age and industry experience to the likelihood of big exits. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu&#x2F;article&#x2F;younger-vs-older-tech-entrpreneurs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu&#x2F;article&#x2F;younger-vs-...</a><p>This solidifies the view that YC is modeled as a &quot;founder college&quot; for the young and cash-starved, weened as they are on ready-made social support systems, institutional authority, and formal rewards.