YC Changes | Hacker News Reader

YC Changes

blog.ycombinator.com

516 pointsskndr131 comments

One evening in early 2008, I got the opportunity to meet Michael at an Austin hotel during SXSW. I pitched him on the idea for Airbnb, and he took us under his wing. For the rest of the year, we would visit his office every Friday night for hours on end. Each session, Joe and I would demo our latest site and report on our progress. Michael taught me about fundraising, product growth, and building the basics of a startup culture. He kept reminding us to take just a few more steps. If we had known just how many steps there were, we may have been discouraged, but Michael always made progress feel within reach. The most important thing Michael did was believe in us. Had it not been for Michael, there might not be an Airbnb today.

As I understand it, the major boom for airbnb was the switch to renting out entire homes. Were you under the guidance of YC during that time?

FWIW, there's some good discussion around this in Sam Altman's interview with Jessica Livingston (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFOC-cgIWaY).

Michael was one of our group partners during S16, and I cannot think of a person better suited for this position than him. He consistently demonstrated the ability to cut through all of the nonsense founders tried to use to defend their actions (ourselves included) and delivered fantastic insights into our businesses to which we were blinded.

For me, the group partners were the primary value delivered by YC during the program, and I look forward to that value being continued under Michael's leadership. Congratulations!

Thanks! I really enjoyed working with you guys!

the group partners were the primary value delivered by YC during the program

Interesting insight. The hype is around the money and demo day, but it seems like insight from great partners is the true differentiator for YC.

Obligatory link to How to Start a Startup Stanford class by Sam Altman: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/

As the founder of a MOOC search engine, I am excited. Its good for my business :)

P.S. You can follow the class on Class Central [1] and we will send you an update whenever the course dates are actually announced

[1] https://www.class-central.com/mooc/7130/startup-school?follo...

class-central is great! I follow your twitter notices to keep up with upcoming courses

Thanks! Glad to know somebody finds them useful.

Startup Playbook is good too (it's roughly the course condensed into a half dozen essays).

http://playbook.samaltman.com

I would personally seek Michael's advice when I was in the S15 batch because of how earnest his advice was. Even for companies outside his group you could really tell the effort he would give to provide quality guidance. One example of how much Michael cares was in the days before our demo day, I was the first to come in at 8AM and Michael literally had slept on the couch having stayed up all night providing feedback the night before. He comes out of the partners office, sits down, and has me pitch maybe 10 minutes after he probably woke up :) Congrats!

Thanks Brian - when you go all in on demo day prep so do we :)

Said just like my Dad. :-)

What didn't work with the Fellowship, exactly? In light of the dissolution, how did the winners of the Apply HN competition (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627) work with the most recent Fellowship class?

Fellowship worked really well for the most part, but our real goal is to 10x or 100x the number of startups that we help, and Fellowship in it's current form couldn't easily do that. The MOOC is essentially Fellowship 2.0 -- we're taking what we learned from Fellowship and then opening it up to the whole world so that anyone can participate.

Do you anticipate seed funding for standout fellowship "graduates", especially those in foreign countries?

sama mentioned "financial aid" below, which sandslash clarified as "The grant will afford founders in more disadvantaged positions an opportunity to focus on their startup.", so it sounds like there will be something along those lines (although whether during or after the course, it's not entirely clear yet).

I wasn't thinking so much in the line of financial aid as funding global entrepreneurship. One of the impressive things I've noted about 500 Startups is their international outlook, where the goal isn't to find startups and bring them to Silicon Valley, but instead to fund them in situ while still providing a bridge to capital and expertise.

TBD how this plays out, but it'll be interesting to watch.

Yes, many fellowship companies have gone on to raise money or join the core YC program. Our hope is that the same will be true of the MOOC.

Fantastic!

> our real goal is to 10x or 100x the number of startups that we help, and Fellowship in it's current form couldn't easily do that

Do you account for the effects you have on the rest of the community when calculating your impact?

For example, I suspect YC is strongly responsible for the rise of "low amounts of equity without control for a small amount of funding" seed rounds, and for the existence of accelerators, in both cases globally.

The Fellowship model of investing tiny amounts - like "sparks", lighting a fire - into an enormous number of teams with as little friction as possible was the next logical step and I was looking forward to Fellowship copies sprouting all over the world.

Unfortunately by effectively ending the program you might be sending a signal to global investors not to try it, that YC Core is the deal size floor that works...

MOOC = Massive Open Online Course

If I had to look it up, I'm sure others are in the same boat.

Clip from "Mean Streets", 1973... 40 years on and we're still not sure what a MOOC is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TswwON_Hs1M

I would guess that over 90% of the YC crowd know what MOOC stands for.

I had no idea but I didn't feel like looking it up so I appreciate giarc for not being lazy.

You are part of the 10% that didn't know. Welcome to Hacker News.

Was wondering the same thing. Cheers.

You buried the lede: a YC MOOC!

I always felt that onemonth.com basically was the YC MOOC. (It is funded by YC, and you see the themes of user first, user research, growth etc running through it).

Not sure if anyone else here knows what I mean.

Will the MOOC be free?

Yes, it will be free.

Thanks Sam for making it free and available to all. I am really excited about the upcoming MOOC from YC. Can you share some more details on what kind of content will it have? What is the target audience? etc. Would love to know more about it.

Am I reading this correctly that the $20,000 YC fellowship is no longer available (and therefore the only want to get any form seed funding from YC is once again to move to the Bay Area)?

That said, the MOOC sounds interesting!

Correct.

However, we may offer something like 'financial aid' for future versions of the MOOC.

I'm confused by this - coming from an academic background, the words "financial aid" mean "help with subsidized tuition fees" to me, but you've said that this is going to be free. Can you elaborate on what you're thinking here?

He's talking about funding startups, not paying for the MOOC.

The initial thought process around financial aid in this case is to give founders the means to be able to work on their idea, project, or company. I'd like to think of it more as a grant. The grant will afford founders in more disadvantaged positions an opportunity to focus on their startup.

We're still working out the details of program, but our aim is to encourage more people to work on their ideas, and hopefully help startups be better in the long run.

Got it. So funding for the ideas/projects/companies, not funding for the MOOC.

I don't envy you the task of deciding who will get the grants (and I say this as someone who routinely pores through hundreds of undergraduate student applications for scholarships and awards). Is there any way you can structure the MOOC to give you a cheap-but-not-trivially-gameable grade? That way you could formulate the "startup grants" as being awards for the best performers in the MOOC and cut down significantly on the administrative effort involved. Of course, you might want people to be working on their projects while they take the MOOC, in which case the timeline wouldn't work -- I don't know whether your MOOC is aimed more at preparing people for a startup or people currently doing a startup (this seems like a very important thing to decide and to be clear about).

... it occurs to me now that I've written this that you've almost certainly considered all the points I've raised already; but I figure I might as well leave them here just in case I've pointed out anything you missed. :-)

Yep! And I definitely appreciate your thoughtfulness and input. We are still fleshing out all the finer details of the program, but we will have a more detailed announcement soon.

Seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit in the announcement is a fun coincidence. He founded gmail. One of the things he did with gmail is gave it a command-line user interface.

I recently found out that a lot of people I would expect to know about it, don't. If that includes you, go to the gear on the upper right of your gmail, select that, then Settings, then turn keyboard shortcuts on and save.

Typing "?" randomly in gmail will let you know what shortcuts are there. It takes time for your fingers to learn them, but scanning email with j k [ ] is so much faster than a mouse. I don't even think before using / to search. :-)

> Typing "?" randomly in gmail will let you know what shortcuts are there. It takes time for your fingers to learn them, but scanning email with j k [...]

really? Oh wow... I've used j and k for ages, but didn't know about this pop-up. Thanks!

These are keyboard shortcuts not a command-line.

Does Paul (pg) have an active role in YC? Asking as a curious outsider.

He normally still advises companies, but right now he's living in England for a year.

Thanks.

What the world needs is a solution to funding orders of magnitude more startups than currently get funded.

YC is in the incredibly fortunate position of having this opportunity but instead it looks like Sam Altman is falling into the same trap Larry Page did with Google. He's turning it into a bit of a rich guy's playground...

On behalf of the world that wasn't born into a world of wealth and elite connections: Please shine your massive resources on the many thousands of deserving little startups!

YC would like to fund a lot more startups. We're working on this.

Also, being connected doesn't help people get into YC. We have no connection to most of the companies we fund.

I think the net needs to include people who know people that were funded by YC and not just the partners themselves.

RE: "We have no connection to most of the companies we fund."

This certainly isn't the perception on my part - the flood of posts from previous YC companies who talk about how they had help from other YC companies to polish their pitch makes it seem like current YC companies are definitively connected to previous YC companies.

The handful of blog posts you see here on HN are not representative of the whole batch. The majority of companies that we fund have zero alumni connections.

To me, this is actually one of the most important features of YC: the application process is completely open and we fund people from around the world regardless of background. Having graduated from college in Ohio in the 90s I moved here with zero connections and really wished for something like YC.

An awesome feature certainly. I appreciate the access (and the free teaching we're getting more of soon) :)

While I can't dictate what orgs do, it'd be helpful to see some "we applied with zero connections and got in on our strength alone" posts to balance it out.

I agree it would be good to have more blog posts with that message -- I worry that good founders won't apply due to the mistaken impression that alumni connections are required.

Here's one for you: https://twitter.com/joseluisnuno/status/770711984543244288

We don't have any blog posts about it, but the company my friend's and I started got into YC with 0 connections and we're pretty much all from the midwest USA. No one took a risk on us until YC, every penny the company had came from 2 of the cofounders' pockets. While we're not out of the woods yet, there is no way we would still be at it w/o YC.

I not only had zero connections to YC.. I actually had zero connections to silicon valley! We (RedCarpet.Cash) are a India-based fintech startup - IMHO the third to ever get funded by YC.

We were also unusual because we are probably the first Indian YC startup with on-ground operations. We went through 3 rounds of YC interviews (not just the one!) .. because the interviewers had to learn about India. Our first interviewer was mwseibel !

What impressed me was that YC learned about India, invested in us and supported us through a pivot back in India. Big shout out to Aaron Harris, who is probably the resident Asia expert now [1]

[1] http://www.aaronkharris.com/carts-without-horses

We applied and got in without any connections whatsoever to YC.

We hadn't ever been to Silicon Valley or to the United States, and no company from our country (Brazil) or even our continent had ever joined YC before us.

Having no connections is no reason not to apply.

I am interested in a startup idea, what do I have to do to get in YC?

I am from India.

As a YC alum, I help a few companies polish their pitch every application season. I have no connection to most of those companies - they're just folks with an exciting idea who sent me a compelling email.

My cofounders & I got the same help from folks we didn't know when we were applying to YC. It's a pretty awesome community.

being connected does help people get in:

-Connected people can more easily get an interview slot

-Connected people can get feedback on their application before submission

-Connected people can more easily coaching and advice before their interview from alumni and partners

I don't think the MOOC gets away from this original ambition. YC is still interested in funding the maximum possible number of promising companies.

This is, however, a clear logistical challenge when you have a partner/advice model that doesn't scale all that easily. It may just turn out that an online, infinitely scalable net is precisely the best way to grow the number of great companies you can see and subsequently fund.

I don't think YC intends this to be a purely educational exercise.

One question does YC == Y Combinator? In the TLDR, YC Core is renamed to "YC", and YC Group now consists of Y Combinator, YC Continuity, YC Research and the new YC MOOC. But I wasn't 100% clear whether the group Michael Seibel is the CEO of "YC" is the same as the component in the YC Group referred to as "Y Combinator".

It would have been a bit more clear (to me) if the group had been consistently referred to as "YC" if that's the new branding, so I'm guessing there are a lot of others like me who aren't certain as well.

It's probably just like Alphabet (YC Group) & Google (YC).

Will the MOOC content be in any way different from How to Start a Startup by Sam A. (class taught at Stanford)

Yes, I have a lot of new ideas about how to improve if after teaching that class.

I plan to talk in more detail about it near the end of this year.

Thank you so much for taking the time to teach this class again. The original contained nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that are hard to find anywhere else.

I expect to be downvoted but my YC interview with Michael a couple summers back left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm not really sure he asked more than "how is this a billion dollar company?" multiple times during the 10 minutes. I'm not sure why YC would pay $1k to fly us to Mountain View if that question was that important and wasn't already answered by our application.

Hope that was just a fluke though... Good luck YC!

Maybe other factors lead them to believe you had a billion dollar idea, but needed to tweeze it out of you. A VC trying to understand how you'll make a billion dollars is as a legit of a question as you can get.

It's very difficult to truly evaluate a business without talking to the founders. Sometimes a bad sounding business (such as air mattress rentals) will turn out to be a really great business (such as AirBnb).

That said, I'm sorry you had a bad experience. We're working on better ways to pre-screen startups before interviews so we can hopefully avoid as much unnecessary travel as possible.

Thanks paul. I should elaborate: the other partners were asking other and varied questions.

The experience was really not bad except that the persistence and insistence of that question made it feel like an episode of Shark Tank.

Maybe we were just bitter realists but the only answer to that question is "get really lucky."

PG wasnt joking when he said:

"You could parachute [Sam] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king." - PG 5.5 years ago[1]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

Let's do it.

Agreed. Depending on what he's allowed to pack I'm betting against him

can always count on a zinger from idlewords :)

TBH, this is why I scrutinize sama. to learn. And, I haven't been able to discern his brand of magic.

Obviously he's figured out how to get a few powerful people to bet on him. But, he doesn't seem to have any outward success.

From his videos, he doesn't seem to be classically charismatic.

So, what has he figured out? How is he a kingmaker?

I am definitely not charismatic.

I am a pretty good investor.

I've had the privilege to hear you speak a couple times (and ask a few questions) and I thought your greatest strength was/is the following -

Take extremely complicated topics and succinctly and concisely boil it down to its fundamentals and present that in an easy-to-understand manner. Aka cut out the bullshit.

Thoughts on whether you agree/disagree?

Competence is charismatic in itself, though not something that translates onto video.

Do you have open office hours? I'd love to get a feel for how you think.

Missed naming opportunity: Y Combinator Combinator

YC, short for YC Combinator, short for Y Combinator Combinator.

I'm surprised they got to shutdown YC Fellowship; is it already shut down, or they are planning on that next year.

Without YC how one could get access to YC network and get one to one advice without moving to bayarea?

online classes are not really one to one advice.

The MOOC will include one to one advice.

Also, YC frequently does open office hours that are open to anyone over Skype.

> The MOOC will include one to one advice.

How might this work at scale?

My understanding of a provost's role is to be as senior as possible without having to do any administrative, managerial, or executive duties -- so they can focus entirely on academic topics.

Is that basically what you're going for with the PB analogy, except s/academic/startup-mentoring/ ?

Yes, that's the goal :)

I like working with startups and advancing our program, but do not generally enjoy administrative work. This change enables me to do more of what I like and less of what I don't.

There are many great mentors in the startup world, but I've yet to meet one with a better time in to help out ratio than Michael Seibel. Excellent choice to lead YC.

It's also very inspiring to see YC Group tackling some of the world's most important problems. Excited to see what comes of this.

The theme of YC Research seems to be futurology.

I would say: automation & AI:

- automated cities & robotic workers - HARC working on the interfaces for the "workers" - basic income to replace minimum wage earners' incomes

Would love to work on this path!

Earnest question: do you believe that full automation and mass displacement of workers, combined with a basic income will lead to anything resembling a decent quality of life for most?

Because I want to believe it, but all contemporary evidence points to an outcome that includes an even more extreme stratification of wealth and masses of struggling, impoverished people.

This is correct. Those at the top, like myself, will continue to develop AI and automation tools while doing our best to keep workers from "becoming smart" through low wages/benefits/minimally satisfying regulations. You wouldn't want your maid revolting against you, now would you?

Call me morally corrupt if you want, but there will always be morally corrupt people in the world whether we like it or not.

So is "YC Core" what we have historically thought of as YC?

What is PG's role these days?

I asked Sam in a live webcast he did some months ago whether YC would build a chatbot for the fellowship to replace mentors and he said they would try. I wonder if they actually did and it'll be included in the MOOC.

I hope Paul Buchheit becoming a provost doesn't mean he won't be part of YC going forward.

A little part of me is hoping to have him on our interview panel again to show him how far we've come.

Thanks. I'm definitely still involved, and if anything should have more time to spend with the startups :)

Michael has been everywhere when it comes promoting YC. Si it's great to see this formalization.

Of course, the timing of this announcement is more exciting being that Michael and Qasar will be in Nigeria in 10 days :) [1][2]

re: MOOC

Sam/Michael,

What are your thoughts on (semi)formalizing a relationship with incubators globally as the top of the funnel for recruiting startups.

It can key into them helping adopt your MOOC curriculum. That way the fundamentals of knowledge are taken care of at the lowest of levels and potential YC recruits have the basics even before applying.

I was just having it as a rough idea to discuss with Michael when he visits only to see this post pop up

[1] Lagos - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/techcircle-presents-building-a-...

[2] Abuja - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/techcircle-presents-build-a-gre...

Both are oversubscribed but pop me an email (see profile) if you want to attend and have not registered I'll get you a ticket.

So YC is the new Alphabet?

My guess is that just about any organization that's using it's business as a vehicle to push social changes is eventually going to start adopting such a structure. You want to keep the business profitable while at the same time making room for new efforts. If you just started opening up new departments in the already-profitable organization you risk watering down what makes it magical.

I actually think it's a great idea. So far the people who don't like it are they smaller is better crowd. The run it like a 3 person coffee shop crowd.

Any hint on a more precise date for Startup School MOOC version launch? Closer to Jan/2017 or closer to Dec/2017?

So is this new "YC" an acronym for YC Core? That seems a bit like the GNU's Not Unix thing.

Pretty sure "YC" is "Y Combinator".

> *I’m going to be the President of YC Group, which includes Y Combinator, YC Continuity, YC Research, and our

Presumably it also includes YC (that used to be YC Core) - was including 'Y Combinator'in the list a slip - and it should have been YC?

I can't wait for the MOOC!!

Does this change mean YCombinator is going to invest in primarily mature startups?

It feels like the research and mooc will boost early stage startups to eventually apply to the YC core program. Is that the goal?

It's ambiguous wether the MOOC will be replacing the Fellowship the Fellowship will be continuing along with this new component.

Clarified: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12490241

YC is really unique. I expect the MOOC will include a nurturing and/or funding path beyond the courses.

Small correction, Socialcam was YC W12, not S12.

ok.

Every blog post should have a TLDR like this one.

TL;DR: Michael Seibel will be the new CEO of YC Core, which we are now just going to call "YC". Ali Rowghani is now the CEO of the YC Continuity Fund. I’m going to be the President of YC Group, which includes Y Combinator, YC Continuity, YC Research, and our new online class. We’ll add more organizational units over time. We’re going to replace the Fellowship with a much larger MOOC launching next year.

The use of TL;DR bothers me because the word "summary" is appropriate or even "key points". It's not common use among all groups of people (old timers for example who also could read a blog post) and it really doesn't serve any clear purpose that "summary" does not.

But you still get the gist of it though, right?

....

I try to use "summary" when I can as well.

I think few people know the full history of tl;dr. When it first started appearing, it wasn't used by the author, but in response to the author (like you wrote something way too long winded I'm not reading that)

Agree most probably don't know the history. TL;DR is a good example of how people can date themselves by how they communicate. They enter into something new and start to copy something that they see because they don't understand the nuance. Then the nuance disappears because of that new usage.

In reverse (with much older people) we have a few customers who pay by check and send a cover letter as well attached to the check (a formal holdover from olden times). Attaching the invoice is sufficient obviously.

In the Army we started everything with a BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front), a simple one sentence description about the presentation/email/whatever. One of the few things I miss...

I was just coming to say the same thing!

It's concise and let's me cherry-pick the sections below I'd like to read - better than a table of contents except in those magazines that provide a paragraph for each of their lead stories).

I'd like to see other sama stories in an abbreviated form too.

tldr.io has something like that and it integrates directly with HN.

http://tldr.io/browser-extension

Reply on news.ycombinator.com