Startup School – YC’s Online Class | Hacker News Reader

Startup School – YC’s Online Class

blog.ycombinator.com

419 pointspiyushmakhija64 comments

I'm very optimistic about this program, but I also wonder how much of the success of the main program and the fellowship can be scaled into a MOOC.

I was part of YCF1 as AirPaper, and while I think it was an incredibly valuable experience, most of the things the YC partners told us we're things that we "knew." Most of the advice was available in one essay or another, but it still felt very, very different to have one of the partners tell us directly what we should be doing.

I actually think in a lot of ways the YC program felt a lot like therapy for our startup. We'd talk in group office hours about the other successes and problems other startups were facing. Individual office hours felt like one on one therapy where we got very specific direction out of the partners, but most of the time they were really helping my cofounder and I work out what the solution to our biggest problem was.

While I think the information in this class will certainly be valuable, I hope that the participants of this class really convince themselves that the advice applies to them, right now. To get the most out of this class, I think you need to abandon cynicism and let the message reach through the screen and grab you and your cofounders by the lapels.

>> "most of the things the YC partners told us we're things that we "knew." Most of the advice was available in one essay or another, but it still felt very, very different to have one of the partners tell us directly what we should be doing."

This is really what will make a difference, that is building a network of mentors that are doing one-on-one mentoring under the same process guided by the same culture. YC should really have a 3rd option, that being to sign-up to become a "certified" mentor.

Not sure if you already saw this, but it does look like there will be group and 1-1 office hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13803069

I find it quiet surprising that none of these startup classes teach how to do market research and market sizing. Yet when a new batch of startups demo every six weeks, the first thing they talk of is, size of opportunity. Market opportunity is one of the things to consider before deciding on a problem to work on. Please consider adding this info to your classes.

Also, None of them teach how Sam or any YC partner or any VC would approach or start thinking whether a startup is worth investing in or not. That would be hugely beneficial to some of us as it will help us in channeling our thoughts.

I am planning to cover both of those!

> Build a community of entrepreneurs who can encourage and teach each other

Working towards the mentioned goal can start right here on HN by adding a navbar link titled "MOOC" like what YC did with "Apply HN". I am curious to know if YC considered involving the HN community directly like they did with the Fellowship. I remember the whole controversy involving pinboard and YC receiving a lot of flak for it, but I hope that experience did not deter YC from involving the HN community if they had considered involving the HN community. I imagine there are a lot of enthusiastic folks around here willing to give feedback to startups.

Sam Altman mentioned that somewhere (can't remember where) that they would experiment giving funding to a few startups taking part in the MOOC. I wonder why they pushed that to the next offering of the MOOC, why not start now?

Also, what happened to the Fellowship? I thought it was a great idea but I get the impression (from having read comments about the Fellowship written by YC partners) that YC felt it might not have been the best way to scale funding new startups and so the MOOC was born.

Suggestion : the Fellowship was a great idea and so is this MOOC, why not make the Fellowship a subset of the MOOC i.e fund a few startups taking part in the MOOC with $20,000 or so and please find a way to involve the HN community directly.

How would YC moderate 3rd party mentors?

Thanks, that's a great suggestion and it does seem like there should be ways for the HN community to plug into this. It's probably also the case that we should let the new thing grow a bit before trying to extend it. But I'll talk with Sam about this the next time I see him.

I was laughed off of HN when I suggested a few years ago that YC was en route to becoming the world's first true 21st century university.

Applying pg's question of "What Microsoft Is this the Altair Basic of" to YC itself, the answer to me has always been a modern university. From the regular cohorts, to nascent investment in basic research, to residential component, to doing things that make a big impact on the world, to being highly profitable (yes, elite higher ed. is a fantastic business), always seemed to me that all the ingredients were there.

This is yet another small step in that direction.

I share your view, I think that halfway on the journey PG realized this potential and even talks about YC as a new type of educational organization on some of is texts.

It's great to be here at this point in time and see it unfold.

You would be happy to know that in fact I believe PG has said as much himself :)

https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/21/sam-altman-taking-over-as-...

Related text from the above link:

>> At a fundamental level, though, Graham says that the YC experience for startups will largely be unchanged. “A big misconception is that Y Combinator is Paul Graham,” he said. This change, he says, should finally dispel that public perception and build a bigger future for YC modeled in part after organizations that have stood the test of time.

>> “It’s rare for a company to last 100 years, but for a university it’s nothing. The reason for the difference, I think, is that product companies always have in their DNA some assumption about the kind of thing they’re building, and about their market, and that eventually ends up becoming false. But a university is just a nexus of people...people go there because of the people that are there,” he said. “Now, I’m not claiming that Y Combinator is going to last for centuries. But it could.”

Ha - I had no idea!

This is a smart move by YC. This gives them a platform to assess promising ideas and teams at no-cost. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point teams become required to graduate from the program before being able to apply to YC.

I am not trying to be cynical here or downplay the value of their contribution. I think that they will genuinely teach the best of what they know to people. And what I am actually saying is that this is a good example of healthy capitalism.

This is an example of the fact that it is possible to articulate your best interests in a way that also helps people.

But I have to say that also admire the strategy itself. This is the kind of things that get you thinking : "they should have done it a long time ago" after you see the solution. Never thought about it either to be fair, but this is how you recognize the best solutions : they shine through their simplicity.

Anyway, well found and wishing you the best with this, and hopefully this will help and inspire many people to make the world a more pleasant place.

The Startup School logo is really cool - a bunch of Y Combinator 'Y's forming a tree. It fits what they seem to be going for with by calling the MOOC 'Startup School' and symbolizes the programming definition of Y Combinator. Whoever came up with that design does good work. :)

I hope that there is some kind of 1:1 they can do here. We're part of a startup in a non-techy city. We're a service business and although our immediate future is bright, I have major questions about how to scale our business outside of acquiring similar companies doing stuff close to what we're doing and changing their strategy. Sure, there are mentors here who have grown a business...but I want YC-enabled growth...

We hope to provide 1:1 and group office hours to as many companies as possible.

That's great. I will fly to SF just to get the quality time.

Which non-techy city? We are based out of Melbourne Australia. All the startup events is 100% startup founders with the next uber/airbnb/facebook and zero mentors/advisors/investors.

What we realized that the success of startup is not talent and perseverance. It's how much money you have to bootstrap, who do you know, what city your startup is based out of and how many VCs you can approach.

Are there any interesting insights learned from running the fellowship that contributed to the development of the MOOC?

I definitely think the community would love to hear them!

Nice! I'm living in Vietnam and I'd love to learn from this program.

As someone who lives in a regional city in Australia, Im very excited to have the opportunity to join the program.

Watching the lectures on Youtube offers a one way information transfer, which while its an amazing amount of information im hoping that this MOOC will allow a bit more of a two way communication.

So Thanks.

"30-40% of these will be recorded advice sessions with startups—we’ve always heard from entrepreneurs that this is some of our most helpful content."

Excellent. Learning online is best served by using video. Following the model of getting the best on tape, distributing to a mass audience. cf: MIT online 6.001 lectures. I'm thinking the Hal Abelson lectures from '85)

"We’ll have an online community via Slack and email where you can connect with other entrepreneurs in the class."

Expedience. Not a fan of slack. Is a YC discussion/mooc platform being planned?

"4) At the end of the class, participants will have a chance to share what they’ve built with a wide audience."

How is this happening? Slack?

This is great, however I don't believe it will make you a better entrepreneur.

To me at least the only thing I ever learned from was doing it and make my own experience which often would if not contradict what I read about then at least illustrate that nothing beats doing.

I guess the idea isn't to teach people how to be an awesome entrepreneur, but to point them in a good direction so they can earn the experience they need to be an awesome entrepreneur.

A friend of mine once said, "There are things in life that you can only learn through experience. There are also things that you should never learn through experience -- like how to pack a parachute. Knowing the difference between the two is key".

I don't disagree.

I just don't think statistically, it has any significant impact on whether you become successful or not. But sure it might save you from some beginner mistakes.

Yea, I see it more as inspiration or a catalyst.

There's a balance to be had between theory & practice, exclusive doing one or the other will likely produce suboptimal results. Ideally, you'd focus on execution and dynamically get intuitive meaningful feedback as you went.

Each to their own of course and I have no scientific evidence to back this up but my guess is that only a fraction who ever become successful entrepreneurs take courses in entrepreneurism.

The rest see an opportunity and hire the financial, legal and technical and other advice they need.

Real value of the course is the opportunity to get one-on-one sessions with experienced mentors; my guess is that the majority of successful founders have received advice that was crucial to their success.

The value of that meeting is network not mentoring IMO. Building a company is mostly a freeform exercise, where the elements which become part of your success are really subtle.

IMO what you will find the most is that luck has a proportionally large part to do with your success.

Absolutely agree with you here. Our aim here is not to make people better entrepreneurs, but rather to share our experiences and learnings in hopes of guiding entrepreneurs on their way to building their company.

Like previous commenters have mentioned, much of the advice/content is bound to be readily available online, and nothing replaces firsthand experience. However, we believe that in this environment, founders will be able to glean some new insight through advisory sessions and group office hours.

And I will be watching it :)

I just I am just in general of the believe that other peoples experience as entrepreneurs are mostly fascinating tales from those who ventured rather than useful information, it's just too complex and fast moving for it to be educational (unless your like to study entrepreneurial history :) )

Nice, good to see that they also put 1on1, wondering how this can scale with the "few" startups that may apply.

The test is whether the core YC aspects can scale?

* How can we motivate people to build on a weekly basis?

* Can we be a credible source of advice so people can save time by not second-guessing it?

* Can we identify which problems need resolving and intervene at depth?

* Can we connect the community through this shared experience?

Lots of assumptions to test.

Will there be an in-person start up school this year like the conference last year?

Dates of recording for the videos on the home page of startupschool.org? Would be helpful to prospective students.

Really, is this the best YC is able to do?

Truly interested in knowingly why the course is not released under something like one of the Creative Commons licenses:

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/licensing-types-...

They're not a nonprofit. You're obviously free to release whatever helpful startup materials you would like to the world, and I'm sure that YC would be quite appreciative of their being more wonderful startups existing in the world as a result.

> They're not a nonprofit.

For-profit & permissive licensing aren't mutually exclusive. For-profits can release their material with permissible licenses too.

I think the parent's criticisms are valid. Consider YC's corporate mission [1]:

> Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone.

[1] http://blog.samaltman.com/2017-yc-annual-letter

It would stand to reason that many more people around the world could benefit from free course materials (as in freedom, not beer). The choice to make materials nonfree will significantly limit their distribution and derivative works, thereby reducing the amount of innovation enabled, and contradicting their own "enable maximum innovation" mission statement.

EDIT: And now sandslash has confirmed that Creative Commons is the ultimate intent. Clearly YC intends to remain consistent with it's core principles. I applaud them!

Apologies for that, we were still in the process of drafting a Terms of Use when we put up the site. That will be updated shortly to have more information. We plan on releasing our content under the Creative Commons license similar to Sam's previous Startup Class.

Thanks for the update, glad to hear YC is going to address the issue and that a terms of service will be added too; adding privacy policy would also be nice.

Unable to sign up at the moment, getting a 522 from CF after entering email.

Sorry about that. We're really getting hammered. If you try again it should work. We'll increase our capacity substantially before registration opens.

Tried to sign up for notifications, and just see an endless spinner.

Thanks for letting us know - we're working on it.

The registration form is not working. Click submit and it just spins

Just had a similar issue. Refresh the page.

fifth try's the charm :)

the conference site is timing out for me.

Here's more info: https://blog.ycombinator.com/onlineclass/

Lots of analytics, advertising and tracking being used on the site: https://builtwith.com/www.startupschool.org

Expecting to see lots of ads for this appearing soon.

You said a lot. But after opening the link It kinda got scary

Yep, here's the full list:

Eyeota

The Trade Desk

Rocket Fuel

Dstillery

Aggregate Knowledge

Tapad

BlueKai

DoubleClick.Net

AppNexus

Neustar AdAdvisor

eXelate

Connexity

Google Universal Analytics

Datalogix

Lotame Crowd Control

New Relic

comScore

Rapleaf

Cross Pixel

OwnerIQ

Signal

Are you really seeing all that loading on the site? Where are you located? The only tracking code being included by us is Google Analytics. There are 4 youtube embeds on the page too that could be loading in some other code.

How do they calculate that? Chrome Network dev tool just shows Google/Youtube/Doubleclick resources.

BuiltWith contains data about both the current and past usage of services gathered from scraping the page, but also from a bunch of other (not always) reliable sources.

My guess is the ADs will drive sign-ups and the analytics will attempt to gain extra data points on the startups to attempt to better source and channel deal flow intelligence.

We are absolutely not going to be advertising on the site. I'm not sure where the tracking is coming from but am looking into it.

Also, I think that information is out of date. The Startup School Conference site has been moved to here: http://conference.startupschool.org.

The new site is built with Ruby on Rails, React and Semantic UI.

I think GP meant advertising FOR the site, not ON it.

Ah. We're not going to be advertising FOR it either. I'm mostly just surprised as we haven't intentionally added any advertising tracking code to the site.

There's a two-day in-person version of this on the East Coast on July 25-26, 2017 at Georgetown University called Startup Spectacular. Worth checking out if you want an in-person version: http://www.startupspectacular.com. Edit: yes, just noticed this is not the same idea / concept. I was posting based on the feedback that a MOOC doesn't seem to work for everyone for this sort of thing.

To be clear, the above appears to have no affiliation with YC, but is just another startup course; one that does not appear to be a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), unlike the one referenced in the the post that's the subject of this thread.

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