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Startup School Online: Registration and Deals

blog.ycombinator.com

100 pointscraigcannon21 comments

Do you (generic you) think this could scale with something like a franchise model?

Consider: there is a local Startup School "Dojo" where a number of founders come together to watch the lectures.

Instead of passing through all the questions, they try to solve the problems themselves and then escalate some common problems to office hours.

I am just trying to think of ways that you -- or anyone -- could spread the startup gospel to all 50,000 and eventually more.

Someone might say: You can always start your own study group. Response: True, but you want feedback from people who have gone through a few successful startup cycles. Ycombinator has credibility.

I think it's hard. With YC, the ongoing benefit from the founders' end is really the network. I think a franchise type model would really dilute that, and you'd end up with the "real" YC and everything else.

To provide an example, consider law schools and the ABA versus medical schools and the AAMC:

There are many ABA-accredited law schools, from which a degree will allow you to sit for the bar exam in a given state. The "real" law schools (let's say the Top 14 for now, with full disclosure that I attended a much shittier law school) provide a very similar education to everyone else even down through Tier 4. The network gets you hired into the big firms with greater ease from HLS and the rest of the Top 14. Everyone else has the same law license (provided they pass the bar), but the opportunities are markedly different for most. And before any fellow Tier 3/4'ers want to flame me for this, come on, you 100% know it's true. I think I've done pretty well, but I also stopped practicing law to do it.

Now, an AAMC-accredited education, on the other hand, provides a lot more parity out of the gate when it comes to opportunity. Med school slots roughly match up with the number of residency slots in a given year, and more or less everyone matches. Not everyone gets to do Ortho/Plastic, but that has more to do with how well you did in med school, versus which med school you attended. The school itself still factors for some specialties, but not nearly to the degree that it would in law. You can be a pretty average med student and still walk out with a residency, license and reasonably good income.

YC is more like #2.

> Now, an AAMC-accredited education, on the other hand, provides a lot more parity out of the gate when it comes to opportunity.

The medical guild used The Flexner Report (1910) [1] to eliminate opportunities for people to train as doctors:

  The Report (also called Carnegie Foundation 
  Bulletin Number Four) called on American medical 
  schools to enact higher admission and graduation 
  standards, and to adhere strictly to the 
  protocols of mainstream science in their teaching 
  and research. Many American medical schools fell 
  short of the standard advocated in the Flexner 
  Report and, subsequent to its publication, nearly 
  half of such schools merged or were closed 
  outright. Colleges in electrotherapy were closed. 

  The Report also concluded that there were too 
  many medical schools in the USA, and that too 
  many doctors were being trained. A repercussion 
  of the Flexner Report, resulting from the closure 
  or consolidation of university training, was 
  reversion of American universities to male-only 
  admittance programs to accommodate a smaller 
  admission pool.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexner_Report

The Guild has been fairly successful at keeping the number of doctors educated just below the number of needed. Foreign-educated doctors are imported to fill the gap.

Let's say I agree with you that there is a lot of value in the network and the brand.

The question remains: is there any residual value left in the advice and the "training"?

Or, more importantly, is there significant value in the advice?

Because if the answer to that question is affirmative, then even if I agree with you, it is a worthy pursuit.

Note that value in advice is context sensitive. What might be amazing, valuable advice in 2009 may be standard stuff that you can get off many different courses in 2019.

But while there are many places where you can learn to put the customer first and do some prototyping, there are a limited number of places you can learn what is happening now. ("Sure, in 2011 you could get funding by showing your user studies, but not an investor expects the product to be smart enough to learn the user's preferences on the fly" or whatever).

The advice is probably valuable, but YC (and countless others) make the advice pretty available already if you're willing to analyze what's already written and recorded and synthesize their advice with your own facts. I say that to mean it's out there, but not with any kind of hand-holding, but I would also wonder how a decentralized/franchised type of YC would really accomplish that.

Beyond that, these sorts of things exist in many cities, they're just not called YC. I'm not against it or anything, I just think that what you're proposing exists in some form already, just without the brand. If YC could add to that experience on a larger scale, it's a great idea. Not trying to talk you out of it or anything.

I don't know if I can do it, but I will say:

1. I am in a tiny out-of-the-way place, and nothing remotely like this exists here (hint: there are three meetup groups, two of which are defunct, and one of which caters to moms who want to meet with kids).

2. It doesn't have to be YC. Who else can do this kind of thing? Onemonth.com? Udacity? They don't seem to be as current as Ycombinator.

That's a really interesting idea, and a possibility. It's definitely something I've thought about a lot.

Quite a few communities have reached out about doing study groups, and I'm excited to hear their feedback.

Hi Steven, I understand you're putting together the Startup School MOC with Finbarr and Sam.

I'm a London based startup founder who loves the idea behind the course and is interested in getting the most possible from it. My interest lead me to hitting the Startup School Radio podcast where I heard this sentiment from a fellow London founder, YC alumni and ex-YC partner Harj Taggar "Just psychologically it's a big deal to be around a lot of other people going through the same thing you are, and just not feeling like you're crazy". I took Harj's words to heart and went about finding other London founders who were in a similar situation to us, told them about the upcoming MOC and started organising us into a YC inspired network of support. After one week of reaching out and attending non-stop Meetup events for tech startups (7 so far, 4 more to go!), I've collected a brilliant group of 18 founders. It turns out they loved the idea of doing the course together just as much as we did. First YC lesson learnt: build something users love and they will be very happy to engage with you. We're currently organising our first weekly dinner (it's tomorrow and I've never cooked for 18 people - here's hoping everyone likes pasta!), and our attempt at office hours will commence with the first lecture.

Any advice or assistance you'd be able to offer us would be brilliant and most appreciated. Is emailing you guys at startupschool@ycombinator.com the best place for that?

Thanks for your time reading a rather long message! Lots of love from the London YC gang to the MOC team in Mountain View.

Sam Knightsbridge

ComHouse CEO

One possibility, and I think HN is the right forum, is to produce some tools to leverage those communities.

Some ideas:

1. Working infrastructure for chatrooms etc

2. A curriculum for people to go through

3. The most important thing, I think, is to have those weekly classes to tune into so the people adopt the rhythm.

And whatever other ideas all the smart HN readers might suggest following this.

Edit: Someone should submit this as one of the projects!

Seriously interested in this. Was looking over the partner benefits and noticed the Clerky bit mentioned access to the fundraising beta for people who use Clerky for incorporating. So ... if someone already did the work a month ago to incorporate, and was chosen, they'd lose access to that service?

There's more legal legwork than just incorporating. Contracts, Terms of Use, etc.

I realize that. Doesn't actually answer my question.

10:1 (I'm guessing) sounds like pretty a high contention ratio for a MOOC. I'd be fascinated to see how this compares with the ratios for YC proper (as well as others like the Fellowships).

[Edit note: I misread the post originally, and got 50:1, which I found more surprising.]

Where are you getting that ratio from? We've had about 50k sign ups, and hope to serve at least several thousand in the Founder Track.

Oops - I misread "several thousand" as "about a thousand". Comment now corrected. The ratio is a bit less eye-popping now, but I bet it's still high by MOOC standards.

One clarification: is the Startup Founder track form out now or will it be published later on. By the text of the blog, it sounds like it's all ready to go - but no link to such a form can be found.

It is a bit of a shame that Heroku couldn't come to the table and provide something. I'm currently torn between using them or AWS for a project

You can use Convox https://convox.com to easily (almost as easy as Heroku) manage deployments on AWS

Are [difficult to scale] software developmemt services companies encouraged to apply? I see YC as a product oriented accelerator.

Will the next "batch" be ~6 months, or a year later?

Most likely next year.

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