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Comment by snowmaker | Hacker News Reader

Guys - we are deeply sorry for this screw-up. I know we got people's hopes up only to let you down, and I feel terrible about it.

While it doesn't excuse our mistake, for what it's worth, Startup School makes the classes and all the materials available online to everyone. So even if you didn't get accepted to the advisor track, we hope you will follow along, watch the videos, and find the material useful.

My apologies on behalf of everyone at YC for letting you down. We're still trying to figure out exactly what happened, and make sure nothing like it happens again.

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Willing to share details about:

- how many companies applied?

- how many were accepted into advisor track?

- how many received false acceptance email (if not the difference of the former 2)?

For anyone curious, the answers are:

- 15k applied

- 4k were accepted

- 11k received false acceptance emails

source?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17806459

Mistakes happen. Waiting two hours to tell people, then doing so from a do-not-reply address, however, is a poor way to handle them.

If we make a mistake like this as a company, we at least try to make up for it in some way, and make our users feel valued.

It took us a little while to realize what we had done. Once we did, we sent out the correction email as soon as we could. That's not an excuse, but I don't want it to feel like we were intentionally leaving people in the dark.

Sending the follow-up from a do-not-reply was also our mistake. Our default outbound address is do-not-reply, and we forgot to change it as we were drafting the correction. Please follow up to startupschool@ycombinator.com. :(

The 'apologies' email was another bulk no-reply message. Maybe they misapologised, too.

/r/oopsdidntmeantodidntmeantooops

I hope this doesn't sound antagonistic since you're already getting a lot of flak for what seems to be an honest mistake. (I was accept-rejected fwiw).

Could you shine some light on what your criteria were for acceptance? I have now seen a few projects that were actually accepted. They seemed pretty generic and not at all what I thought would have been accepted. As products, the only benefit they seemed to have were that they were in maybe the alpha or beta stage of development. For our future reference, could you please elaborate a bit on what you were looking for in these applications?

P.S. If you were accepted, congratulations! I am not saying your product is generic :)

How about making this up to those of us who got false-acceptance emails by providing some feedback on our applications?

I'm happy to do that. Email us at startupschool@ycombinator.com with your name so we can do that.

My cofounder who led the application will be doing so in a moment! Thanks.

If you're going to do this, maybe do it for everyone and not buried in a comment.

Yeah, this should be an actual initiative. Work overtime if you have to, at least give us a bit of the mentorship that everybody here wanted.

I appreciate the initiative, very nice way to apologize. Thanks

This would be awesome. I’m sure all founders would love just a little insight on why they were rejected so that they can try to address the shortcomings.

Pretty certain I incorrectly received the "Ooops, you didn't actually email"

Please confirm this bug. My company is basically a unicorn.

"Oh youre a founder huh?"

"Yep"

"What company?"

"We are in stealth-mode, currently"

"Ah, what stage are you at, can you share that?"

"Yeah, like I said, we are a stealth-mode pre-unicorn startupschool audit track company"

No really, it's unicorn

List of achievements:

Startup School Advisor Track for 20 minutes

Lol! I think this comment is the greatest thing to come out of the error.

I have been feeling less than and embarrassed all day, but this little back and forth really cheered me up.

I salute you and celebrate your epic comment! hahaha

Thank you for the apology. I think all of us in tech know how these things can happen and so I personally appreciate it. If YC wasn't so cool, we wouldn't be so bummed. :)

Thanks again and good luck with everything!

That really stung to get the "Your in" then "Sorry, Out" emails, but mistakes happen and appreciate the apology here.

Did the "Your in" emails go to everyone who applied, or was it a subset of applications?

Judging by similar forum threads elsewhere, it looks like some who were accepted were initially rejected and many who were rejected were initially accepted.

Has this thread been manually deleted from the HN front page?

Definitely not. It was being downgraded a bit by software for reasons unrelated to the topic, but I just turned that off.

submissions automatically get docked when the number of comments exceeds the number of votes after a certain number.

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