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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

Yep. We do a little bit of that already with our normal batch applicants, but with the wide net of Startup School there may be more more data available that would be interesting to correlate with long-term success. I think it would be so valuable to have a rigorous study of the factors that correlate with startup success – letting founders know what they should optimize for is an important part of the value we want to provide!

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eg. 40% of VCs went to Harvard or Stanford, so therefore if you want to be a VC or know VCs, you should optimize for going to Harvard or Stanford.

/s - because much of the data you'd have on such early stage co's is identity-based, and therefor chock full of bias.

Some of it for sure, but there are a lot of other things to look at. And of course the whole idea of startup school is to try to cast a much wider net, orders of magnitude wider.

Add one order of hopefully serendipitous magnitude. =)

YC has always admirably stretched the scale of vc. This will be an interesting experiment now at this scale--and I'm especially curious how you'll measure progress along the way.

Exactly. They filter for pedigree (and sometimes looks) first. Remember which and why schools used to require photographs with apps? It wasn't just a beauty contest.

How can I get started early in helping with this data?

Serious question. Is there anything I can start doing/capturing that would help?

It would be interesting to write a bot that tracked fundraising event data from Crunchbase for the two groups in this cohort.

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