Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackconnor | Hacker News Reader

Man, credit where credit is due, this showed a lot of integrity. There was one good solution, it was just a painful one, yet they still did it. Well done YCombinator!

P.S. They make the point that this is an experiment, and I think all of us who join should prove that it is a good one. Nobody rails against applications and qualifying scores like HN peeps (check the comments of any article, ever, about SAT/GMAT/GRE scores for evidence). And since YC choose to go the universal route, standing strong to the HN ethos, I think we can prove that decisions like this do work for the best by being focused, engaged, and building some kickass tech companies.

View on HN

Agreed. Let's prove to them we can do this.

I disagree. They didn’t do anything except open up the grant application part to everyone (no cost to them) and promise everybody that they would get some credits (probably no cost to them). The course was always able to be audited.

What this really does is make clear the desire of the people at ycombinator to open their pre screening program (which is what startup school is, essentially) to more startups. The value to them is clear - they now get more companies that have an initial touchpoint with ycombinator, and they can maybe make money off them or whatever. But they don’t have to scale the thing that was most useful about startup school - that is, the advisors and small groups. For ycombinator this actually is a win win - they can now phase out advisors next round if this is a success and then the course would be very simple to run (and mostly free to create!).

The value that they were really providing (advisors, small groups) doesn’t scale for a free program, and with this new method of acceptance they aren’t offering that value to the newly “accepted” startups. For me personally, If I wanted to independently learn the things they teach in startup school, I already had the ability to watch last years lectures and read last years course material.

If there are credits, that will be valuable I suppose. But, again, I want to emphasize that ycombinator isn’t giving startups anything of real value here that it wasn’t already giving away (except, I guess, the ability to save face if you had already excitedly told friends that you were in this program).

Hi, I was involved in the decision to open Startup School to all applicants and am the developer primarily responsible for writing the software we’ll need to make this scale. We're all planning on working overtime for the next 12 weeks as we prepare for and go through the course. Although we don't have the resources to assign an advisor to every group, we do want to provide human attention to every single company we've accepted.

In general, we're committed to making Startup School an excellent experience for all 15,000 of the companies that applied. This is going to be a great deal of effort for all involved, but it's a point we wanted to get to anyway (even though the timing and communication that lead to this decision was a terrible mistake that we're still really sorry for).

Thanks for your time and commitment. I'm not even an applicant, but it is still quite an admirable thing.

Thank you, as someone that has been on the other end of snafus like this, I know owning up and opening the program to an additional 11K people is not easy.

KCorbitt, thanks to you and the team, I was really impressed with how this was handled.

Cheers kcorbitt!

Agreed. I was excited by the prospect of being a part of a network of other vetted founders.

If they're letting literally anyone in, it's no more useful than every other founders mastermind group on FB.

Huge misfire by YC. Startup School had the chance to be a wonderful network of promising early stage companies - not only that, you've alienated a lot of the promising companies who were properly accepted.

YC simply does not have the stomach to deal with even an ounce of bad press, and it showed today. I would be very wary as a promising company to jump on board with an organization that will probably throw you under the bus rather than go through the fire with you if ever your company, for whatever reason, incites a mob.

I will no longer be applying to the YC accelerator, and from my conversations with other great founders, I'm not the only one.

> If they're letting literally anyone in, it's no more useful than every other founders mastermind group on FB.

We made a major mistake with the admissions emails – which I still feel terribly about. However, while that mistake moved up our timeline drastically, a more open process was directionally the way we were going with Startup School anyway. In fact, the first iteration of Startup School we ran a few years ago was intended to be open to all applicants. We had so much interest that we had to cap the number of accepted companies to the number we had projected would apply, to ensure our infrastructure and organizational ability could handle everyone.

For the Startup School founders forum, we'll be building in extra moderation features before the course launches next week to ensure we don't get into a tragedy of the commons situation. We'll keep iterating on the community management to ensure the quality of discourse remains high, and relevant to the very best companies (luckily we have in-house expertise we can lean on in the form of the incredible HN team!).

It's true that accepting all applicants will decrease the value of Startup School as a credential. But credentialing was never our intention. Our goal with Startup School is to improve the long-term chances of survival for every participating startup, and we believe that we'll be able to do a great job of that, even with the limitations imposed by serving 15,000 companies with a finite number of resources.

What about the people who should have been rejected? Surely, with so many companies there are companies where rejecting them was a service. Now they are instead getting that validation which might make them go on working on something obviously fruitless. It might not even be their own fault, it might just be that no one in YC is really excited about working with them and you can't offer much else which you should be up front about. It is of course admirable that you want to make things work, but I definitely wouldn't underestimate the challenge of transforming your whole process retroactively.

You might be right that this is true for some startups. But it's also true that there are other startups that will keep going regardless of whether they get rejected by Startup School or YC proper.

As a founder of a startup that would have been rejected, I'm looking forward to getting the most I can out of Startup School.

Yeah, I’m sorry to say it but I agree with what some other people have been posting.

I would have been excited to be part of a pre-vetted community. Will there be a separate space for the people on the advisor track to be able to communicate and form a community?

Letting everyone in makes it feel like YC is going from “Harvard” to “Khan Academy.” Both are noble endeavors, but completely different brands.

And to your point, it was never about credentialing. It’s about the network. Isn’t one of YC’s main selling points the YC network? (This is repeated in YC branding.) Now people are comparing it to those Facebook entrepreneur groups that everyone can join.

Feels like some serious damage has been done to the YC brand.

> Agreed. I was excited by the prospect of being a part of a network of other vetted founders.

I feel compelled to say this. I am one of the founders who got an initial reject followed by an accept email. I read the accept email and felt good (I had not even read the reject email). When I learned that YC has accepted everyone, I felt better. Sure having access to a dedicated advisor has an advantage. The advisor can guide you and all that but it's ultimately your hustle. Now the playing ground is more or less levelled when it comes to hustle.

Also, how does this 'part of a vetted group' feeling help in your startup's success ? Agreed, it's a momentary boost in confidence, but beyond that I'm not sure how the vetting process adds any value. The way I see it, the vetting is more or less random.

Does this happen to people who were intentionally accepted, or accidentally accepted?

(Seems to me I got the same emails as you: First a reject email: "Class Begins Next Week! (for visitors/auditors)" and about being an auditor = not accepted. Then I got an email "you were actually supposed to receive the email below accepting you into the Startup School Advisor Track". I never got the "we screwed up and sent acceptances to companies that were not actually accepted to Startup School" email)

There are so many wantrepreneurs and "founder networking" types that suck up valuable time. I'd hoped that YC had filtered those out and that accepted companies could assume their peers are as serious as they are.

after careful thinking, I decided applying was not worth the time I could invest in improving the product.

now that everyone gets a trophy, I am glad I dodged the bullet

Bingo.

Welcome to the new society - participation ribbons for all!

and please grab your complementary juicero and blood test robot on your way out. Point being... if VCs can't filter these out then why have a filter at all?

>> I'm not sure how the vetting process adds any value

What? The entire point of vetting is to increase the quality of the remaining pool. You can argue how successful they are at doing this, but the intent of the process is pretty clear.

>> The way I see it, the vetting is more or less random.

Don't let YC or anybody else define you, but if you'd got in initially I bet you'd take it as a positive signal data point.

I was one of those accepted then rejected. Beforehand they announced that everyone had now been accepted, they offered to provide feedback to the rejected applicants which I received. The reasons my application was rejected was I was a single cofounder and was not working on my startup full time - yet. I can’t afford to do so as I look after my family here and overseas. So this vetting process although understandable does not always necessarily mean people who were rejected had shit ideas or that yours was more superior. This is a startup school. The point is to guide even so called startups who “don’t have their shit together” to a place where they do. As a single founder, I appreciate being part of a community that will give me ideas, feedback and guidance so I’m obviously happy about YCs decision Best wishes

> I was excited by the prospect of being a part of a network of other vetted founders.

I mean, that's what YC is supposed to be. Startup school is an effort to bring YC to more people, which obviously is going to involve less vetting. How hard can you vet early age startups that answered 3 questions with 150 words anyway? You're making it a bigger deal of it than it is.

I get that, but there was still some form of vetting - enough to disqualify 2/3 of candidates.

I'm not making a big deal out of it. Quite the contrary - I don't care about Startup School anymore, whereas I did before.

Note to anyone reading this: please build a mastermind group that requires an MRR of at least $15k. I'd pay good money to be a part of that.

I get that, but there was still some form of vetting - enough to disqualify 2/3 of candidates.

But that's just the thing... nobody actually knows if that level of vetting is meaningful... it may perform no better than chance in terms of identifying "good" startups (however you define that). This experiment will actually be very interesting exactly in that it will help YC see if their vetting IS as good as they think it is.

please build a mastermind group that requires an MRR of at least $15k. I'd pay good money to be a part of that

Sure, having a $15K MRR shows something about a company, but why do you think that is the best criteria to identify founders/companies to network with?

Having $15k MRR means you actually are a company. What value am I going to get from people who haven't even gotten to that point yet?

It's a pretty good barometer for success - 99% of founders don't get to that point.

What value am I going to get from people who haven't even gotten to that point yet?

Who knows? Why do you think only people who have gotten to $15K MRR can offer value?

I agree it's something of a signal, but I'd personally consider that a very weak signal. shrug

You don't see the difference in value between someone who has built a company that's making nearly $200k a year vs someone who hasn't?

In that case, we fundamentally disagree, and this discussion is fruitless.

$200K a year is shit though. Just because somebody can get to that level doesn't mean they're going to tell you anything useful for getting to $500,000,000 / year. That's why I say it is a signal, but it's a very weak signal.

There's also the problem that you don't know the value of the hypothetical "person who hasn't gotten to $15K MRR" yet. If they started their company 2 weeks ago, they probably have an MRR of $0. Does that mean that they have nothing of value to tell you? That depends on a lot of other variables.

Anyway, you're probably right... we probably just have fundamentally differing world-views. I lean towards the "you can learn something for everybody" mindset, and try to late-bind judgment on people's value as advisers until the last possible moment.

MRR is a decent criterion because it means the market is responding favorably to their product (and it's not vaporware).

There’s quite a lot of extra organisational and support work that they will have to do to support another 11,000 people. That’s going to be roughly 450 more groups of 25 people to sort out, four times as many people to still interact with to some extent, and a whole lot more traffic.

When they say “we’ve decided to use our error as a forcing function to find a way to make Startup School work for all founders who applied”, that really is a fair way of describing it. Making this work is possible, but it will be quite a lot more work for them—work they had not reckoned on.

This – Every serious founder already audited last years startup school via the youtube and podcast. The content was amazing but I saw this as a way for us who don't live in the valley to network our way into YC. However, a YC branded forum exclusively for active founders seems valuable so lets see what happens.

> Every serious founder already audited last years startup school via the youtube and podcast.

I didn't. I'd consider myself to be serious, and I'll presume out of 15,000 other companies there exist some more people like me. I don't think you'll be disappointed by the experience.

How valuable can a forum with 15,000 companies (most of which are bad) spamming their services ever offer any real value? If you're lucky to have a good group you might find value, otherwise it's going to be pointless.

I'd encourage seeking out other, smaller founder mastermind groups - you'll get much more value there.

We're going to work hard to moderate the community to prevent that from happening. I think Hacker News itself shows that it is possible to run a large community site that's open to everyone and still keep the content interesting and non-spammy.

Yeah, I suppose it's a fair point that if anyone's going to moderate this properly it's you guys.

Don't mind my negative commentary - I know this was a difficult day for you, and I appreciate the hard decisions that need to be made.

As a founder, though, I have a very hard time finding groups of other founders who have reached a certain level of success and was very excited to be a part of that. It's very difficult finding something like that and I really hope you guys can consider my ideas here.

How valuable can a forum with 15,000 companies (most of which are bad)

How do you know they're bad? And maybe it's the case that having ONE person in your group, who is the "right" person, will actually be what makes the group valuable...

Not saying that will prove to be the case, but I think you're rushing to judgment a bit.

Does that mean you think HN should turn into a private group, and that way get better than it is now?

I'd put a lot more effort and expect far more value out of a private, vetted startup school then I would say, this response.

Please don't post uncivilly here.

Agreed.

It's great for YC. If there's a large amount of negative feedback, they can use the excuse that this was an experiment (and the result of their... high integrity) and revert.

Disagree

I doubt you're being down-voted for your sentiment, rather, that a one-word dismissal is lazy. Tell us why, preferably without a rhetorical question.

I’m 100% being downvoted for my sentiment. That’s literally all it was.

I have zero opinion on this topic. Downvoted for the lazy one-word response.

Compare to throwmeoutoft11's comment below.

Why?

Respectfully, you don’t see any reasons this would be a bad idea?

It's fine to disagree substantively (e.g. like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807427 did), but not fine to troll the thread like this. Please stop.

Whatup funnynoodles, there definitely are reasons this COULD end up bad, which are pretty much just that YC gets stretched too thin. But, honestly, it could also go super well for them. I mean, accelerators are entirely based on the idea of funding a lot of ideas to cherry pick the few good ones. Well, YC just accidentally created a batch of 15,000 ideas they are associated with, which could potentially provide some crazy successful startups. The downside is they lose money, and maybe some of the cohort are unhappy, though as they've told the later group they wouldn't have the same advisory resources, the program degradation feels fairly minimal.

Experiment - it could go bad, but it could also go good, we'll see.

Respectfully, what are all of the reasons that this would be a bad idea?

username checks out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com