YC's Startup School Relaunching as Continuous Program
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Seriously startup school is great. Cannot recommend participating enough.
And also: do it no matter what stage you are at. Full disclosure: the project that our team was working has been put on hold by us[1] (and going through SuS helped us realize we might be chasing the wrong thing), BUT the experience of going through it pushed me towards working much harder on a project which had previously just been on autopilot.
[1]We'll probably pick it back up eventually.
If I had one regret, looking back on the experience, it would be a mistake I made: forming an LLC far before I needed to, largely to be seen as a 'company' by YC. You can (and I'd say in some cases should) validate your project, esp. if you're a solo founder - by launching an app as an individual developer vs a company account. I know YC itself is only interested in companies, but they should appreciate that if this school is open to all -- all people don't need a company to have a profitable project.
I've been through SUS and I really valued it. It's great content and some of the discussions were really valuable. I think it's fair to say, though, that the content is very opinionated. I understand why - it's trying to prepare people to apply to YC and YC have a particular way of doing things. I think that's fine. My worry is that the reach of YC on the broader tech start-up culture is so broad now (and getting broader) that these opinions and ideas become broadly accepted norms. When that happens, people stop recognising the fact that there could be a choice to make and we loose the diversity and richness of other opinions and ideas.
Here's an example: everyone knows that the only place to incorporate a company is in the state of Delaware. Creating something in your local region is out of the question, not because you've reasoned well about the pros and cons but because the culture has a generally accepted answer.
I think if we don't have diverse views and perspectives on what's possible and what kind of companies we should be creating, we'll end up with more of the same. That's a winning formula for YC but a bad one for culture as a whole.
We don't need one VC that dominates the early stage market. We need competition to keep the ecosystem healthy. Maybe what we really need is the other VCs, bootstrappers, open-source foundations and NGOs to get into the startup education/social network business too.
I think there are a number of factors to consider here which will be specific to each individual context but just pointing out that the answer is only obvious if you've already decided what the important considerations are. VCs will always have a bias towards ruthless efficency but founders need to be more thoughtful. Not every decision is about the bottom line.
After going through counseling, I figured I still want to build something and I want to gobble up advice, but I ponder on them and see if they fit my lifestyle.
I am nomadic now (Asia but could be anywhere) and want to stay indie (bootstrapped, perhaps angel investment). I can not give into the pressure that YC lectures sometime make me feel. I am happy and for the first time I am on a product where I just got two clients (first time in my life, 14 years professional experience).
Startup School has incredible value and I will take out what I need out of it. I will incorporate where I want and am happy if YC does not care. Find your own way, I know I want to.
The program was extremely helpful for getting me through to the launch. My product is a moonshot sold to enterprises, so it took an enormous amount of work upfront to get something into users' hands.
The accountability of a cohort was critical for the lonely days of coding something that is both ambiguous and ambitious. Also, constantly being forced to explain my product really helped me hone my message and sales pitch.
I am still friends with some of the people I met back then. I seriously recommend this program to anyone who is starting out.
I'm currently in the (long) process of adding streaming computation. Once that's ready, Empirical will be able to handle everything from gargantuan CSV files to real-time data using the same language primitives.
I talked about some of these goals when I launched on HN last year:
After starting the public beta, I heard the following sentence several dozen times: "This looks amazing! Does it handle streaming?" And thus began the quest I am currently on.
About the only advice I can give is to keep practicing and keep an open mind. The feedback will get less negative the more you hone your pitch.
Do you have customers, or potential customers in the pipeline?
For example, a crypto broker wants their traders to write their own models. A stock-exchange advisor wants their asset managers to compute their own transaction costs. Etc.
Basically, Empirical will be a value-add component for existing customers of these larger providers. Instead of shuffling market data over the Internet, the user will "send the query to the data."
Every firm I've shown Empirical to has had the same word-for-word response that most end users have had: "Does it handle streaming?" I put the sales calls on hold while I try to get this done.
looking fwd to startup school & sharing with a few friends starting out!
Thank you for this work, I've gained interesting and profitable lessons from the program.
In 2030: no idea! Directionally though, I'd like to migrate all the "scalable" parts of YC (1-to-many lectures/writing, investor/founder matching, community, accountability) to Startup School where they'll be freely available to everyone, while leaving the unscalable parts (eg. 1-to-1 advice with partners, big checks) in the core program.
I love that there a groups later in Startup School that are for later stage companies.
I can see a progression where based on the stage and growth of your company you get different peers, investors, advisors, and off the record content.
I found it both interesting seeing how people had evolved during the programme as well as not wanting to let people down by being late or not attending.
I would suggest using some kind of Karma to improve the experience while still keeping the people you meet freeform.
1) Meet the same people over 4 weeks (say) for accountability
2) Attendance, Reports, Progress, Peer feedback etc. can be factored in
3) After the 4 weeks you are matched against people who are at your level of attendance/motivation/productivity/peer review etc. and a new set of group office hours is started.
Anyway, this would help me better to be more accountable, while job, family, hobbies friends etc. get in the way.
Don't have changes related to that in the current relaunch yet, but it's on the roadmap.
For example, can I be placed in a cohort with only people who are doing more than $100k ARR?
That said, it still isn't perfect and we have more work planned in that area. We also dropped the requirement for group sessions from 6 to 1 so that folks who don't find them a valuable use of time don't need to keep doing them!
We met companies that were making hardware and companies that had been building complicated enterprise products for years. I don't think we met a single MVP in a weekend type of company.
All in all, a valuable experience - at the very least it gives you access to a bunch of nice deals (AWS, GCP credits and the like).
I’m particularly interested in the addition of streaks as a way to increase accountability and unlock additional opportunities, have you considered further gamifying the program with similar metrics?
Its an on line animation platform https://toonclip.com
Will there still be the $15k grant consideration if you become certified when you submit your app for the YC Core program?
For example, I am working on a side-hustle that is more of a service that sells a product, versus a traditional app/SaaS app. So I'm wondering if Startup School is more geared towards product/app businesses than a typical service-type business.
It appears to be the little heard of and quite hard to track down "M5 Security Solutions" also known as "M5 Hosting". What is strange is they do say they do private hosting for the Department of Defense. Can we get an expansion on that relationship? Thank you.
I don't remember how Scott found them, but it was through some HN-sympatico source like an obscure technical mailing list. We wanted to switch providers, and it seemed like a good idea to pick one that appealed to people with similar tastes to us and sympathetic with the spirit of HN. It's worked out great so far.
Weirdly, this is at least the third time that you've posted strangely insinuating posts about how/where HN is hosted:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423248
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374955
Three starts to look like an idée fixe. I still can't figure out what the insinuation is supposed to be...no, we're not an intelligence front. I really want to put a joke here, but I suppose it would probably only feed whatever this is, so I guess I'd better not.