28 ms·

YC's Startup School Relaunching as Continuous Program

330 points by kcorbitt 6y ago

hello_newman 6y ago
for anyone who has been in Startup School and successfully gone through it, would you say it's best to have a Startup that is a "product" instead of say a service-type business? 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.
kcorbitt 6y ago
Hey folks, really excited about this change. I’ve been wanting to make Startup School a continuous program for years, but it took a while to get all the right pieces in place. Here to answer any questions you may have!
- tosh 6y ago
  love the streak concept, also enjoyed it at pioneer on individual level looking fwd to startup school & sharing with a few friends starting out!
- ipnon 6y ago
  What were your initial expectations for Startup School? Where do you see Startup School in 2030? Thank you for this work, I've gained interesting and profitable lessons from the program.
  - kcorbitt 6y ago
    Initial expectations: we expected Startup School to be very popular with founders, and in the long term also hopefully encourage more founders to apply to YC's core program. It modestly exceeded our expectations on the former (we've seen over 100k users sign up in the last two years), and has vastly exceeded expectations on the latter. Concretely, in the latest YC core batch 44% of founders are Startup School alums. That's a far higher percentage than we were expecting at this point! 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.
    - ipnon 6y ago
      Wow, that's really an impressive idea (VCaaS?). Thanks for your response.
    - sytse 6y ago
      This is awesome! 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.
      - kcorbitt 6y ago
        Totally. We're making some early moves in this direction with a private forum channel for companies that self-identify as growth stage, but we'd like to take this a lot further.
chews 6y ago
Glad to see you guys doing this, let’s see how this changes the future of startups! My feeling is that YC was always AA baseball and now it’s a lot more like the big leagues.
andy_ppp 6y ago
I was in the first version of the MOOC and it was better for me meeting the same people over the duration of the time (currently I believe you interact with different groups each time?). 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.
- kcorbitt 6y ago
  Yes, we want to make accountability MUCH better, particularly for solo founders who can have a harder time staying motivated without someone else to bounce things off of. Don't have changes related to that in the current relaunch yet, but it's on the roadmap.
- servercobra 6y ago
  I've done Startup School for the past two iterations. I really enjoyed meeting so many random founders in each meeting, but we spent more than half of the meetings just getting to know each other. Some of my meetings had 7 teams! And then the next week, you wind up with new founders and you do it all over again. As time went on, I got less and less from the group meeting, where they were my favorite part at the start. Having the same group over and over would be fabulous, since we could really talk about what we did last week, whether we did it, what's up for next week, continuing talk about issues we're having, etc.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    I'm torn on this a bit since I enjoyed having to practice pitching concisely to new companies outside of biotech to improve that aspect, and to get new perspectives on problems from different people, but I also did enjoy the times that we accidentally (or deliberately?) got regrouped with companies from the prior week and could catch up on progress made. Both have their place and their use, but some level of deeper relationships (as built in the first version that I went through when there were set cohorts) are definitely lacking in the current iterations. Part of it might be taking initiative to stay in touch on your own I guess.
rshnotsecure 6y ago
Can we also get (I mean this respectfully) a specific answer from YCombinator on who exactly hosts the news.ycombinator.com website? 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.
- dang 6y ago
  It's no secret. We were happy to answer this last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473932), happy a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and happy now: we have two boxes (one active, one failover) at M5, a small hosting provider that has good support and better tooling than what we had before. They've served HN well. They seem to be run by engineers, and are engineer-friendly. The founder has been an HN user for 9 years (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikiem https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikiem). 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=21423248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374955 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.
  - rshnotsecure 6y ago
    I just saw this sorry. Reading now.
blhack 6y ago
Awesome news. If you haven't done startup school, I'd highly recommend it. We got paired with lots of people from our local city (which surprised me since I didn't know there was this much activity around here). 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.
- catherynl 6y ago
  So happy to hear you had a great experience! We've added a new concept of "company stage" to improve the relevance of curriculum content and group session matches, hopefully that will make your point of "do it no matter what stage you are at" even more true. :)
  - csteubs 6y ago
    Would you consider adding a feature to clear past metrics from the charts on /updates? I signed up for the SUS 2018 course with a startup that looked very different from my current project, so my metrics these days look like a bunch of primary-colored snakes chasing some dots.
    - kcorbitt 6y ago
      Yeah, that's a common feature request. For now, if you send an email to startupschool@ycombinator.com we can clear those out manually.
- spenvo 6y ago
  Oh getting paired with locals is very cool! I did it a couple years ago, and it was worth it -- but I wish some in my group had been from around my city, Austin. My project ended up shipping (https://www.currentkey.com https://www.currentkey.com), and it was nice to be accountable to a few other people through an important stretch and have regular reality checks. I'd strongly consider doing this again for my next project (a mobile game), especially if I could be paired with locals. 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.
bberenberg 6y ago
Low conversation quality and feedback was a pain point for me during SuS. Do you intend to implement any strategies to improve the quality (better matched, not saying anyone is better or worse) of the peers we are communicating with? For example, can I be placed in a cohort with only people who are doing more than $100k ARR?
- kcorbitt 6y ago
  Yes, we've reworked the matching algorithm! You can see the criteria we use for forming matches at the bottom of the weekly update when you sign up. 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!
snake117 6y ago
Great news! Also, thank you and everybody for all your hard work :) Will there still be the $15k grant consideration if you become certified when you submit your app for the YC Core program?
- kcorbitt 6y ago
  We aren't currently evaluating companies for grants, but are likely to restart a version of that program later in the year. If and when we do, founders that participate in the program starting now will be eligible!
chrisaycock 6y ago
I did Startup School in 2018 and was one of the inaugural grant winners. 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.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Seconded. Was also one of the grant winners as a biotech, and went through it again later mainly for the practice in pitching/ability to connect with the local startup ecosystem. I actually liked that in the second run through, there were not that many other biotech startups, it was nice to have a community of diverse companies (both in terms of fields and to an extent founders, since I think the cohort was a lot more diverse than the startup space as a whole), and I actually particularly enjoyed one of the group sessions where I somehow ended up grouped with companies in Chile. I wish there was a "don't group me with similar companies" option since it was almost more interesting and more useful to have a conversation with a Chilean legal tech company and learn about how they approach problems they face than talk to another biotech. It was a really interesting experience, and the deals weren't that bad either.
- nytf3 6y ago
  What are the advantages of Empirical vs q/kdb+?
  - chrisaycock 6y ago
    Empirical is statically typed. I can run a backtest overnight knowing it won't crash because of a type error or misspelled column name. 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969390
makeee 6y ago
I've done the program twice and was one of the grant winners. I found the program super valuable, particularly the groups sessions. I really like the new continuous format and excited to keep participating. Nice work Kyle and team!
thecupisblue 6y ago
This seems mostly aimed at SaaS/Uber4X type of startups where you can bootstrap an MVP in a weekend and have a customer by the next one. Where's the content for startups doing innovative stuff in the long run?
- iheartblocks 6y ago
  What gave you the impression that that was the focus?
  - thecupisblue 6y ago
    That in 8 weeks you have to watch all the curriculum content - it seems like the focus is to go through the content and launch/be ready to launch/find customers. But the other comments prove me wrong, it seemed like that from the FAQ :)
- zomglings 6y ago
  Have gone through startup school, and it is not at all how it seems to you. 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).
- vikramkr 6y ago
  Having gone through SUS/winning a grant with a biotech, I'll say the style of thinking and the community/accountability was universally applicable. Getting to the killer experiment as quickly as possible to have a solid foundation to build on/raise money off of is a very similar and useful style of thinking to get an MVP launched asap. The more tactical content was sorely lacking for biotechs/hartechs/moonshots though. For bio and hardware, it would have been nice to have some co tent specifically around challenges with capital raising/capital efficiency, how to think about designing experiments. Maybe for hardware, a how to do kickstarter lecture (since there were some very granular tactical software lectures), and maybe a lecture on how to manage a supply chain/inventory. For moonshots, I dont know if theres a playbook that applies since by definition they're very different, but perhaps similar themes to biotech of how do you derisk as quickly as possible. Hopefully theres an opportunity to add content along those lines as they build out the next gen of SUS
josh_t 6y ago
Really excited to see this being offered as a continuous program. I’ve participated in and followed SUS since its launch and I can’t recommend this program enough! 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?
benjaminjosephw 6y ago
Astounding strategic play from YC here. Start up School has become popular enough to be viable as a social network. Imagine a VC having a live and data rich directory of most investment hungry early stage tech startups where that startup has shared its progress from the earliest stages of its development. What an incredible advantage that is as a VC firm. Even though I love YC, I find that idea quite worrying. 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.
- deleted 6y ago
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- Invictus0 6y ago
  The whole notion of startups is new ideas disrupting entrenched stalwarts. If it turns that there is a way to do things outside YC dogma, I'm sure a new VC will come along and disrupt them too.
- verdverm 6y ago
  I honestly like it far less now that it has been continuous for many months. Far less participation that made the semi annual so great. Probably leaving soon myself... it's been fun
deleted 6y ago
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chirau 6y ago
So if we graduated SUS in already do we get the Startup School Certified status or we have to go through the program again?
- kcorbitt 6y ago
  You'll need to start again, because the way we're tracking things changed. That said, if you've been submitting updates consistently those will count towards certification, and if you go through and mark all the content you already viewed as complete you'll be most of the way there already.
  - aychtang 6y ago
    Are there benefits of being Startup School Certified? It's not clear in the FAQ
elpakal 6y ago
nice - great program and I really got a lot out of SUS! now can we talk about the "guaranteed YC partner interview" that was promised if SUS participants completed a tech quiz from Triplebyte (a YC company). All i got was spam from Triplebyte...
EGreg 6y ago
Does Startup School give $15,000 to anyone who gets in after completing the basics?
100-xyz 6y ago
We participated in the last SUS and it was awesome for us. Lots of feedback, improvement, new users and a successful PH launch. Its an on line animation platform https://toonclip.com https://toonclip.com

330 points by kcorbitt 6y ago

for anyone who has been in Startup School and successfully gone through it, would you say it's best to have a Startup that is a "product" instead of say a service-type business? 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.

kcorbitt 6y ago

Hey folks, really excited about this change. I’ve been wanting to make Startup School a continuous program for years, but it took a while to get all the right pieces in place. Here to answer any questions you may have!

tosh 6y ago
love the streak concept, also enjoyed it at pioneer on individual level looking fwd to startup school & sharing with a few friends starting out!
ipnon 6y ago
What were your initial expectations for Startup School? Where do you see Startup School in 2030? Thank you for this work, I've gained interesting and profitable lessons from the program.
- kcorbitt 6y ago
  Initial expectations: we expected Startup School to be very popular with founders, and in the long term also hopefully encourage more founders to apply to YC's core program. It modestly exceeded our expectations on the former (we've seen over 100k users sign up in the last two years), and has vastly exceeded expectations on the latter. Concretely, in the latest YC core batch 44% of founders are Startup School alums. That's a far higher percentage than we were expecting at this point! 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.
  - ipnon 6y ago
    Wow, that's really an impressive idea (VCaaS?). Thanks for your response.
  - sytse 6y ago
    This is awesome! 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.
    - kcorbitt 6y ago
      Totally. We're making some early moves in this direction with a private forum channel for companies that self-identify as growth stage, but we'd like to take this a lot further.

chews 6y ago

Glad to see you guys doing this, let’s see how this changes the future of startups! My feeling is that YC was always AA baseball and now it’s a lot more like the big leagues.

andy_ppp 6y ago

I was in the first version of the MOOC and it was better for me meeting the same people over the duration of the time (currently I believe you interact with different groups each time?). 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.

kcorbitt 6y ago
Yes, we want to make accountability MUCH better, particularly for solo founders who can have a harder time staying motivated without someone else to bounce things off of. Don't have changes related to that in the current relaunch yet, but it's on the roadmap.
servercobra 6y ago
I've done Startup School for the past two iterations. I really enjoyed meeting so many random founders in each meeting, but we spent more than half of the meetings just getting to know each other. Some of my meetings had 7 teams! And then the next week, you wind up with new founders and you do it all over again. As time went on, I got less and less from the group meeting, where they were my favorite part at the start. Having the same group over and over would be fabulous, since we could really talk about what we did last week, whether we did it, what's up for next week, continuing talk about issues we're having, etc.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  I'm torn on this a bit since I enjoyed having to practice pitching concisely to new companies outside of biotech to improve that aspect, and to get new perspectives on problems from different people, but I also did enjoy the times that we accidentally (or deliberately?) got regrouped with companies from the prior week and could catch up on progress made. Both have their place and their use, but some level of deeper relationships (as built in the first version that I went through when there were set cohorts) are definitely lacking in the current iterations. Part of it might be taking initiative to stay in touch on your own I guess.

rshnotsecure 6y ago

Can we also get (I mean this respectfully) a specific answer from YCombinator on who exactly hosts the news.ycombinator.com website? 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.

dang 6y ago
It's no secret. We were happy to answer this last week (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473932), happy a couple years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041), and happy now: we have two boxes (one active, one failover) at M5, a small hosting provider that has good support and better tooling than what we had before. They've served HN well. They seem to be run by engineers, and are engineer-friendly. The founder has been an HN user for 9 years (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikiem https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mikiem). 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=21423248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23374955 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.
- rshnotsecure 6y ago
  I just saw this sorry. Reading now.

blhack 6y ago

Awesome news. If you haven't done startup school, I'd highly recommend it. We got paired with lots of people from our local city (which surprised me since I didn't know there was this much activity around here). 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.

catherynl 6y ago
So happy to hear you had a great experience! We've added a new concept of "company stage" to improve the relevance of curriculum content and group session matches, hopefully that will make your point of "do it no matter what stage you are at" even more true. :)
- csteubs 6y ago
  Would you consider adding a feature to clear past metrics from the charts on /updates? I signed up for the SUS 2018 course with a startup that looked very different from my current project, so my metrics these days look like a bunch of primary-colored snakes chasing some dots.
  - kcorbitt 6y ago
    Yeah, that's a common feature request. For now, if you send an email to startupschool@ycombinator.com we can clear those out manually.
spenvo 6y ago
Oh getting paired with locals is very cool! I did it a couple years ago, and it was worth it -- but I wish some in my group had been from around my city, Austin. My project ended up shipping (https://www.currentkey.com https://www.currentkey.com), and it was nice to be accountable to a few other people through an important stretch and have regular reality checks. I'd strongly consider doing this again for my next project (a mobile game), especially if I could be paired with locals. 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.

bberenberg 6y ago

Low conversation quality and feedback was a pain point for me during SuS. Do you intend to implement any strategies to improve the quality (better matched, not saying anyone is better or worse) of the peers we are communicating with? For example, can I be placed in a cohort with only people who are doing more than $100k ARR?

kcorbitt 6y ago
Yes, we've reworked the matching algorithm! You can see the criteria we use for forming matches at the bottom of the weekly update when you sign up. 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!

snake117 6y ago

Great news! Also, thank you and everybody for all your hard work :) Will there still be the $15k grant consideration if you become certified when you submit your app for the YC Core program?

kcorbitt 6y ago
We aren't currently evaluating companies for grants, but are likely to restart a version of that program later in the year. If and when we do, founders that participate in the program starting now will be eligible!

chrisaycock 6y ago

I did Startup School in 2018 and was one of the inaugural grant winners. 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.

vikramkr 6y ago
Seconded. Was also one of the grant winners as a biotech, and went through it again later mainly for the practice in pitching/ability to connect with the local startup ecosystem. I actually liked that in the second run through, there were not that many other biotech startups, it was nice to have a community of diverse companies (both in terms of fields and to an extent founders, since I think the cohort was a lot more diverse than the startup space as a whole), and I actually particularly enjoyed one of the group sessions where I somehow ended up grouped with companies in Chile. I wish there was a "don't group me with similar companies" option since it was almost more interesting and more useful to have a conversation with a Chilean legal tech company and learn about how they approach problems they face than talk to another biotech. It was a really interesting experience, and the deals weren't that bad either.
nytf3 6y ago
What are the advantages of Empirical vs q/kdb+?
- chrisaycock 6y ago
  Empirical is statically typed. I can run a backtest overnight knowing it won't crash because of a type error or misspelled column name. 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969390 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19969390

makeee 6y ago

I've done the program twice and was one of the grant winners. I found the program super valuable, particularly the groups sessions. I really like the new continuous format and excited to keep participating. Nice work Kyle and team!

thecupisblue 6y ago

This seems mostly aimed at SaaS/Uber4X type of startups where you can bootstrap an MVP in a weekend and have a customer by the next one. Where's the content for startups doing innovative stuff in the long run?

iheartblocks 6y ago
What gave you the impression that that was the focus?
- thecupisblue 6y ago
  That in 8 weeks you have to watch all the curriculum content - it seems like the focus is to go through the content and launch/be ready to launch/find customers. But the other comments prove me wrong, it seemed like that from the FAQ :)
zomglings 6y ago
Have gone through startup school, and it is not at all how it seems to you. 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).
vikramkr 6y ago
Having gone through SUS/winning a grant with a biotech, I'll say the style of thinking and the community/accountability was universally applicable. Getting to the killer experiment as quickly as possible to have a solid foundation to build on/raise money off of is a very similar and useful style of thinking to get an MVP launched asap. The more tactical content was sorely lacking for biotechs/hartechs/moonshots though. For bio and hardware, it would have been nice to have some co tent specifically around challenges with capital raising/capital efficiency, how to think about designing experiments. Maybe for hardware, a how to do kickstarter lecture (since there were some very granular tactical software lectures), and maybe a lecture on how to manage a supply chain/inventory. For moonshots, I dont know if theres a playbook that applies since by definition they're very different, but perhaps similar themes to biotech of how do you derisk as quickly as possible. Hopefully theres an opportunity to add content along those lines as they build out the next gen of SUS

josh_t 6y ago

Really excited to see this being offered as a continuous program. I’ve participated in and followed SUS since its launch and I can’t recommend this program enough! 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?

benjaminjosephw 6y ago

Astounding strategic play from YC here. Start up School has become popular enough to be viable as a social network. Imagine a VC having a live and data rich directory of most investment hungry early stage tech startups where that startup has shared its progress from the earliest stages of its development. What an incredible advantage that is as a VC firm. Even though I love YC, I find that idea quite worrying. 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.

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Invictus0 6y ago
The whole notion of startups is new ideas disrupting entrenched stalwarts. If it turns that there is a way to do things outside YC dogma, I'm sure a new VC will come along and disrupt them too.
verdverm 6y ago
I honestly like it far less now that it has been continuous for many months. Far less participation that made the semi annual so great. Probably leaving soon myself... it's been fun

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chirau 6y ago

So if we graduated SUS in already do we get the Startup School Certified status or we have to go through the program again?

kcorbitt 6y ago
You'll need to start again, because the way we're tracking things changed. That said, if you've been submitting updates consistently those will count towards certification, and if you go through and mark all the content you already viewed as complete you'll be most of the way there already.
- aychtang 6y ago
  Are there benefits of being Startup School Certified? It's not clear in the FAQ

elpakal 6y ago

nice - great program and I really got a lot out of SUS! now can we talk about the "guaranteed YC partner interview" that was promised if SUS participants completed a tech quiz from Triplebyte (a YC company). All i got was spam from Triplebyte...

EGreg 6y ago

Does Startup School give $15,000 to anyone who gets in after completing the basics?

100-xyz 6y ago

We participated in the last SUS and it was awesome for us. Lots of feedback, improvement, new users and a successful PH launch. Its an on line animation platform https://toonclip.com https://toonclip.com