Ask HN: YC Fellowship first impressions?

The YC Fellowship was announced this July (to recap: 8 week remote program with $12,000 for a team to bring an idea to a startup)[1][2]. It generated quite a bit of discussion at the time[3] on HN as well. This first round of the program is supposed to run from mid-September to mid-November.

Now that it is underway, what are people's first impression with the program? Both on the side of teams who got the fellowship and on YC's side since it should be different from what you have done before!

Consider this as checking in on behalf of the community to see how things are going at the first few steps (selection, onboarding, maybe after the first week in the program?). I'm sure there will be a lot to learn at the end, but it feels as the process itself is very valuable. So any comments from the people involved is very appreciated! (I couldn't join this time due to the "full time" requirements, but hope to do it in the future)

[1]: http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-fellowship

[2]: http://fellowship.ycombinator.com/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9917334

Disclaimer: this is a repost of an earlier attempt which died due to wrong timing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10270575)