HN Explorer

Startup School Advisor Track: You Are In

198 points by PieShell ↗ HN
Can anyone add any information on what the "Advisor Track" is for Startup School? I was just accepted, but I only see Founder Track in past applications, so not sure what Advisor Track means or the differenct if any.

Thanks!

340 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] thread
hellojebus
Was also accepted into the same Track. 25 companies per track it seems, there are probably many cohorts.
alkhatib
See: https://www.startupschool.org/about

In addition to having full access to all the lectures and class office hours, you will also:

- Be assigned an advisor and join their group of companies. Advisors are members of the YC alumni network.

- Have virtual advisory sessions, in the form of Group Office Hours, every week via online video.

- Have access to a community of international founders through the Startup School forum.

- Be responsible for updating your Advisor on your progress once a week.

- You must submit at least 9 out of your 10 weekly updates and attend 9 out of 10 group office hour sessions.

- Upon successful completion, you will receive a certificate of completion and the opportunity to share what you're working on with the public.

- 100 startups that complete the course will be chosen to receive $10K in equity-free funding.

elvirs
so how many companies are actually accepted into the course?
alkhatib
Not sure the number was specified, but seems like >100

Since 100 will be chosen to receive the 10,000$

ModernMech
But only 25 were accepted to the "Advisor" track, and there seems to be only one set of reject/accept emails being sent out. It seems to me there are only 25 accepted for advising, but maybe even auditing companies are eligible for the $10k?
curun1r
My reading of the acceptance email is that it's 25 companies per advisor and that there's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 advisors, if last year's numbers are any indication. So anyone accepted at this point still only has around 4% chance of getting the $10k. But the advice and lectures should still be valuable for everyone who doesn't get the money.
eip
"We are deeply sorry to have to send this email, but unfortunately an error occurred in the software that triggers acceptance emails. The acceptance email was sent to you even though we are unfortunately not able to include you in the Startup School Advisor Track.

Although you are not in the Advisor Track, you have, in fact, been accepted to audit Startup School and will have access to all of the content just as soon as it is made available.

Again, we regret having made this error and raised your expectations unnecessarily. We hope you continue working on your startup and that Startup School is a huge help."

tolth
Got the same. Wow.
rboyd
wow same. ours was kind of a last minute effort so I was shocked and had pretty grounded expectations, but man my heart goes out to anyone that was already celebrating (quite a few on Twitter).
mwseibel
Once again I just wanted to say we are really sorry for this error. This is not the standard we hold ourselves to at YC. I personally apologize to the companies that were both rejected and accepted. Trust that this provides us with even more motivation to make sure that Startup School is great for all participants.
elvirs
I hope yours was not sent by mistake because I just got another email saying my application wasnt actually accepted. Which I understand because I was surprised to be accepted since our demo is passport protected and they could not have seen what is it that we have built so far.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
seanbuff
We were also accepted and then rejected. Doesn't exactly instill confidence.
snowmaker
You're right. We're going to have to work extremely hard to regain people's confidence.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
torartc
I was also accepted and rejected. Very upset and frustrated.
snowmaker
That's completely fair - and we're so sorry that our mistake left you feeling that way.
Tunecrew
in and then out just like the other posters in this thread - very NOT HAPPY w/ YC today.
mwelwa
I got the same email. Accepted then apologies. I’m not sure what the audit school is? I’m so confused
soneca
"Audit school" is just watching the lectures online.
w_allDueRespect
Doesn't everyone who applied get to audit the course .... ?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
soneca
That's my understanding too
w_allDueRespect
So basically we've just been told that we got accepted into Community College.
iceboss
Worse! Community college has acceptance criteria, auditing has none.
torartc
Accepted to audit === "you signed up, congrats"
mwelwa
I have so many GIFs for this moment :)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
greysteil
So much love for everyone who received an "accepted" email in error. Don't let it get you down.

I just got rejected with https://dependabot.com despite $6k MRR and 2,000 active users. I'm sure there are lots of other great companies in the same situation - let's keep building great things.

w_allDueRespect
Thank you for that. The worst part though is the part where they say "You got accepted to audit the course" .... doesn't everyone get accepted to audit it?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
snowmaker
They do. And I apologize for the wording - it was not intended to be misleading.
bluesage1
mistakes happen, but great to see you totally owning it up!
sodafountan
I appreciate that.

Startup School Lesson One: How not to treat your users.

chrisherd
This.

We’re building a massively ambitious banking alternative. Principal engineer ex JP Morgan Chase Senior Dev. Angel investment from the founder of a hugely disruptive British Unicorn. Support from a number of other important sources.

Not to criticize the decision making process, historical precedent speaks for itself. We thought we fit the mould but apparently not.

Back to implementing.

snowmaker
That seems promising ... hope you keep working on it.
chrisherd
First product will launch in October (Nexves dot com) would appreciate any comments Jared.

Got ~1,000 users desperate to test the beta and a very compelling reason 100k will migrate in the first 12 months.

Startup School would of been external gratification of what we know is an awesome idea.

We’ll deliver.

wj
Just FYI, when I tried to go to your site it doesn't resolve without the leading www.

Also you have a typo: "Outwith" -> "Without"

Best of luck with your launch!

itsevrgrn
Wow, I can't believe you got rejected. Email and ask for feedback on your application as mentioned above.
pcmaffey
Given the sheer volume of applications, my guess is they rely heavily on your LinkedIn profile to pattern match based on their profile of a successful YC candidate.

So yeah just because you don't look like what they want you to look like (school, history, network, etc), that's no judgement on you. Keep on keeping on.

threeseed
This may be pretty close to the mark.

I just got accepted (after initially rejected) and my startup is pre-launch and has zero customers/revenue. But I do have a degree and have worked for a dozen very large enterprises e.g. Apple, Oracle.

It's great to be accepted but my passion for my startup hasn't changed one iota. Still going to work 24/7 regardless and so should everyone. Do it because you love it.

pedalpete
That may be a heuristic, but if I'm any example, it's not all there is. I don't have a university degree and I doubt the companies I've worked for would be known by YC.
pcmaffey
I'm sure your 4k karma helped though ;)
chaostheory
Totally agree. The application for startup school was short and easy to fill out. Even with the normal YC application, it's basically getting you to write a business plan which is useful in of itself.

Not sure if it'll help anyone, but I feel better when I see the backgrounds of the people who got in:

https://theymadethat.com/organizations/d55c2ee1-c72e-568e-bb...

kleopullin
7% female founders in first 10 pages. That's a downer.
chaostheory
There’s another obvious pattern if you look at enough profiles
dcurry1357
Solid facts....I went through every page and yeah...smh, definite pattern and type.
dcurry1357
Wow...great point, 7% female founders in the first 9 pages, and out of 300+ members only 1 AA female and 1 AA male...

Yeah, very telling indeed.

eddieh
Did you get a rejection email? I haven’t received an accepted or rejected email yet.
craze3
I guess this is more motivation to work on my actual YC application :)
mindcrime
I look at it as motivation to succeed with or without them, so I can give them all the finger and big hearty (but good-natured) "Fuck You" in a couple of years. shrug
w_allDueRespect
Yeah, this was totally not cool. I much like most of you was not expecting to get accepted, I basically applied for the hell of it. None the less, it was quite a let down to receive that second email. Especially after telling a few family and friends. Kind of sucks, but hey it was an accident all we can do is move past it.
snowmaker
You're right - it was extremely not cool. We're very sorry.
jeanlucas
Hey, please, in the good name of YC, explain this on twitter. Some people are kinda lost over there. I got an invite as participant and got a reply saying I am not an advisor (but nothing about participating)
snowmaker
Yes - we're replying to all the twitter threads right now.
itsevrgrn
I'm in the same boat. I wonder what some of the people who apply for the hell of it could do if they were joined together to make a company. There are a ton of really talented people on here.
m00dy
I got the same and this is not cool
dang
You're right. It was very far from cool.
RedneckBob
WTF? A rollercoaster for sure. You're in! You're out! Boooo!
roynal
Startup school's valuable first lesson in customer communication and PR is right here. Well, software screwed up the experience and crushed the expectations of so many, including me. Moving on :)...
snowmaker
You're right - it was a huge lesson for us that we need to have way better protections in place to prevent something like this from happening.
roynal
Acknowledge the effort you're taking to correct this snafu.
chrisherd
You’d expect this from other accelerators, everyone holds YC to higher standards.

I don’t think it’s wrong to expect better in this instance. In the age of social media news travels fast. I’d received congratulatory messages from several YC alum within 10 minutes of the first email.

That’s life.

nautical
Not cool at all ...
itsevrgrn
Am I the only one who finds this ironic coming from the top tech incubator in the world?
dang
Oh you guys, what a painful fuckup. I'm so sorry. More apologies coming. (Edit: and hopefully a fix, as well.)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
Mapsmithy
I knew it was a little premature to spend the $10k
mic500
$10K? There'll be no much money left after you live in the bay area for 10 weeks
snowmaker
Guys - we are deeply sorry for this screw-up. I know we got people's hopes up only to let you down, and I feel terrible about it.

While it doesn't excuse our mistake, for what it's worth, Startup School makes the classes and all the materials available online to everyone. So even if you didn't get accepted to the advisor track, we hope you will follow along, watch the videos, and find the material useful.

My apologies on behalf of everyone at YC for letting you down. We're still trying to figure out exactly what happened, and make sure nothing like it happens again.

jaysonelliot
Mistakes happen. Waiting two hours to tell people, then doing so from a do-not-reply address, however, is a poor way to handle them.

If we make a mistake like this as a company, we at least try to make up for it in some way, and make our users feel valued.

zilongli
The 'apologies' email was another bulk no-reply message. Maybe they misapologised, too.
samstave
/r/oopsdidntmeantodidntmeantooops
kcorbitt
It took us a little while to realize what we had done. Once we did, we sent out the correction email as soon as we could. That's not an excuse, but I don't want it to feel like we were intentionally leaving people in the dark.

Sending the follow-up from a do-not-reply was also our mistake. Our default outbound address is do-not-reply, and we forgot to change it as we were drafting the correction. Please follow up to startupschool@ycombinator.com. :(

tolth
How about making this up to those of us who got false-acceptance emails by providing some feedback on our applications?
snowmaker
I'm happy to do that. Email us at startupschool@ycombinator.com with your name so we can do that.
tolth
My cofounder who led the application will be doing so in a moment! Thanks.
fabiandesimone
If you're going to do this, maybe do it for everyone and not buried in a comment.
sodafountan
Yeah, this should be an actual initiative. Work overtime if you have to, at least give us a bit of the mentorship that everybody here wanted.
soneca
I appreciate the initiative, very nice way to apologize. Thanks
chelak
This would be awesome. I’m sure all founders would love just a little insight on why they were rejected so that they can try to address the shortcomings.
PieShell
Thank you for the apology. I think all of us in tech know how these things can happen and so I personally appreciate it. If YC wasn't so cool, we wouldn't be so bummed. :)

Thanks again and good luck with everything!

jaysonelliot
Has this thread been manually deleted from the HN front page?
newman8r
submissions automatically get docked when the number of comments exceeds the number of votes after a certain number.
dang
Definitely not. It was being downgraded a bit by software for reasons unrelated to the topic, but I just turned that off.
acutesoftware
That really stung to get the "Your in" then "Sorry, Out" emails, but mistakes happen and appreciate the apology here.

Did the "Your in" emails go to everyone who applied, or was it a subset of applications?

heurist
Judging by similar forum threads elsewhere, it looks like some who were accepted were initially rejected and many who were rejected were initially accepted.
hellojebus
Pretty certain I incorrectly received the "Ooops, you didn't actually email"

Please confirm this bug. My company is basically a unicorn.

samstave
"Oh youre a founder huh?"

"Yep"

"What company?"

"We are in stealth-mode, currently"

"Ah, what stage are you at, can you share that?"

"Yeah, like I said, we are a stealth-mode pre-unicorn startupschool audit track company"

JayLy
Lol! I think this comment is the greatest thing to come out of the error.
jmu2018
I have been feeling less than and embarrassed all day, but this little back and forth really cheered me up.
hellojebus
No really, it's unicorn

List of achievements:

Startup School Advisor Track for 20 minutes

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
otto_ortega
I salute you and celebrate your epic comment! hahaha
heurist
I hope this doesn't sound antagonistic since you're already getting a lot of flak for what seems to be an honest mistake. (I was accept-rejected fwiw).

Could you shine some light on what your criteria were for acceptance? I have now seen a few projects that were actually accepted. They seemed pretty generic and not at all what I thought would have been accepted. As products, the only benefit they seemed to have were that they were in maybe the alpha or beta stage of development. For our future reference, could you please elaborate a bit on what you were looking for in these applications?

P.S. If you were accepted, congratulations! I am not saying your product is generic :)

mwseibel
I just want to say we are really sorry for this error. This is not the standard we hold ourselves to at YC. I personally apologize to the companies that were both rejected and accepted. Trust that this provides us with even more motivation to make sure that Startup School is great for all participants.
yesimeanno
It's ok, we forgive you. Oh wait, due to an error we meant to say actually we don't forgive you.
adw
"Trust that this provides us with even more motivation to make sure that Startup School is great for all participants."

This is a little tone-deaf when replying to people who thought they were participants, I'm afraid.

rboyd
if getting funded on demo day is like getting drafted to the NBA, applying to startup school was like trying out for JV team.

is being told we got accepted to audit something like being invited to watch the game from outside the stadium using binoculars as long as we promise to keep the cheering to a quiet roar?