I bet that 25-40% complete the course fully. They expected 4000 so it will be around there. We will see. Great move by YC and really excited to experience the program!
I was thinking the same thing - probably the number that actually starts the course will be in the 90%s of the total and there will be a fair amount of attrition as the course proceeds.
It would be interesting to see what these numbers look like as well over the ten weeks.
We had originally accepted about 4000 - although our goal has always been to make our MOOC as much about "open" as we possibly can. Our own misstep has caused us to accelerate things.
It actually happens dozens of times per year on a one-off basis, usually with college coaches telling recruits they've been accepted when the admissions office has only provisionally accepted them.
Actually, we just literally reversed the SQL queries for the emails we sent out for accepted/rejected companies – and then didn't immediately realize our mistake.
It's been a pretty tough day here at YC but we're all really happy with the final decision we came to!
You may be the only person who didn't receive a rollercoaster's worth of emails today. Maybe check with startupschool@ycombinator.com to make sure they got your application?
A great way to save the situation. And the resulting community created by 15k startups might lead to interesting directions and developments. I'm looking forward to participating and meeting our peers out there.
This is fantastic. It would be great if there could be a way for teams to 'level up' and get access to an advisor + the AWS / Stripe credits. Is that possible @yc ?
As some of the 'accepted' companies with advisors quit / drop out and spots open up, could those spots be filled with promising companies who don't have advisors?
This would be awesome, especially after reading the numbers. Apparently, 15,000 applied and YC was going to take in about 4,000 companies. That's roughly 1/3 of applicants; if you factor in that I'm sure quite a few of the companies that would have been denied in the first place might not participate anyway then I'm sure this is probably doable.
I thought what happened earlier was pretty shitty - this is 100% the right action to take and totally above & beyond. Congratulations to all startups who applied and get to move forward!
First rule of Startup Club... you DO NOT get accepted to Startup club.
Second rule of Startup Club... you ARE NOW ACCEPTED to Startup Club.
Third rule... if either of these notices from the other two rules affected the trajectory of your startup you are not a true founder. So get to work and stop worrying if someone else approves your startup or not.
Nice. Understand this is going to stress the infrastructure pretty severely, but it seems like both A. the right thing to do, and B. an interesting experiment / learning opportunity.
We're definitely experimenting with different ways of opening YC's benefits up to a larger group of companies. Startup School is one initiative of many that we're trying.
For someone out of the loop, what exactly are in the discount code and the 10K equity free grant? Does everyone get it on the completion of the course or does YC choose a selected few?
Since this is a brand new update to Startup School, we're going to work on figuring out how we can offer discounts/deals to all founders in the program. Stay tuned!
I hope somebody runs the data in the future to see if there was a statistical difference in outcomes between the companies intended to be accepted vs. not :-)
Is there any chance you can blind yourselves to any extent? Or does everyone involved already know too much about which companies were initially accepted?
This would be a seriously missed opportunity for YC if they dont:
Immediately start tracking all the applicants and what stages they are in, how much funding/traction/etc they have and which segment vertical they are in and then seeing how well they all do.
Yep. We do a little bit of that already with our normal batch applicants, but with the wide net of Startup School there may be more more data available that would be interesting to correlate with long-term success. I think it would be so valuable to have a rigorous study of the factors that correlate with startup success – letting founders know what they should optimize for is an important part of the value we want to provide!
Some of it for sure, but there are a lot of other things to look at. And of course the whole idea of startup school is to try to cast a much wider net, orders of magnitude wider.
Add one order of hopefully serendipitous magnitude. =)
YC has always admirably stretched the scale of vc. This will be an interesting experiment now at this scale--and I'm especially curious how you'll measure progress along the way.
Exactly. They filter for pedigree (and sometimes looks) first. Remember which and why schools used to require photographs with apps? It wasn't just a beauty contest.
Unfortunately there is a huge self selection bias: the majority of applicants would know it is hard to get accepted, so they will have tried really hard to get in.
In the next round if they said they would accept anyone, then presumably there would be a lot of low quality applicants (100's of Facebook clones etc).
Mainly we just didn't build the course's functionality or navigation with that volume of users in mind. We also want to make sure we provide a great experience to everyone, whether their group has an advisor or not. We're going to be working very hard over the next week making sure we're able to do that for everyone.
Wow! Thanks to YC for this opportunity. The valley is in no way perfect but its these sort of moments that make you excited to be in technology. I'm sure one of the companies that did not make it initially will earn the $10,000 credit.
So, can you explain, what is the main difference between 'new-way'-accepted participants and people who even did not apply to Startup School and will be able to watch the videos also?
I feel like that one of the spirit of YC is try something new, well done. I still have a question, can I join the class on Tuesdays? I mean be a live audience. We're willing to give up $10k, and ask no questions in the class.
There will be an application process open to all SS participants for the in-person class (unfortunately our room has limited seating). We hope that everyone who wants to will be able to attend at least one lecture in person!
That's exciting to hear! I filled out the class attendance application attached to the mistaken acceptance email before the correction was sent -- is that the form you are referring to or will there be a new one?
306 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 261 ms ] threadUnderstand that the advisors won't be able to give personal feedback, but I am happy to be discussing ideas / issues / feedback with other peers.
It would be interesting to see what these numbers look like as well over the ten weeks.
How many had you originally accepted? (And thus, how many have advisors?)
Good luck to all.
4,000 companies were accepted but 11,000 received acceptance emails?
http://time.com/3637980/college-admissions-mistakes-johnshop...
It actually happens dozens of times per year on a one-off basis, usually with college coaches telling recruits they've been accepted when the admissions office has only provisionally accepted them.
I'm going to also guess and say user accounts were created in a not easily rolled back way after the fact.
It's been a pretty tough day here at YC but we're all really happy with the final decision we came to!
It would be foolish for the tech industry as a whole to not take significant raised eyebrows at what can come out of this.
Surely there will be some "holy crap we couldnt have predicted this to happen" moment in store for the world to see now...
In addition, startups will receive over $50,000 in credits to a variety of other services, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, and Clerky."
Second rule of Startup Club... you ARE NOW ACCEPTED to Startup Club.
Third rule... if either of these notices from the other two rules affected the trajectory of your startup you are not a true founder. So get to work and stop worrying if someone else approves your startup or not.
Looking forward to the class.
Is this the beginning of a fully crowd sourced Y Combinator?
Public stumble today—it happens.
Gutsy recovery.
Thanks.
Now it's up to all of us to make the most of it and make it more than it would have been.
I wouldn't worry too much about that angle, personally.
The human mind can follow a community of about 150. This is two orders of magnitude larger.
I think they will be lucky if they can even remember names of folks they are dealing with.
Immediately start tracking all the applicants and what stages they are in, how much funding/traction/etc they have and which segment vertical they are in and then seeing how well they all do.
This will be a very interesting experiment.
Serious question. Is there anything I can start doing/capturing that would help?
/s - because much of the data you'd have on such early stage co's is identity-based, and therefor chock full of bias.
YC has always admirably stretched the scale of vc. This will be an interesting experiment now at this scale--and I'm especially curious how you'll measure progress along the way.
In the next round if they said they would accept anyone, then presumably there would be a lot of low quality applicants (100's of Facebook clones etc).
They know who they "would" have taken.
And somewhere in the future they know who was successful.
If that are the companies they wanted anyway, all is good.
If not, they can check what was different and what spoke for and against them