Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students (ycombinator.com)
A year ago, YC went from running 2 batches / year to 4 batches / year. We did this because we wanted to give founders more flexibility to do YC at the right time for them. It seems to have worked - a lot of founders have told us that they were only able to do YC because the new schedule fit their timeline.
Early Decision was driven by the same motivation. We talked to a lot of college students, and we learned that most graduating seniors interview for their after-graduation job in the fall of their senior year. For the ones who are interested in doing their own startup, this creates a bit of a dilemma. If they don't interview for jobs in the fall in order to apply to YC later, they're risking that they might be left without any options.
We created Early Decision so that they can apply to YC at the same time they're doing recruiting for regular jobs, the fall of their senior year. If they get into YC, they can confidently turn down their other job offers without worrying they'll be left without anything.
Note: this isn't really a new idea. We've quietly done this from time to time since 2018, but we didn't create a dedicated flow in the application software for it, so most people didn't realize it was an option. Hopefully by productizing and popularizing it, we'll make it easier for college seniors to start companies.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 66.0 ms ] threadThere's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:
- new parents
- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled
The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?
Moreover, for better or worse, the all day every day work culture typical of venture-backed startups isn't really compatible with being a new parent etc. anyway.
The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.
If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.
In the last year alone, I've had to bow out of co-founding two promising startups with good biz co-founders, because first-year MBA students wanted to finish their degree before they sought funding.
Two ways funding could help:
1. I couldn't afford to work over a year as a technical cofounder, executing in full-time startup mode like usually needs to be done, with no income. While they were part-time, and getting an MBA and networking out of it during this period. Even ramen lifestyle funding would've made this closer to an equitable balance of contribution and risk among the cofounders.
2. There's also the concern that MBA programs seem to push students to have a hypothetical startup, so there's always a chance that the MBA student won't be fully committed to actually do the startup once they graduate. Maybe accepted funding could make this a firmer commitment. (Even if there's no contractual obligation to pursue the startup, I'd guess that new MBA graduates don't want to burn bridges in the small world of investors, so would take the commitment fairly seriously.)
There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.
Life is short. Play long term games with long term people. While a batch bakes in a season, a cap table rests like a boulder in a hillside. If you’re smart there are better ways to find a lever with which to move the world.
Consider incentives. Don’t accept a hammer when you need a bulldozer. Don’t ask which paths exist: find where you want to be, ask what needs to be done. Do it.
Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!
I've been lurking on HN since 2008 and can't remember a time where i got the vibe from pg to be like "live your life" instead of "start a company now and apply". Can you point to some specific essay you had in mind?
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Another good example of expressing and exersiging values, how easy to construct appealing narrative regardless of underlying subject and something else what I can't pinpoint at this stage...
Edit: I think I understand the problem now. PG's actual advice has always been "finish college before starting a startup". Somehow somewhere that got distorted into "don't start a company in your 20s", which is certainly not what PG has been saying (the average graduation age is somewhere around 23). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45372572 quotes a representative passage, and if you read that essay you'll see that he's mostly saying "don't start a startup at 20".
(Edit: I deleted my last sentence which was irritable.)
This is evident in how disappointed certain people are when they’re rejected from YC. Their startup is merely a vehicle to get into the club.
Wanting to finish school is a negative signal. Also
> Also we know that many students spend a lot of time in Fall or during their final year applying for jobs or internships. Early Decision gives students another option: apply to YC and bet on yourself.
So now YC is an alternative to searching and apply for jobs? I think if you're marginal on trying to find a corporate job or starting something, then you should prob find a corp job. Objectively starting a startup is worse, you work harder, lower odds of success, more stress, less money, etc. You have to be a little crazy and hardheaded to make it work
Finally everything that YC does to increase it's applicant pool so they still maintain exclusivity. If you have 2% acceptance rate, why are you trying to maximize the top of the funnel? You should discourage people to apply.
As if all of your education (and probably side-projects, life decisions) is meant to lead to YC.
It's telling how many people are afraid to watch that show and detest it because it's just so spot on accurate, and they cringe when they see themselves in its characters and their own lives in its plots.
Maybe you could offer that as a “waitlist” option.
Seems like a bad signal for YC though - if you aren't committed enough to quit school or at the very least reject job offers and do your startup anyway - feels like you might not be committed enough to do what it takes?
But if anyone does, YC knows how to pick founders with the right mindset.
I regret that decision.
Truth is that it is incredibly difficult to build startup without any good industry knowledge.
-graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates.
-join other people's startups where they work crazy hours
-work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school
Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation.
It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.
Then at mid 30s get hired as Dir/VP of engineering in smaller Series A startup.
You will have higher chance to retire early and/or afford yourself to work on things you like later on.