<story><title>Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-every-company-that-applied-is-now-accepted/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>threeisoneis</author><text>I disagree. They didn’t do anything except open up the grant application part to everyone (no cost to them) and promise everybody that they would get some credits (probably no cost to them). The course was always able to be audited.&lt;p&gt;What this really does is make clear the desire of the people at ycombinator to open their pre screening program (which is what startup school is, essentially) to more startups. The value to them is clear - they now get more companies that have an initial touchpoint with ycombinator, and they can maybe make money off them or whatever. But they don’t have to scale the thing that was most useful about startup school - that is, the advisors and small groups. For ycombinator this actually is a win win - they can now phase out advisors next round if this is a success and then the course would be very simple to run (and mostly free to create!).&lt;p&gt;The value that they were really providing (advisors, small groups) doesn’t scale for a free program, and with this new method of acceptance they aren’t offering that value to the newly “accepted” startups. For me personally, If I wanted to independently learn the things they teach in startup school, I already had the ability to watch last years lectures and read last years course material.&lt;p&gt;If there are credits, that will be valuable I suppose. But, again, I want to emphasize that ycombinator isn’t giving startups anything of real value here that it wasn’t already giving away (except, I guess, the ability to save face if you had already excitedly told friends that you were in this program).</text></item><item><author>jackconnor</author><text>Man, credit where credit is due, this showed a lot of integrity. There was one good solution, it was just a painful one, yet they still did it. Well done YCombinator!&lt;p&gt;P.S. They make the point that this is an experiment, and I think all of us who join should prove that it is a good one. Nobody rails against applications and qualifying scores like HN peeps (check the comments of any article, ever, about SAT&amp;#x2F;GMAT&amp;#x2F;GRE scores for evidence). And since YC choose to go the universal route, standing strong to the HN ethos, I think we can prove that decisions like this do work for the best by being focused, engaged, and building some kickass tech companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kcorbitt</author><text>Hi, I was involved in the decision to open Startup School to all applicants and am the developer primarily responsible for writing the software we’ll need to make this scale. We&amp;#x27;re all planning on working overtime for the next 12 weeks as we prepare for and go through the course. Although we don&amp;#x27;t have the resources to assign an advisor to every group, we do want to provide human attention to every single company we&amp;#x27;ve accepted.&lt;p&gt;In general, we&amp;#x27;re committed to making Startup School an excellent experience for all 15,000 of the companies that applied. This is going to be a great deal of effort for all involved, but it&amp;#x27;s a point we wanted to get to anyway (even though the timing and communication that lead to this decision was a terrible mistake that we&amp;#x27;re still really sorry for).</text></comment>
<story><title>Startup School: Every Company That Applied Is Now Accepted</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-every-company-that-applied-is-now-accepted/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>threeisoneis</author><text>I disagree. They didn’t do anything except open up the grant application part to everyone (no cost to them) and promise everybody that they would get some credits (probably no cost to them). The course was always able to be audited.&lt;p&gt;What this really does is make clear the desire of the people at ycombinator to open their pre screening program (which is what startup school is, essentially) to more startups. The value to them is clear - they now get more companies that have an initial touchpoint with ycombinator, and they can maybe make money off them or whatever. But they don’t have to scale the thing that was most useful about startup school - that is, the advisors and small groups. For ycombinator this actually is a win win - they can now phase out advisors next round if this is a success and then the course would be very simple to run (and mostly free to create!).&lt;p&gt;The value that they were really providing (advisors, small groups) doesn’t scale for a free program, and with this new method of acceptance they aren’t offering that value to the newly “accepted” startups. For me personally, If I wanted to independently learn the things they teach in startup school, I already had the ability to watch last years lectures and read last years course material.&lt;p&gt;If there are credits, that will be valuable I suppose. But, again, I want to emphasize that ycombinator isn’t giving startups anything of real value here that it wasn’t already giving away (except, I guess, the ability to save face if you had already excitedly told friends that you were in this program).</text></item><item><author>jackconnor</author><text>Man, credit where credit is due, this showed a lot of integrity. There was one good solution, it was just a painful one, yet they still did it. Well done YCombinator!&lt;p&gt;P.S. They make the point that this is an experiment, and I think all of us who join should prove that it is a good one. Nobody rails against applications and qualifying scores like HN peeps (check the comments of any article, ever, about SAT&amp;#x2F;GMAT&amp;#x2F;GRE scores for evidence). And since YC choose to go the universal route, standing strong to the HN ethos, I think we can prove that decisions like this do work for the best by being focused, engaged, and building some kickass tech companies.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chrismorgan</author><text>There’s quite a lot of extra organisational and support work that they will have to do to support another 11,000 people. That’s going to be roughly 450 more groups of 25 people to sort out, four times as many people to still interact with to &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; extent, and a whole lot more traffic.&lt;p&gt;When they say “we’ve decided to use our error as a forcing function to find a way to make Startup School work for all founders who applied”, that really is a fair way of describing it. Making this work is possible, but it will be quite a lot more work for them—work they had not reckoned on.</text></comment>