Y Combinator will now run its online Startup School multiple times per year
As an investor in several Techstars-incubated start- ups, I can see both the charm and effectiveness of this Startup School model, which was globally pioneered by Boulder, CO based Techstars, and also by their “ kissing- cousins,” Y Combinator. Lately, some of the best ideas and talent are coming from outside of the United States. In the tech world, we are still all about convincing the world to “send us your huddled masses.” Cleverness knows no borders. But one of the problems is helping budding founders around the world to travel to our incubator locations in Austin and elsewhere. It’s a long trip, expensive, and often totally beyond the means of global talent. In other words, a real barrier to entry.
Y Combinator has a great solution—this online startup school.
—Ray Brimble
Y Combinator will now run its online Startup School multiple times per year
by Greg Kumparak, originally published on December 10, 2019 by Tech Crunch
Back in 2017, Y Combinator began offering a 10-week, once-a-year online course called Startup School. Part forum community and part video classroom, the program offers a variety of lectures on topics like raising money or evaluating startup ideas, as led by YC partners and other entrepreneurs from their network.
Three years and 40,000+ students later, they’re switching up the schedule; beginning in 2020, Startup School will now be running multiple times per year. It’s also shifting from being a 10-week program to being an eight-week program.
In its first few years, Y Combinator set a hard cap on the number of founders it accepted into each Startup School session. After acceptance letters were accidentally sent to the wrong teams in 2018, the company opted to let in everyone who applied, modifying the program to focus less on personal advising and more on small peer-to-peer advice groups. It sounds like they’re sticking with this strategy moving forward, as an FAQ on the Startup School site notes that they “do not have a limit on the number of participants” with this year’s sessions.
Did you take part in Startup School previously and are curious if it’s worth doing again? YC says that while “a few lectures will be updated or replaced,” the video content of 2020’s Startup School will be largely the same as 2019. The structure of the course itself will see some changes, though: they’ll be doing fewer group video chat sessions, but introducing weekly Q&A sessions with YC partners.