Y Combinator only considers IVY League applicants?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6266

by ginn • 19 years ago

7 22 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

ginn• 19 years ago

I read an old RWW 2006 article that said if you're not from an ivy league school, than Y Combinator doesn't consider you. Anyone know if this is true?

pg4• 19 years ago

Sure, I know. It's false (of course). Sounds like something written by someone we turned down. What is RWW?

danielha2• 19 years ago

Read/Write Web.

I think he's referring to their profile on you: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paul_graham_profile.php

staunch2• 19 years ago

How about people with no university education?

python_kiss• 19 years ago

RWW refers to Read/WriteWeb (Richard's blog). I haven't read the article BitGeek is referring to but I am guessing, like most posts on R/WW, it was written by a guest author.

omarish• 19 years ago

how about the reddit founders? they say uva is the mit of the south, but even mit isn't an ivy.

richcollins2• 19 years ago

They are wrong. Ga Tech is the MIT of the south :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_in_popular_culture

Not sure why we are proud of being qualified by "of the South" though.

vegashacker• 19 years ago

Alexis (of Reddit) said he was joking right after he made that comment at his presentation at Startup School. I think the joke was referring to Chris Anderson's earlier talk -- he said that Wired had acquired Reddit and it was done by a couple of guys from MIT using Rails.

BitGeek• 19 years ago

So, is the claimed "early 20s" requirement also false?

I know its a theme, but I didn't think it was a requirement.

davidw• 19 years ago

My guess is that the Y combinator partners evaluate each team themselves, rather than having an Arc program do it. So while they may have an average they gravitate towards, they probably would be willing to consider teams outside of that if they're impressed. Being a team does seem to be one of the 'rules' that they aren't as flexible about.

pg4• 19 years ago

Yes; we've had several people in their 30s. We get a lot of people in their early 20s, but that's probably just because more of them are starting startups.

RyanGWU82• 19 years ago

And paying attention to Y Combinator.

boomstrap• 19 years ago

Strange in my application I was never asked where I went to school.

immad• 19 years ago

7th textbox down: "For each founder, please list: YC username; name; age; year, school, degree, and subject for each degree..."

richcollins2• 19 years ago

I know of a Y Combinator company founded by someone who didn't attend college.

Also, it turns out that lots of smart people go to Ivy caliber schools (who would have guessed)

MobileDigit• 19 years ago

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, how much value does Y Combinator give to schooling?

What about age?

SwellJoe• 19 years ago

Definitely not. I don't even have a four year degree, much less one from an Ivy League school, and my co-founder went to some school in Australia that I didn't even identify on the application, because I didn't know the name and had no time to check. (Our company was in WFP2007.)

But if I were offering advice from what I know today, I'd say, "Go to a famously good school. It'll pay for itself in one to five years, depending on your path after college, and after that it's all gravy."

I dunno what goes into the application vetting process, but I'll give the YCs credit for being extremely fair in the interview process. I met most of the other folks in Boston for the interview process (and spoke with many of them for a lot longer than the 15 minutes the YCs did), and while most who made it that far were impressive, the ones actually picked for the program were exactly the ones I would have picked as being most likely to succeed. And, interestingly, an MIT group that I met was turned down.

Y Combinator only considers IVY League applicants?

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