HN user
Most people are in Startup School haven't even started or have no idea. SUS is a perfect place to start on a small project with other people. From our experience at YC, getting a cofounder is the single best thing to improve the odds of your startup.
Neither did my cofounders when we got started.
Startup School is a good way to start finding a friend with similar interests. You gotta start somewhere.
- Kevin (YC Partner / Startup School Instructor/Host)
If you register now for Startup School 2019, you can now start using the directory to find other single founders looking for a cofounder. Filter by proximity, vertical and company description. This is a really great free resource to help you do the single best thing to help your startup.
Over 11K founders have already signed up for Startup School. Classes start July 22nd. https://startupschool.org
We have a video conf system we offer on Startup School website, but teams are welcome to organize something else if they can all agree.
Startup School is now open to all. Taking spot doesn't take away from anyone else now.
That's when you had to apply to Startup School for limited spots. Now it's open to everyone for free, which means we don't require the intro video to just register/signup for the class.
This year, each lecture is no more than 20 minutes. On any given week, there will be a max of 1 hour of video content for you to watch. More important than the lectures will be dedicating 30-60 minutes each week to participate in group sessions with other SUS founders.
At the minimum, to be considered active: you need to submit a weekly update about your progress every week (probably 5-15 minutes max).
Every week we release about an 1 hour of video content for you to watch.
Every week, there are group sessions with other SUS founders for you to talk about your startup. These should be about 30-60 minutes.
We provide discussion questions before your group sessions to give you topics to think about. Between 10-30 minutes of prep depending on how seriously you take it.
If you come to a SUS meetup in person, those are probably 2 hour events.
As you can see, it's probably a max of 2-3 hours a week in regards to time we ask of you. How much time you dedicate to your startup is up to you.
Yes! It's okay if you don't know which idea you want to pursue. Our first lecture actually goes over how to evaluate ideas for potential and helping you weigh and decide which to pursue.
Ah, good catch. Thanks for sharing a recording of the bug.
Hey HN, this is Kevin Hale, one of the partners at YC. I'll be hosting this year's Startup School alongside Adora Cheung. We learned a lot from last year's class and the Startup School team is really excited about this next iteration. Over the next few weeks, we're going to talk about some of those changes in more detail--about the data that drove those decisions and the new software we made to improve the experience for founders.
If you have any immediate questions about the course, please do let us know.
We did this interview with Sam a few weeks before he posted his recent essay on the topic. Not having to coordinate illustrations definitely helps with publishing speed. :) During the interview, we realized it was the first time I had heard him talk about the GDP idea as an answer to the branding problem of bringing UBI to America.
It's not just for hardware and software companies. Service companies can be pre or post launch too.
"It is humbling to go back to the labor market, hat-in-hand, asking for help. We did this when we hired you. We asked each of you to help us. You did not need us. There are plenty of great jobs. But we needed you. And thank goodness you came. We wouldn’t be here without you. But each of you was hired because the team before you failed to execute without you. And this is still true today."
Such a great perspective to have. More of this please.
We're really excited about this new series on The Macro about the first employees at startups. First employees are often unsung heroes at companies, but often incredible crucial to getting them off the ground and setting the culture of the startup.
I'm always remind of Derek Sivers video on First Followers when I think of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ
No one communicated that Pinboard, the company, was a joke. I feel quite the opposite.
Yes, I called all the other winners too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633517
Regarding Pinboard, the simple answer is he won the votes, he won the poll, but he made me feel uncomfortable in the end. I went into my good-faith phone call with him very much wanting this to work out and I was disappointed to come out of it tense and with less energy than when I went in. It’s touchy feely, I know, but the truth.
The thing with YC is startups can’t do the program in a vacuum. Even with the remote nature of the Fellowship, the founders affect the partners they work with and the other founders they work alongside, both in their batch and among the alumni community. We made the decision to call all the startups we’d consider taking on through Apply HN and make a decision on fit. I know that’s changing the rules at the last second, but we didn’t realize this until Pinboard entered the fray. I'm actually grateful for the head's up. Like all our experiments at YC, we design them to adapt as things happen, and they certainly did here.
I made the same phone calls with the other founders and they felt completely different. I wasn’t looking for gratitude or devotion or deference. My minimum was connection, my ideal was simpatico—evidence that I could spend a lot of time with the founder, which is what’s needed to make this relationship work well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good rapport with Maciej. Regardless of the vote situation, I’d make the same decision.
Maciej is clearly brilliant and quite witty and knows how to build and direct a passionate following. Pinboard is unique and I’m glad it exists. More opinionated software should exist in the world. Even though we couldn’t find rapport together, I sincerely wish him and his startup the very best.
Can you provide a link to the sketch or anything showing what you've done so far?
Always betting on the founders. Ideas sometimes change. Markets sometimes change.
What gets people tripped up is that you sometimes judge a founder indirectly by seeing how they communicate an idea, looking at their ability to deliver, and hearing about how they think about the market.
The answers to those questions are important, but we put it in the context of what does it say about the founder.
No rule against it. If you're up for it, I don't see why not.
I know you're ribbing us, but paying for a Pinboard account is like buying shares in Berkshire Hathaway. It's for true believers. I think there's always opportunity in concentrations of users like that.
Of all the partners at YC, I ran the startup that was the most different from everyone else. And my approach might be more aligned with your values. If you were seriously interested, I'd be delighted to work with you.
Honestly, we don't really know. We have very few hypotheses around this idea. We're just insanely curious to see what will happen. As far as the disadvantage you mention, that happens when you launch. That happens when you start getting press. That happens when you announce a large funding round. That happens when you're doing well.
In our experience, startups are far more likely to die by suicide than by homicide. Iteration is the only practice to greatness that we've ever seen and you can't do that well without talking about your idea to others. In a vacuum, you can only go so far.
My advice is similar to how we're approaching this experiment: don't over think it.
Don't know yet. Let's see what happens here. Also, Fellowship actually runs three times a year, so the next potential cycle is in the fall.
Nah. A lot of teams don't know about HN before they apply to YC. Many make it into the batch and are good.
One of the reasons we're trying this is to question a lot of our own assumptions about the best way to find a great startup. Best practices will probably arise over time on how to best apply through HN, but I'd rather we let ourselves be open to surprising ways to present a startup.
I think we'll actually learn more during this experiment with less rules on format up front.
You look for grit. What evidence can you find that shows they don't just give up when things get hard?
Thing is we don't find out usually until after we invest what the real problems are...so we optimize for people we want to spend a lot of time with and work on these problems/issues whatever they may be.
Most founders feel imposter syndrome after they're accepted. The great thing about being part of a batch is you realize you're not alone and then learn that shit show is actually a default state. When you learn that, you relax and focus on the resourcefulness you need to solve your problems systematically.
Hey everyone! I manage and run the Fellowship program at YC. I just want to build on top of what Dan wrote about being nice. We’re not asking you to do this because we think it’s good manners. We actually believe it’s the right way to think and act like the best investors.
It’s easy to form some really bad habits when you sit in a position of power to judge the potential of a person, a team, an idea and their execution—believing that you know better and focusing your time on finding weakness.
The best investors don’t spend a lot of time on what can go wrong. They already know the odds are against every startup that ever comes into existence. They already know every startup is a shit show. Those will be the reasons why all the other investors will miss out on an unpredictable opportunity. The best investors try to figure out what can go right. They dream a little with the startup and they then sell that vision back to the founders.
Remember that the big wins in startups come from the margins. For you to find what no one else could have predicted, know that it will take the shape of something that isn’t obvious.
Being nice gives you a good foundation for being open and optimistic, which is what we strive for when we read applications here at YC.
Thanks again for trying this out with us. I'm really excited about what we discover together.
Jared will also be doing open office hours on Slack from 2-4pm PT on Friday (Feb 26). If you'd like help with your startup, but want your questions answered in a private setting, sign up here by end of day on Feb 23: