How To Get Into Y Combinator Startup School

Y Combinator (YC) is an American seed-money startup accelerator. It has given funding to over 2,000 companies, some of them big names in their industries. Examples of such are Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Reddit and Stripes. It was founded by Jessica Livingstone, Paul Graham and Tappan Morris in March 2005.

YC interviews thousands of start-ups and then selects two or more batches of companies per year to enter the YC program. There, founders are taught how to market their product and team, refine their business model in order to achieve a product-market fit, and scale their startups into a high-growth business.

The program includes ‘office hours’ where startup founders can meet one-on-one and in a group. They also participate in weekly dinners where they get to interact with successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other important guests from Silicon Valley. At the end of the program, participants are granted seed money to launch or boost their start-ups. In exchange, YC gets 7% equity of each participant-company.

In 2017, it started its Startup School — a free online course open to all individuals working on a startup or thinking of starting one. Eric Migicovskyn, a partner at YC, says that the idea is to make Startup School available for founders as soon as they had a startup idea.

The Startup School does not replace the core YC program, neither does it automatically improve chances of getting into YC. However, over the last few years, it has been observed that there’s been an increase in the number of companies in YC who have attended the Startup School.

YC Startup School aims to do the following:

• Encourage people to think of entrepreneurship as a way to positively impact the world.
• Teach people how to found a startup and equip them with the tools and resources to prepare them for managing the business.
• Build an interactive community of entrepreneurs who can help, encourage and support one another.

Participation in the Startup School program is self-guided and based on the stage of each founder’s startup. Those in Stage 1 are founders who are in the process of validating their business idea and building an initial product. Stage 2 founders have built a product and already have some early customers. Stage 3 founders have fully developed their products and are working on increasing sales/revenue and users.

Participants get access to:

• Startup School’s library content and curriculum tailored to each startup stage
• Tracking tools to measure company’s growth and progress
•  A community of international founders through  the Startup School forum
• A personalised dashboard to track participation
• Programming and resources from the Y Combinator team comprising live Q&A sessions, office hours with YC alumni and AMAs with startup founders.

Students can also communicate on a forum, where advice is shared on everything from feedback on a new app to tips on how to value a pre-seed startup.

The program lasts for six weeks and there are no limits to the number of people who can participate. Signing up is simply done on the website startupschool.org. Once you sign up, you’ll be asked whether you’re actively working on a company (20hours/week) or thinking of starting one in the future.  This determines whether you will be placed in the Active Founder track or the Aspiring Founder track.

There are no exams or requirements to pass the course. The organizers expect founders to be focused on building their startups and so allows founders a lot of flexibility to spend as much time as they need in the Startup School. To earn the Startup School Certificate Badge, participants must submit a weekly update for 8 weeks in a row, and read or watch all the content curriculum.