Interestingly enough I got a YC email yesterday asking me to apply for the current batch.
I’d never received that type of email from YC in the past, and immediately thought their application numbers must be dropping. After all YC historically seemed to market and advertise the fact that statistically it’s more difficult to get in than Harvard.
This announcement the very next day seems to support YC is looking for more applications. Then again maybe the total application numbers and acceptance rate are public info and I’m way off.
Yes, you are off. Our apps submitted metric is growing.
The reason we started sending out emails to remind people of the deadlines is the sheer # of founders we talk to in person and over email that complain that they missed the application deadline and they didnt know when the date would be.
Questions about when the app deadline is, if you can submit late, when the deadline is for the following batch, etc is the #1 most common type of question in our support queue, and sending out reminders seemed like the best solution.
"Early Decision" implies that if a student is accepted they are bound to attend that school. It's offered by colleges primarily because it greatly simplifies their yield planning. (Colleges admit many more than they actually can accommodate since they know many won't matriculate.)
This program should really be called Early Action, which is non-binding!
You actually go into a legally binding contract to attend the school? I've never heard of such a thing. Do they sue you for breach if you don't show up?
If you don't show with "good" reason (finances, health issue, etc) they usually do nothing.
If you don't show with a "bad" reason then what they do varies, but I've never heard of someone being sued. Instead it seems to be things like, "we will tell your high school and it may be mentioned if you try to apply to another university."
Seems like a great idea. I would be interested to hear about the indicators used to show that students sometimes didn't bother applying in these cases. It seems intuitive that college students, having to plan in Fall of N for full-time employment or even internships in Summer of N+1, would have been adversely affected by the normal application schedule. Were there a large number of potential founders that raised the alarm about this?
> That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by doing it. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup — becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas — by spending time learning about the easy part. Especially since you won't even really learn about it, any more than you'd learn about sex in a class. All you'll learn is the words for things.
What part of this essay is in conflict? The essay is advising that you not take entrepreneurship classes, but instead take classes in futuristic stuff like genetics. It doesn't have anything to do with whether it should be possible to apply to YC early.
I see it encouraging students to come up with ideas for YC companies inorganically. Obviously that is not the intent, but I see it as a very likely side effect.
If the student organically has a great idea, then sure this has nothing to do with it. For the ones that didn't and wasted time in college? I guess they should have read some of PG's essays. ;)
Off topic but that essay was great! I’ve read several but not all of PG’s essays and this was one of the ones I hadn’t previously read.
In particular, this struck a cord with me:
> So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?" There's plenty of time to apply that test later. But if you're thinking about that initially, it may not only filter out lots of good ideas, but also cause you to focus on bad ones.
I have a follow-up question to the text I quoted though.
I’ve recently been thinking about a software product that I wish existed but which doesn’t quite exist.
The product I have in mind does seem to fit the criteria laid out in the essay quite well. Even down to the question of “if someone else built it, would you use it?” Yes, I absolutely would.
But what I am wondering is not so much “how big could my company become”, but rather: Is this product idea sufficient to build a startup around at all? Is it even necessary to try and build a startup around it?
Details about the product don’t matter but in short it would be a particular kind of music creation and performance software for the iOS platform.
Actually I can motivate why it should be a startup. Because implementing it will require more people than just myself. I am confident that I can build an MVP on my own, but I am also certain that more man power is needed in order to develop the product into a useful state. Great!
There are a few ways to start a software business:
1. Build a tool and start trying to sell it
2. Survey the market and figure out what's missing, then GOTO 1
When starting with 1 you run the risk of making something no one else wants and will likely need to substantially correct to market values. But if you want the tool to exist and are willing to build it purely for yourself, then you might as well build it. You'll be in a much better position for fundraising if you do, and if nothing else you can add it to your portfolio for your next job search.
Also keep in mind that markets do not need to be large to be profitable. Large markets can make reaching customers much easier but also starts you off as a blip in a sea of noise. If you can build something a few customers love, warts and all, then you're well on your way to viability.
When I read the title, I assumed it worked like college early decision, where admission is binding. This is not the case, so this sounds like a great thing for YC to be doing
Things are different where I'm from (Canada) so please forgive me if this is a dumb question, but... in what way is early college admission binding on students? Even if a student accepts an offer, can't they just not turn up?
Its binding in the sense that the university and the high school generally agree that, in exchange for the preferential treatment that often comes with early decision (first dibs on financial aid, etc), the student's high school will only send final transcripts to the early-decision university as long as the student is accepted there and will not honor official transcript requests from other institutions.
Its not as though the college will sue you or anything like that for backing out of an early-decision agreement, but, the student will have a difficult time applying to other schools for the upcoming academic year.
(If the student isn't accepted into the early-decision school, the high school will supply transcripts to whatever other regular-decision institutions the student applied for... but the idea is that if a student wants to apply early-decision, they either attend the early-decision school for the upcoming year or none of its competitors. If you want to take multiple offers from multiple competing schools and compare them, you need to apply regular-decision or early-action)
Early admissions are not binding (compared to early action which is less common.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_admission
Many colleges also have a waitlist for admissions to backfill from.
The down side of this is that someone accepted then will focus on the startup instead of finishing up their studies. You could argue that would happen either way but I think 'having it in the can' means more chance of doing so. And perhaps also not uncovering and turning down other opportunities or overlooking them. (Similar to when you buy a house you are not going to any other open houses..ditto for buying a car and many other things).
How are you supposed to focus on learning and school work if you already known that you are getting in YC to do a startup? Which more often than not is going to fail instead of focusing on your studies which you are paying big dollars for (potentially at least).
Also to a smaller degree you are giving up info to YC which in theory would also allow them to identify a trend to fund someone else ahead of you. (Relevant if they turn you down).
Early decision plans for colleges are not without their disadvantages, the biggest being that it forces a decision before the student has the time to know what all of their options and offers may be. This is frequently mitigated by financial aid packages that compensate for the loss of choice, but even so, such plans have the downside of not knowing what other packages might have come to fruition.
YC seems to be walking that same path - seeking a commitment before the student knows all the choices that may be available post-graduation. Is there an intent to also give some incentive to compensate for that? Or is YC not asking for a commitment, and instead just making it an invitation that can be taken or not?
Despite the name, it's probably less about mirroring college applications and more about competing for top undergrad/grad students who would otherwise be recruiting for companies like FB, Google, Bain, etc. When I was in grad school, the top tier firms started recruiting in the fall and their incoming graduates had all accepted their full-time offers before winter break. I believe this is the same for undergrad.
In a lot of ways, you could think about this as giving students more optionality as they will have the opportunity to consider YC alongside other extremely compelling opportunities. It's smart for YC to try and get in front of students when they're in a better mindset to evaluate that tradeoff.
I'm sure there are a lot of students who would have be great YC candidates but end up signing a Google offer in the fall and just stay there for years because the pay is so good it doesn't make sense to leave...
I think admission to the summer batch early is compensation enough (and if an applicant doesn't agree, they simply elect to not apply early decision, right?)
Having the plan nailed down that early may allow you to think and develop the idea differently than if you're not sure whether you're doing YC or working a job, what city you'll live in, etc.
Since it's optional for the applicant, I don't see any significant downside that would require an extraordinary amount of additional incentive.
Kudos to YC for taking this approach. A lot of founders want to quit status-quo and pursue startup full time but are not able to due to a number of reasons including college, immigration, teams being risk averse etc. With this, they get the validation that they have a good investor backing them and also get the time to test out their PM fit before getting into the batch, giving them enough time to learn and iterate on their mistakes.
If you’re accepted, you will be early accepted into the Summer 2019 batch which begins in June. If you’re not accepted, you can apply again during the regular Summer 2019 application cycle which begins in March.
I assume that means you'll find out at the same time as everyone else - so yes, "Early Rejection"
Well then that would just be silly. A large number of YC companies don't get in the first few times they apply with an idea. Getting rejected from YC doesn't mean your startup isn't viable - it may just mean it's not ready for investment (from them) yet.
I'm surprised to hear YC courting would-be founders who are more interested in finishing college (grad school, even!). Affinity to the norms of academic institutions (not unlike large corporations) and to converging on their pre-formulated problems would seem incompatible with the traits of successful startup founders.
This solidifies the view that YC is modeled as a "founder college" for the young and cash-starved, weened as they are on ready-made social support systems, institutional authority, and formal rewards.
I’d never received that type of email from YC in the past, and immediately thought their application numbers must be dropping. After all YC historically seemed to market and advertise the fact that statistically it’s more difficult to get in than Harvard.
This announcement the very next day seems to support YC is looking for more applications. Then again maybe the total application numbers and acceptance rate are public info and I’m way off.