What this really does is make clear the desire of the people at ycombinator to open their pre screening program (which is what startup school is, essentially) to more startups. The value to them is clear - they now get more companies that have an initial touchpoint with ycombinator, and they can maybe make money off them or whatever. But they don’t have to scale the thing that was most useful about startup school - that is, the advisors and small groups. For ycombinator this actually is a win win - they can now phase out advisors next round if this is a success and then the course would be very simple to run (and mostly free to create!).

The value that they were really providing (advisors, small groups) doesn’t scale for a free program, and with this new method of acceptance they aren’t offering that value to the newly “accepted” startups. For me personally, If I wanted to independently learn the things they teach in startup school, I already had the ability to watch last years lectures and read last years course material.

If there are credits, that will be valuable I suppose. But, again, I want to emphasize that ycombinator isn’t giving startups anything of real value here that it wasn’t already giving away (except, I guess, the ability to save face if you had already excitedly told friends that you were in this program).

In general, we're committed to making Startup School an excellent experience for all 15,000 of the companies that applied. This is going to be a great deal of effort for all involved, but it's a point we wanted to get to anyway (even though the timing and communication that lead to this decision was a terrible mistake that we're still really sorry for).

If they're letting literally anyone in, it's no more useful than every other founders mastermind group on FB.

Huge misfire by YC. Startup School had the chance to be a wonderful network of promising early stage companies - not only that, you've alienated a lot of the promising companies who were properly accepted.

YC simply does not have the stomach to deal with even an ounce of bad press, and it showed today. I would be very wary as a promising company to jump on board with an organization that will probably throw you under the bus rather than go through the fire with you if ever your company, for whatever reason, incites a mob.

I will no longer be applying to the YC accelerator, and from my conversations with other great founders, I'm not the only one.

We made a major mistake with the admissions emails – which I still feel terribly about. However, while that mistake moved up our timeline drastically, a more open process was directionally the way we were going with Startup School anyway. In fact, the first iteration of Startup School we ran a few years ago was intended to be open to all applicants. We had so much interest that we had to cap the number of accepted companies to the number we had projected would apply, to ensure our infrastructure and organizational ability could handle everyone.

For the Startup School founders forum, we'll be building in extra moderation features before the course launches next week to ensure we don't get into a tragedy of the commons situation. We'll keep iterating on the community management to ensure the quality of discourse remains high, and relevant to the very best companies (luckily we have in-house expertise we can lean on in the form of the incredible HN team!).

It's true that accepting all applicants will decrease the value of Startup School as a credential. But credentialing was never our intention. Our goal with Startup School is to improve the long-term chances of survival for every participating startup, and we believe that we'll be able to do a great job of that, even with the limitations imposed by serving 15,000 companies with a finite number of resources.

As a founder of a startup that would have been rejected, I'm looking forward to getting the most I can out of Startup School.

I would have been excited to be part of a pre-vetted community. Will there be a separate space for the people on the advisor track to be able to communicate and form a community?

Letting everyone in makes it feel like YC is going from “Harvard” to “Khan Academy.” Both are noble endeavors, but completely different brands.

And to your point, it was never about credentialing. It’s about the network. Isn’t one of YC’s main selling points the YC network? (This is repeated in YC branding.) Now people are comparing it to those Facebook entrepreneur groups that everyone can join.

Feels like some serious damage has been done to the YC brand.

I feel compelled to say this. I am one of the founders who got an initial reject followed by an accept email. I read the accept email and felt good (I had not even read the reject email). When I learned that YC has accepted everyone, I felt better. Sure having access to a dedicated advisor has an advantage. The advisor can guide you and all that but it's ultimately your hustle. Now the playing ground is more or less levelled when it comes to hustle.

Also, how does this 'part of a vetted group' feeling help in your startup's success ? Agreed, it's a momentary boost in confidence, but beyond that I'm not sure how the vetting process adds any value. The way I see it, the vetting is more or less random.

(Seems to me I got the same emails as you: First a reject email: "Class Begins Next Week! (for visitors/auditors)" and about being an auditor = not accepted. Then I got an email "you were actually supposed to receive the email below accepting you into the Startup School Advisor Track". I never got the "we screwed up and sent acceptances to companies that were not actually accepted to Startup School" email)

now that everyone gets a trophy, I am glad I dodged the bullet

What? The entire point of vetting is to increase the quality of the remaining pool. You can argue how successful they are at doing this, but the intent of the process is pretty clear.

>> The way I see it, the vetting is more or less random.

Don't let YC or anybody else define you, but if you'd got in initially I bet you'd take it as a positive signal data point.

I mean, that's what YC is supposed to be. Startup school is an effort to bring YC to more people, which obviously is going to involve less vetting. How hard can you vet early age startups that answered 3 questions with 150 words anyway? You're making it a bigger deal of it than it is.

I'm not making a big deal out of it. Quite the contrary - I don't care about Startup School anymore, whereas I did before.

Note to anyone reading this: please build a mastermind group that requires an MRR of at least $15k. I'd pay good money to be a part of that.

But that's just the thing... nobody actually knows if that level of vetting is meaningful... it may perform no better than chance in terms of identifying "good" startups (however you define that). This experiment will actually be very interesting exactly in that it will help YC see if their vetting IS as good as they think it is.

please build a mastermind group that requires an MRR of at least $15k. I'd pay good money to be a part of that

Sure, having a $15K MRR shows something about a company, but why do you think that is the best criteria to identify founders/companies to network with?

It's a pretty good barometer for success - 99% of founders don't get to that point.

Who knows? Why do you think only people who have gotten to $15K MRR can offer value?

I agree it's something of a signal, but I'd personally consider that a very weak signal. shrug

In that case, we fundamentally disagree, and this discussion is fruitless.

There's also the problem that you don't know the value of the hypothetical "person who hasn't gotten to $15K MRR" yet. If they started their company 2 weeks ago, they probably have an MRR of $0. Does that mean that they have nothing of value to tell you? That depends on a lot of other variables.

Anyway, you're probably right... we probably just have fundamentally differing world-views. I lean towards the "you can learn something for everybody" mindset, and try to late-bind judgment on people's value as advisers until the last possible moment.

When they say “we’ve decided to use our error as a forcing function to find a way to make Startup School work for all founders who applied”, that really is a fair way of describing it. Making this work is possible, but it will be quite a lot more work for them—work they had not reckoned on.

I didn't. I'd consider myself to be serious, and I'll presume out of 15,000 other companies there exist some more people like me. I don't think you'll be disappointed by the experience.

I'd encourage seeking out other, smaller founder mastermind groups - you'll get much more value there.

Don't mind my negative commentary - I know this was a difficult day for you, and I appreciate the hard decisions that need to be made.

As a founder, though, I have a very hard time finding groups of other founders who have reached a certain level of success and was very excited to be a part of that. It's very difficult finding something like that and I really hope you guys can consider my ideas here.

How do you know they're bad? And maybe it's the case that having ONE person in your group, who is the "right" person, will actually be what makes the group valuable...

Not saying that will prove to be the case, but I think you're rushing to judgment a bit.

It's great for YC. If there's a large amount of negative feedback, they can use the excuse that this was an experiment (and the result of their... high integrity) and revert.

Compare to throwmeoutoft11's comment below.

Experiment - it could go bad, but it could also go good, we'll see.