I personally think that they've rectified this in a smart way by introducing 2 tracks: the advisor track and a normal one (this is just a guess since I received mail saying I've been accepted to the 'advisor track').

So YC is giving forum access to all the companies that applied but advisor access only to a subset of all the companies that applied. Is that correct?

I don't know. The fair way to handles this would have been to first honour the original deal. They have already put people through the application process and the were going to reject them if this hadn't happened. Instead of "accepting everyone" they should have rejected the ones original being rejected and then asked them forgiveness and confidence in this additional track. Now they have left a lot of people in the awkward position of doubt if they want to do it but without an easy way to say no.

Yeah, same here. Got the email about accepting our startup to the advisory track. My friend got the email about the normal track.

The advisor track email was the email they didn't intend to send referenced in this post, isn't it?

You make a good point about withstanding rejection. But from the discussions that I overheard this afternoon, part of the motivation is that it's what the YC partners wanted to do anyway. That is, it's not only about making people feel better (though we certainly do want that), but also about realizing the original vision. I think Adora is planning to write a blog post about this.

If it works out, then the mistake will turn out to have been more of a catalyst than a mistake, which would be a good outcome. Hopefully people will feel that way in the end.

I felt so bad for whoever made the email mistake. I hope they're feeling alright. It's a bug everyone could see themselves letting slip through.

I checked with him and he's fine, but I think probably also in shock. In case it helps, I haven't seen any signs of blame; everyone knows we could easily have done it ourselves. The general feeling seems to be that it motivated us to do something that we wanted to do in the first place, but thought we couldn't.

Yea, it's a shitty position to be in but it could happen to any of us. Hope he won't be too hard on himself. With that being said, we were one of the originally rejected and then accepted startups. I guess that means we're part of the advisory track. I just hope that YC can still dedicate the originally-intended resources to the advisory group.

Could you please let me know if I am banned? I criticized Sam Altman and since then I get error posting any new story “you are posting too fast”. Thanks.

You're not banned, and we don't ban people for "criticizing Sam Altman". But you have been breaking the HN guidelines badly and when people do that we rate limit their accounts. That's one way we have of trying to stave off the decline of this forum.

We're happy to take rate limits off if people give us reason to believe that they will follow the guidelines in the future. Among other things that requires being civil, which "I love your naive hero worship", "What the F are you smoking", and so on, definitely are not.

The guidelines also ask you to email us instead of posting off-topic moderation questions to threads, especially because it's random whether or not we see them there. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules more carefully from now on?

I intend to help other people and hopefully receive good advice from others who are in the same situation. Why not try to be better than ourselves rather than assume we can't do it because of a factor out of our control (not having input from YC people).

And to be fair, I'm absolutely convinced that we'll still get awesome advice from YC if they see us putting in the effort.

Many companies are still on the advisor track and get that advisor. If you don't find any value without an instructor, then you don't need to participate, but the course material is still there if you want it. Seems like a no-lose to me.

Well technically there is a loss for those on the advisor track.

Because you are now competing with 15K teams for the 100 sponsorship spots instead of 4K. But to be honest I don't think it would make all that much of a difference. The top 100 companies will deserve their spot regardless of the competition.

You already were competing with 15K teams.

They're skipping the step where they eliminate the 11K which the advisor-tier have already beaten once.

This will affect the odds of winning, but by how much?

I guess we're going to find out when we see the final ratio of advised/unadvised startups who win sponsorship.

I think you'll be surprised at how many of the 15k actually complete the course. Asking people to write 3 sentences for the chance to win $10k is really really easy. Following through with months of work to win $10k.... not so much. My guess is probably around the original 4k to maybe 6k will complete the course fully.

We were accepted and frankly I didn't even notice there was a $10K grant. I mean it'd help of course but not much relative to the value I hope we'll get from advising and serious peers.

I kind of agree with you, startups have to fix 'mistakes' fast instead of just making others feel pleased? i.e. the so-called 'fire fast', otherwise it might fail more likely. In that sense, YC probably did a wrong move even though it's labelled as an experiment.

I 100% agree and I know a lot of other people do to.

It makes the whole thing feel like Khan Acedemy or opencourseware. Both great learning resources, but that’s not why a lot of people signed up.

I think this is different, with Khan Academy there's no pressure of ending the course. Here you have a few months and there's an incentive to go and complete the course. I'm not expecting 100% of the people to complete the course, but I do expect better completion rates than Khan Academy or Coursera.