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.