Definitely not. I don't even have a four year degree, much less one from an Ivy League school, and my co-founder went to some school in Australia that I didn't even identify on the application, because I didn't know the name and had no time to check. (Our company was in WFP2007.)

But if I were offering advice from what I know today, I'd say, "Go to a famously good school. It'll pay for itself in one to five years, depending on your path after college, and after that it's all gravy."

I dunno what goes into the application vetting process, but I'll give the YCs credit for being extremely fair in the interview process. I met most of the other folks in Boston for the interview process (and spoke with many of them for a lot longer than the 15 minutes the YCs did), and while most who made it that far were impressive, the ones actually picked for the program were exactly the ones I would have picked as being most likely to succeed. And, interestingly, an MIT group that I met was turned down.

I know of a Y Combinator company founded by someone who didn't attend college.

Also, it turns out that lots of smart people go to Ivy caliber schools (who would have guessed)

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, how much value does Y Combinator give to schooling?

What about age?

So, is the claimed "early 20s" requirement also false?

I know its a theme, but I didn't think it was a requirement.

My guess is that the Y combinator partners evaluate each team themselves, rather than having an Arc program do it. So while they may have an average they gravitate towards, they probably would be willing to consider teams outside of that if they're impressed. Being a team does seem to be one of the 'rules' that they aren't as flexible about.

Yes; we've had several people in their 30s. We get a lot of people in their early 20s, but that's probably just because more of them are starting startups.

And paying attention to Y Combinator.

Strange in my application I was never asked where I went to school.

7th textbox down: "For each founder, please list: YC username; name; age; year, school, degree, and subject for each degree..."

I read an old RWW 2006 article that said if you're not from an ivy league school, than Y Combinator doesn't consider you. Anyone know if this is true?

Sure, I know. It's false (of course). Sounds like something written by someone we turned down. What is RWW?

Read/Write Web.

I think he's referring to their profile on you: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paul_graham_profile.php

RWW refers to Read/WriteWeb (Richard's blog). I haven't read the article BitGeek is referring to but I am guessing, like most posts on R/WW, it was written by a guest author.

How about people with no university education?

Yes, we've funded people who've never been to college, along with a large number who didn't finish.

One of the best programmers I've ever met dropped out of high school (I believe he eventually got a GED). Now he's Director (but never stopped programming) of an entire department with a handful of CS PhDs under him.

Do you do background checks for criminal history or education? Are there any fixed requirements like this?

(Sorry for not asking all of this in my first post)

If we didn't allow people with criminal records, we would have had to exclude one of our own partners.

I'm starting to feel that the elusive, intangible rtm is but a legendary myth, like the griffin or the free lunch.

how about the reddit founders? they say uva is the mit of the south, but even mit isn't an ivy.

They are wrong. Ga Tech is the MIT of the south :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_in_popular_culture

Not sure why we are proud of being qualified by "of the South" though.

Go Jackets!

Alexis (of Reddit) said he was joking right after he made that comment at his presentation at Startup School. I think the joke was referring to Chris Anderson's earlier talk -- he said that Wired had acquired Reddit and it was done by a couple of guys from MIT using Rails.