The batches are the secret sauce. (Well, not that secret.) Doing YC without the batches would be a very impressive feat to pull off. It would turn the piston driven machine they have now into the equivalent of a turbine.

The people are the secret sauce. Specifically, the people at YC who know everyone worth knowing in the valley. You join YC for their rolodex; nothing else they do is that different from any other accelerator.

Not that YC doesn't add value (they do; especially in companies with very raw founders) but Silicon Valley is all about who you know. That's a lot of value right there.

What does that even mean?

Apologies for using a metaphor. Let me try to clarify. Batches allow you to look at a bunch of companies at roughly the same point in time. So you now get to look at the companies against the backdrop of all the other companies in the same batch. Rather than having to make a one-shot decision about a single start-up you make a decision about which N of the 100's of applicants you like best which will give you a statistical advantage.

But it is possible that YC now has crunched enough data and has enough people in the alumni network that they can abandon the batch model and get the same kind of quality without having to use the batch model.

The 'late' applications were a hint in this direction, if they get rid of the batch model entirely they will have potentially a huge benefit both in load (batches will create temporary overload) and in total throughput.

So instead of having two 'strokes' per year they'd be moving at an ever accelerating pace until they run at the maximum rate at which viable applicants can apply and be processed.

To explain a bit of the metaphor, a piston has very discrete stages to produce work (at minimum, up and down) whereas a turbine is continuously spinning. YC's history has relied on 'stages' where all the companies are on the same path, they present at demo day, and the investors know exactly what to expect. If they turned into a 'turbine', the companies would all be at random stages, Demo Day would be much different, and YC would come to resemble more typical VC funds.

Hopefully, they'll also be captioned so that deaf entrepreneurs like me can also watch. They've set the standard by funding non-profits, hopefully they'll also set another standard by building an accessible lecture series.

Very rough first pass transcription, I'm ironing out the typos: http://www.bnjs.co/2014/09/25/transcript-lecture-1-how-to-st...

Apologies for the delayed response, bnjs. Apparently I need to figure out a way to get replies to comments. Thanks for the awesome transcription, I know how much of effort these take :).

If they aren't let me know and I'll transcribe as much as I have time for, I did the same for one of the start-up schools.

A transcript would be amazing! Thanks. Could you share the Startup School transcript that you wrote also? Would love to read it.

I also needed a transcript (doubles as notes). Will post my own transcript here for you guys.

HackReactor is doing it with great success, wouldn't be too surprised to see positive feedback for this course leading to something similar.