_sentient

YC changed my life, and I'll be forever grateful to PG, Jessica, and the team for taking a chance on a homeschooled, GED-wielding solo founder.

I could see it going both ways. You're not going to know all YC founders by default, but you will know more founders than if the batches were small.

The individual network is larger, but comprises a smaller % of the total network as the program scales.

Definitely not trying to imply that these people don’t exist elsewhere, but rather than YC does a great job getting a bunch of them in one place.

Definitely could have worded that better, but my point is that I found YC to cultivate a density of smart + ambitious + nice people that I haven't found in quite the same quantities in most other networks I've been a part of.

Tons of incredible non-YC folks out there too.

I wonder how much of this is a function of the W22 batch being remote.

We all know the benefits: The fundraising pop is great, the brand patina helps you hire better talent than you would otherwise, the advice can be useful, especially for first-time founders, you can sell into the YC network, etc. All of this pales, IMO, to the value of the personal connections you make in the program. It sounds like OP, by virtue of being 8,400 miles away, missed out on that.

I went through YC in S14, and I found the in-person experience to be invaluable. There were 80 companies at the time, so we had somewhere around ~200 founders in our batch. Even at that scale, you're not going to get to know everyone, and I found myself gravitating toward a smaller group of people who I connected with personally.

I'm not going to lie, YC was stressful. You're dropped in amongst bunch of smart and accomplished people who are sprinting as fast as possible toward the all-consuming Demo Day. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, but that's not unintentional. Those shared experiences formed the substrate of some amazing, life-long friendships.

I have 15+ close friends who went through S14. We talk every day. We've been in each other's weddings. We've watched each other have kids, shut down companies, start new ones, get acquired for enormous amounts of money, and everything in between. It's been incredible watching their trajectories over the last 9 years. Some are C-level execs at public companies, some are tier 1 VCs, a couple are billionaires, some are homesteaders and amazing parents. All of them are solid, kind, high-quality people, the likes of which you are unlikely to meet in the regular world.

I think you lose much of that in the remote-only format. If I were to go through a remote-only accelerator located in Singapore, I imagine I would make few meaningful personal connections. Like it or not, Zoom is a pretty thin facsimile of real human interaction.

My life's trajectory is meaningfully better for the friendships I made in S14, and I expect that trend to keep compounding over the next 30 years. If you missed that benefit, you missed much of what makes YC special.

It's a fairly time-honored tactic to redesign a brand that has lots of negative associations built up, and I could see Dara driving this as part of the overhaul. Typically that results in a full name change though.

Having read through this, it sounds like the brand team considered more radical changes but ultimately found that the broad name recognition and generally positive associations with the stark black/white aesthetic were too strong to ditch entirely. What remained was the ability to iterate on the original brand, and that's what you got.

I agree with ditching "the bit" icon in favor of a "U" though. That logo made zero sense, and always felt like a creative team stretching to imbue an abstract mark with some sort of meaning.

DM me. Twitter handle is in my profile.

I was at Demo Day, and couldn't disagree more.

If you actually believe that, go ahead and pick the ten companies you think are worth something, and I'll take the "unpromising" part of the batch. We can put a five year bet into longbets that the top ten companies of my group will outperform your ten companies, as scored by either exit value or value of last round raised.

Picking winners is hard, and most great companies today looked dramatically different when they were first getting started.

Depending on what stage of growth you’re at, your Startup School mentor should still be able to be helpful.

Most companies in the program are in the 0-1 phase, but there were a few in my group that were 1-N. The program format is flexible, so it’s fairly easy to tailor content to your audience.

YC core has a similar dynamic, and individual companies in a batch fall along a fairly wide range in terms of stage / progress. They only break out a formal growth track once companies have >50 employees.

YMMV depending on your mentor of course.

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