kevin

Most people are in Startup School haven't even started or have no idea. SUS is a perfect place to start on a small project with other people. From our experience at YC, getting a cofounder is the single best thing to improve the odds of your startup.

Neither did my cofounders when we got started.

Startup School is a good way to start finding a friend with similar interests. You gotta start somewhere.

- Kevin (YC Partner / Startup School Instructor/Host)

If you register now for Startup School 2019, you can now start using the directory to find other single founders looking for a cofounder. Filter by proximity, vertical and company description. This is a really great free resource to help you do the single best thing to help your startup.

Over 11K founders have already signed up for Startup School. Classes start July 22nd. https://startupschool.org

We have a video conf system we offer on Startup School website, but teams are welcome to organize something else if they can all agree.

Startup School is now open to all. Taking spot doesn't take away from anyone else now.

That's when you had to apply to Startup School for limited spots. Now it's open to everyone for free, which means we don't require the intro video to just register/signup for the class.

This year, each lecture is no more than 20 minutes. On any given week, there will be a max of 1 hour of video content for you to watch. More important than the lectures will be dedicating 30-60 minutes each week to participate in group sessions with other SUS founders.

At the minimum, to be considered active: you need to submit a weekly update about your progress every week (probably 5-15 minutes max).

Every week we release about an 1 hour of video content for you to watch.

Every week, there are group sessions with other SUS founders for you to talk about your startup. These should be about 30-60 minutes.

We provide discussion questions before your group sessions to give you topics to think about. Between 10-30 minutes of prep depending on how seriously you take it.

If you come to a SUS meetup in person, those are probably 2 hour events.

As you can see, it's probably a max of 2-3 hours a week in regards to time we ask of you. How much time you dedicate to your startup is up to you.

Yes! It's okay if you don't know which idea you want to pursue. Our first lecture actually goes over how to evaluate ideas for potential and helping you weigh and decide which to pursue.

Ah, good catch. Thanks for sharing a recording of the bug.

Hey HN, this is Kevin Hale, one of the partners at YC. I'll be hosting this year's Startup School alongside Adora Cheung. We learned a lot from last year's class and the Startup School team is really excited about this next iteration. Over the next few weeks, we're going to talk about some of those changes in more detail--about the data that drove those decisions and the new software we made to improve the experience for founders.

If you have any immediate questions about the course, please do let us know.

We did this interview with Sam a few weeks before he posted his recent essay on the topic. Not having to coordinate illustrations definitely helps with publishing speed. :) During the interview, we realized it was the first time I had heard him talk about the GDP idea as an answer to the branding problem of bringing UBI to America.

It's not just for hardware and software companies. Service companies can be pre or post launch too.

"It is humbling to go back to the labor market, hat-in-hand, asking for help. We did this when we hired you. We asked each of you to help us. You did not need us. There are plenty of great jobs. But we needed you. And thank goodness you came. We wouldn’t be here without you. But each of you was hired because the team before you failed to execute without you. And this is still true today."

Such a great perspective to have. More of this please.

We're really excited about this new series on The Macro about the first employees at startups. First employees are often unsung heroes at companies, but often incredible crucial to getting them off the ground and setting the culture of the startup.

I'm always remind of Derek Sivers video on First Followers when I think of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

No one communicated that Pinboard, the company, was a joke. I feel quite the opposite.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441978

Yes, I called all the other winners too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633517

Regarding Pinboard, the simple answer is he won the votes, he won the poll, but he made me feel uncomfortable in the end. I went into my good-faith phone call with him very much wanting this to work out and I was disappointed to come out of it tense and with less energy than when I went in. It’s touchy feely, I know, but the truth.

The thing with YC is startups can’t do the program in a vacuum. Even with the remote nature of the Fellowship, the founders affect the partners they work with and the other founders they work alongside, both in their batch and among the alumni community. We made the decision to call all the startups we’d consider taking on through Apply HN and make a decision on fit. I know that’s changing the rules at the last second, but we didn’t realize this until Pinboard entered the fray. I'm actually grateful for the head's up. Like all our experiments at YC, we design them to adapt as things happen, and they certainly did here.

I made the same phone calls with the other founders and they felt completely different. I wasn’t looking for gratitude or devotion or deference. My minimum was connection, my ideal was simpatico—evidence that I could spend a lot of time with the founder, which is what’s needed to make this relationship work well. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a good rapport with Maciej. Regardless of the vote situation, I’d make the same decision.

Maciej is clearly brilliant and quite witty and knows how to build and direct a passionate following. Pinboard is unique and I’m glad it exists. More opinionated software should exist in the world. Even though we couldn’t find rapport together, I sincerely wish him and his startup the very best.