One evening in early 2008, I got the opportunity to meet Michael at an Austin hotel during SXSW. I pitched him on the idea for Airbnb, and he took us under his wing. For the rest of the year, we would visit his office every Friday night for hours on end. Each session, Joe and I would demo our latest site and report on our progress. Michael taught me about fundraising, product growth, and building the basics of a startup culture. He kept reminding us to take just a few more steps. If we had known just how many steps there were, we may have been discouraged, but Michael always made progress feel within reach. The most important thing Michael did was believe in us. Had it not been for Michael, there might not be an Airbnb today.
Michael was one of our group partners during S16, and I cannot think of a person better suited for this position than him. He consistently demonstrated the ability to cut through all of the nonsense founders tried to use to defend their actions (ourselves included) and delivered fantastic insights into our businesses to which we were blinded.
For me, the group partners were the primary value delivered by YC during the program, and I look forward to that value being continued under Michael's leadership. Congratulations!
I would personally seek Michael's advice when I was in the S15 batch because of how earnest his advice was. Even for companies outside his group you could really tell the effort he would give to provide quality guidance. One example of how much Michael cares was in the days before our demo day, I was the first to come in at 8AM and Michael literally had slept on the couch having stayed up all night providing feedback the night before. He comes out of the partners office, sits down, and has me pitch maybe 10 minutes after he probably woke up :) Congrats!
What didn't work with the Fellowship, exactly? In light of the dissolution, how did the winners of the Apply HN competition (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11440627) work with the most recent Fellowship class?
Fellowship worked really well for the most part, but our real goal is to 10x or 100x the number of startups that we help, and Fellowship in it's current form couldn't easily do that. The MOOC is essentially Fellowship 2.0 -- we're taking what we learned from Fellowship and then opening it up to the whole world so that anyone can participate.
> our real goal is to 10x or 100x the number of startups that we help, and Fellowship in it's current form couldn't easily do that
Do you account for the effects you have on the rest of the community when calculating your impact?
For example, I suspect YC is strongly responsible for the rise of "low amounts of equity without control for a small amount of funding" seed rounds, and for the existence of accelerators, in both cases globally.
The Fellowship model of investing tiny amounts - like "sparks", lighting a fire - into an enormous number of teams with as little friction as possible was the next logical step and I was looking forward to Fellowship copies sprouting all over the world.
Unfortunately by effectively ending the program you might be sending a signal to global investors not to try it, that YC Core is the deal size floor that works...
sama mentioned "financial aid" below, which sandslash clarified as "The grant will afford founders in more disadvantaged positions an opportunity to focus on their startup.", so it sounds like there will be something along those lines (although whether during or after the course, it's not entirely clear yet).
I wasn't thinking so much in the line of financial aid as funding global entrepreneurship. One of the impressive things I've noted about 500 Startups is their international outlook, where the goal isn't to find startups and bring them to Silicon Valley, but instead to fund them in situ while still providing a bridge to capital and expertise.
TBD how this plays out, but it'll be interesting to watch.
I always felt that onemonth.com basically was the YC MOOC. (It is funded by YC, and you see the themes of user first, user research, growth etc running through it).
Thanks Sam for making it free and available to all. I am really excited about the upcoming MOOC from YC. Can you share some more details on what kind of content will it have? What is the target audience? etc. Would love to know more about it.
Am I reading this correctly that the $20,000 YC fellowship is no longer available (and therefore the only want to get any form seed funding from YC is once again to move to the Bay Area)?
I'm confused by this - coming from an academic background, the words "financial aid" mean "help with subsidized tuition fees" to me, but you've said that this is going to be free. Can you elaborate on what you're thinking here?
The initial thought process around financial aid in this case is to give founders the means to be able to work on their idea, project, or company. I'd like to think of it more as a grant. The grant will afford founders in more disadvantaged positions an opportunity to focus on their startup.
We're still working out the details of program, but our aim is to encourage more people to work on their ideas, and hopefully help startups be better in the long run.
Got it. So funding for the ideas/projects/companies, not funding for the MOOC.
I don't envy you the task of deciding who will get the grants (and I say this as someone who routinely pores through hundreds of undergraduate student applications for scholarships and awards). Is there any way you can structure the MOOC to give you a cheap-but-not-trivially-gameable grade? That way you could formulate the "startup grants" as being awards for the best performers in the MOOC and cut down significantly on the administrative effort involved. Of course, you might want people to be working on their projects while they take the MOOC, in which case the timeline wouldn't work -- I don't know whether your MOOC is aimed more at preparing people for a startup or people currently doing a startup (this seems like a very important thing to decide and to be clear about).
... it occurs to me now that I've written this that you've almost certainly considered all the points I've raised already; but I figure I might as well leave them here just in case I've pointed out anything you missed. :-)
Yep! And I definitely appreciate your thoughtfulness and input. We are still fleshing out all the finer details of the program, but we will have a more detailed announcement soon.
Seeing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Buchheit in the announcement is a fun coincidence. He founded gmail. One of the things he did with gmail is gave it a command-line user interface.
I recently found out that a lot of people I would expect to know about it, don't. If that includes you, go to the gear on the upper right of your gmail, select that, then Settings, then turn keyboard shortcuts on and save.
Typing "?" randomly in gmail will let you know what shortcuts are there. It takes time for your fingers to learn them, but scanning email with j k [ ] is so much faster than a mouse. I don't even think before using / to search. :-)
> Typing "?" randomly in gmail will let you know what shortcuts are there. It takes time for your fingers to learn them, but scanning email with j k [...]
really? Oh wow... I've used j and k for ages, but didn't know about this pop-up. Thanks!
What the world needs is a solution to funding orders of magnitude more startups than currently get funded.
YC is in the incredibly fortunate position of having this opportunity but instead it looks like Sam Altman is falling into the same trap Larry Page did with Google. He's turning it into a bit of a rich guy's playground...
On behalf of the world that wasn't born into a world of wealth and elite connections: Please shine your massive resources on the many thousands of deserving little startups!
I don't think the MOOC gets away from this original ambition. YC is still interested in funding the maximum possible number of promising companies.
This is, however, a clear logistical challenge when you have a partner/advice model that doesn't scale all that easily. It may just turn out that an online, infinitely scalable net is precisely the best way to grow the number of great companies you can see and subsequently fund.
I don't think YC intends this to be a purely educational exercise.
RE: "We have no connection to most of the companies we fund."
This certainly isn't the perception on my part - the flood of posts from previous YC companies who talk about how they had help from other YC companies to polish their pitch makes it seem like current YC companies are definitively connected to previous YC companies.
The handful of blog posts you see here on HN are not representative of the whole batch. The majority of companies that we fund have zero alumni connections.
To me, this is actually one of the most important features of YC: the application process is completely open and we fund people from around the world regardless of background. Having graduated from college in Ohio in the 90s I moved here with zero connections and really wished for something like YC.
An awesome feature certainly. I appreciate the access (and the free teaching we're getting more of soon) :)
While I can't dictate what orgs do, it'd be helpful to see some "we applied with zero connections and got in on our strength alone" posts to balance it out.
I agree it would be good to have more blog posts with that message -- I worry that good founders won't apply due to the mistaken impression that alumni connections are required.
I not only had zero connections to YC.. I actually had zero connections to silicon valley! We (RedCarpet.Cash) are a India-based fintech startup - IMHO the third to ever get funded by YC.
We were also unusual because we are probably the first Indian YC startup with on-ground operations. We went through 3 rounds of YC interviews (not just the one!) .. because the interviewers had to learn about India. Our first interviewer was mwseibel !
What impressed me was that YC learned about India, invested in us and supported us through a pivot back in India. Big shout out to Aaron Harris, who is probably the resident Asia expert now [1]
We don't have any blog posts about it, but the company my friend's and I started got into YC with 0 connections and we're pretty much all from the midwest USA. No one took a risk on us until YC, every penny the company had came from 2 of the cofounders' pockets. While we're not out of the woods yet, there is no way we would still be at it w/o YC.
We applied and got in without any connections whatsoever to YC.
We hadn't ever been to Silicon Valley or to the United States, and no company from our country (Brazil) or even our continent had ever joined YC before us.
As a YC alum, I help a few companies polish their pitch every application season. I have no connection to most of those companies - they're just folks with an exciting idea who sent me a compelling email.
My cofounders & I got the same help from folks we didn't know when we were applying to YC. It's a pretty awesome community.
One question does YC == Y Combinator? In the TLDR, YC Core is renamed to "YC", and YC Group now consists of Y Combinator, YC Continuity, YC Research and the new YC MOOC. But I wasn't 100% clear whether the group Michael Seibel is the CEO of "YC" is the same as the component in the YC Group referred to as "Y Combinator".
It would have been a bit more clear (to me) if the group had been consistently referred to as "YC" if that's the new branding, so I'm guessing there are a lot of others like me who aren't certain as well.
Thank you so much for taking the time to teach this class again. The original contained nuggets of knowledge and wisdom that are hard to find anywhere else.
I expect to be downvoted but my YC interview with Michael a couple summers back left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm not really sure he asked more than "how is this a billion dollar company?" multiple times during the 10 minutes. I'm not sure why YC would pay $1k to fly us to Mountain View if that question was that important and wasn't already answered by our application.
Hope that was just a fluke though... Good luck YC!
It's very difficult to truly evaluate a business without talking to the founders. Sometimes a bad sounding business (such as air mattress rentals) will turn out to be a really great business (such as AirBnb).
That said, I'm sorry you had a bad experience. We're working on better ways to pre-screen startups before interviews so we can hopefully avoid as much unnecessary travel as possible.
Maybe other factors lead them to believe you had a billion dollar idea, but needed to tweeze it out of you. A VC trying to understand how you'll make a billion dollars is as a legit of a question as you can get.
I've had the privilege to hear you speak a couple times (and ask a few questions) and I thought your greatest strength was/is the following -
Take extremely complicated topics and succinctly and concisely boil it down to its fundamentals and present that in an easy-to-understand manner. Aka cut out the bullshit.
My understanding of a provost's role is to be as senior as possible without having to do any administrative, managerial, or executive duties -- so they can focus entirely on academic topics.
Is that basically what you're going for with the PB analogy, except s/academic/startup-mentoring/ ?
I like working with startups and advancing our program, but do not generally enjoy administrative work. This change enables me to do more of what I like and less of what I don't.
There are many great mentors in the startup world, but I've yet to meet one with a better time in to help out ratio than Michael Seibel. Excellent choice to lead YC.
It's also very inspiring to see YC Group tackling some of the world's most important problems. Excited to see what comes of this.
Earnest question: do you believe that full automation and mass displacement of workers, combined with a basic income will lead to anything resembling a decent quality of life for most?
Because I want to believe it, but all contemporary evidence points to an outcome that includes an even more extreme stratification of wealth and masses of struggling, impoverished people.
This is correct. Those at the top, like myself, will continue to develop AI and automation tools while doing our best to keep workers from "becoming smart" through low wages/benefits/minimally satisfying regulations. You wouldn't want your maid revolting against you, now would you?
Call me morally corrupt if you want, but there will always be morally corrupt people in the world whether we like it or not.
I asked Sam in a live webcast he did some months ago whether YC would build a chatbot for the fellowship to replace mentors and he said they would try. I wonder if they actually did and it'll be included in the MOOC.
Michael has been everywhere when it comes promoting YC. Si it's great to see this formalization.
Of course, the timing of this announcement is more exciting being that Michael and Qasar will be in Nigeria in 10 days :) [1][2]
re: MOOC
Sam/Michael,
What are your thoughts on (semi)formalizing a relationship with incubators globally as the top of the funnel for recruiting startups.
It can key into them helping adopt your MOOC curriculum. That way the fundamentals of knowledge are taken care of at the lowest of levels and potential YC recruits have the basics even before applying.
I was just having it as a rough idea to discuss with Michael when he visits only to see this post pop up
My guess is that just about any organization that's using it's business as a vehicle to push social changes is eventually going to start adopting such a structure. You want to keep the business profitable while at the same time making room for new efforts. If you just started opening up new departments in the already-profitable organization you risk watering down what makes it magical.
I actually think it's a great idea. So far the people who don't like it are they smaller is better crowd. The run it like a 3 person coffee shop crowd.
TL;DR:
Michael Seibel will be the new CEO of YC Core, which we are now just going to call "YC".
Ali Rowghani is now the CEO of the YC Continuity Fund.
I’m going to be the President of YC Group, which includes Y Combinator, YC Continuity, YC Research, and our new online class. We’ll add more organizational units over time.
We’re going to replace the Fellowship with a much larger MOOC launching next year.
In the Army we started everything with a BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front), a simple one sentence description about the presentation/email/whatever. One of the few things I miss...
The use of TL;DR bothers me because the word "summary" is appropriate or even "key points". It's not common use among all groups of people (old timers for example who also could read a blog post) and it really doesn't serve any clear purpose that "summary" does not.
I think few people know the full history of tl;dr. When it first started appearing, it wasn't used by the author, but in response to the author (like you wrote something way too long winded I'm not reading that)
Agree most probably don't know the history. TL;DR is a good example of how people can date themselves by how they communicate. They enter into something new and start to copy something that they see because they don't understand the nuance. Then the nuance disappears because of that new usage.
In reverse (with much older people) we have a few customers who pay by check and send a cover letter as well attached to the check (a formal holdover from olden times). Attaching the invoice is sufficient obviously.
It's concise and let's me cherry-pick the sections below I'd like to read - better than a table of contents except in those magazines that provide a paragraph for each of their lead stories).
I'd like to see other sama stories in an abbreviated form too.
Can you help me understand what is off topic about it? It's a discussion of PG and SamA and their management philosophy on a subthread about what PG thinks about SamA on a thread about SamA's new role at YC?
I would understand if you removed the whole toplevel thread, or lower threads about white cannibalism, but it seems strange that you removed mine.
I'll happily call this out as obvious concern trolling. While you are technically correct (as most concern trolling is designed to be), it's obvious to any reasonable person that referring to an "island of cannibals" to an English-speaking primarily Western audience will call up a specific cultural trope that involves people of color. And now I've spent my order of magnitude more effort pointing out your bullshit than you spent creating it, so I suppose the joke's on me.
Since you just made an accusation of casual racism, by your own reasoning, you must be casually racist.
> although it hinges on the assumption that HackerNews is mainly of interest to Westerners who are primarily English-speakers.
This is almost definitely true. I would bet money that the majority of HN readers speak English as a first language. Not all, of course, but greater than 50%.
Paul's meaning was to say "a completely alien group of people" and made the assumption that nobody reading his blog was a cannibal. If he had said "Sam would even impress a group of people of color", that might be racist. Certainly equating cannibals with people of color is racist.
The racism at play is not found in Paul's original phrase, but rather is latent in the listener's mind. Don't blame the messenger.
Of course it may be that, today, 51% of this site's readers are white native English speakers. Do you believe we should therefore interpret every statement according to how it's likely to be understood by this particular group? Remember these posts will be archived for posterity.
To fight racism is to promote racism. To ignore racism is to destroy racism.
As for your subtle quote-fudging: a "casual assertion of racism" isn't an "accusation of casual racism", so I don't think I can address that assertion.
Yes, Pitcairn and Roanoke come immediately to mind. Notice also that Paul writes "an island full of cannibals", not "an island of cannibals", so you may want to avoid making subtle and potentially misleading distortions to the original text.
Edit: When you say "island of cannibals" it implies an indigenous, or at least long-established, population, but "island full of cannibals" could easily mean a group of recent settlers who shipwrecked or marooned and then turned to cannibalism, as was likely the case in Pitcairn and Roanoke.
Not to mention - do you really think cannibalism was historically unknown on white European islands like the one on which Paul currently resides?
You are the one distorting the meaning. The joke clearly implies an existing culture of cannibals, a society entirely hostile and dangerous to outsiders and yet somehow brought to heel by Sam's super amazing charisma or work ethic or whatever else is the criteria by which cannibals choose their leaders. If a shipwreck situation were intended he would have stated it that way.
> an existing culture of cannibals, a society entirely hostile and dangerous to outsiders and yet somehow brought to heel by Sam's super amazing charisma or work ethic or whatever else is the criteria by which cannibals choose their leaders
All that may be true, but it took a racist to add the dimension of skin color.
