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.
