- The Startup School tour has reached its final stop in Berlin after visiting over 15 cities and interacting with over 2,000 founders.
- The number of participants in Startup School has grown by over 40% throughout the course, with over 40,000 founders and 30,000 startups currently enrolled.
- Startup School has had a positive impact on the ability of participants to get funding from YC, with a higher percentage of startup school applicants receiving interviews compared to non-startup school applicants.
- Despite not being perfect, 106 startup school companies have been accepted into YC, including those with no traction, revenue, or funding.
- Solo founders are also encouraged to apply to YC, as 10 single founders have been accepted from startup school.
- The key to success is being clear and concise in describing your startup, using an average of 78 words to get your point across.
- Participants are advised to avoid lengthy and confusing descriptions, as they can hinder understanding and frustrate investors.
- The importance of practicing and refining your pitch is emphasized, as YC interviews and demo day pitches have limited time constraints.
- Participants are encouraged to continue editing and improving their company profiles with better descriptions.

- The median number of edits for the company descriptions was 1, indicating that there is room for improvement.
- Funding was the biggest obstacle for start-up companies, followed by meeting a co-founder.
- Launching and focusing on product were found to have the biggest impact on key performance indicators (KPIs).
- The top insights from talking to users focused on product, conversion, and monetization.
- Many participants did not launch their companies, and those who did took an average of 5 weeks to launch.
- Biotech and hard tech companies had longer weeks to launch, and should follow different advice.
- The percentage of weekly updates from launched companies increased over time.
- Start-up founders improved in explaining their ideas and getting others excited about them during group sessions.
- Qualitative feedback and support from other founders was highly appreciated.
- Some start-ups did not show up for group sessions, and improvements are being considered for the next course.
- Overall, start-up morale improved over time.

- Technical startups are happier and more productive
- Launching and shipping regularly improves morale
- Being full-time on a startup increases happiness
- Making money contributes to happiness
- Participating in group sessions boosts morale
- Having co-founders improves morale and increases the chances of startup success
- Talking to users leads to increased happiness and better morale
- Talking to just 3 users a week can provide valuable insights
- Startup School helps with interviews and accepts imperfect applicants
- Prioritizing launching and practicing pitching are important
- Talking to users is crucial for happiness and success in startups.

- The Startup School tour has concluded in Berlin after visiting multiple cities and engaging with thousands of founders.
- The number of participants in Startup School has grown significantly, with over 40,000 founders and 30,000 startups currently enrolled.
- Startup School has positively impacted participants' ability to secure funding from YC, with a higher percentage of startup school applicants receiving interviews.
- 106 startup school companies, including those with no traction, revenue, or funding, have been accepted into YC.
- Solo founders are encouraged to apply, as 10 single founders have been accepted from startup school.
- Clear and concise startup descriptions are crucial, with an average of 78 words being used to convey the message effectively.
- Participants are advised to avoid lengthy and confusing descriptions, as they can hinder understanding and frustrate investors.
- The importance of practicing and refining pitches is emphasized, given the time constraints of YC interviews and demo day pitches.
- Participants are encouraged to continuously improve their company profiles with better descriptions.
- Funding and finding a co-founder were identified as the biggest obstacles for start-up companies.
- Launching and focusing on product were found to have the greatest impact on key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Insights from user feedback focused on product, conversion, and monetization.
- Start-up founders who launched their companies took an average of 5 weeks to do so.
- Biotech and hard tech companies had longer launch periods and should follow different advice.
- The percentage of weekly updates from launched companies increased over time.
- Start-up founders improved in explaining their ideas and generating excitement during group sessions.
- Qualitative feedback and support from other founders were highly valued.
- Some start-ups did not attend group sessions, and improvements are being considered for future courses.
- Overall, start-up morale improved over time.
- Technical startups reported higher happiness and productivity levels.
- Regular launching and shipping of products improved morale.
- Being full-time on a start-up increased happiness.
- Generating revenue contributed to happiness.
- Participating in group sessions boosted morale.
- Having co-founders improved morale and increased the chances of start-up success.
- Talking to users resulted in increased happiness and better morale.
- Just three user conversations per week can provide valuable insights.
- Startup School assists with interviews and accepts imperfect applicants.
- Prioritizing launching and practicing pitching are important.
- Talking to users is crucial for happiness and success in start-ups.

YC Partners Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung reflect on Startup School 2019 and share some of our learnings from this year's program.

You can find the lecture slides and transcript here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/80

Hello Berlin We made it to week 10, this is the last stop on the startup school tour We have something kind of special today, so Adore and I are doing a presentation together, and it's all based on numbers from the last 9 weeks of Startup School.

She's gonna sort of kick it off, and what we're gonna do is probably talk for like hopefully 20 minutes, and then we'll open up to Q&A to answer all of your questions or anything else you wanna talk about, and then we'll have like more mingling and eating and such until we have to kick you out and go have you work on your company or apply to YC, if that's what you still have left to do, at 8 p.m.

I'm 1 of the partners at YC, and we're just going to go over what we learned during Startup School.

So it's week 10, we made it, congratulations.

So, the Startup School team has been in the past few weeks traveling around the world, visiting cities where there's lots of Startup School founders.

We've done 20 events at this point, over 15 cities, and we've interacted with over 2,000 founders in person.

So, similar to how we started, we wanted to end Startup School by looking at the numbers.

Most of you don't know this, but Startup School actually grew a lot during the course itself.

When we held orientation back in July, end of July, we were around 20,000 founders and 21,000 startups with over 20,000 people auditing the course just for the content.

And as we let more people in during the course, as of today, the number swelled by over 40%.

So you'll see we have now over 40,000 founders in Startup School and over 30,000 startups.

There are over 77,000 people actually subscribed to the content and over, yeah, with the number of people increasing between 30 and 50%.

Really cool that female founders increase the most here.

So 1 of the things that we wanted to look at was whether Startup School made a difference.

So we looked at the last 2 batches to see how last year's participants compared to the rest of the population in regards to their ability to get funding from YC.

So in the end, from the past 2 batches, 9.7% of start-up school applicants that applied got an interview, versus 9.1% of non-start-up school applicants got interviewed.

That means 6.6%, if you did startup school, 6.6%, you had a higher chance of getting interviewed.

And we think this year it'll be much, much higher because we focused the course a lot on helping you build that application and just focus your startup on the right things to get those questions done well.

All right, so if we look deeper into the numbers, as of today, 106 startup school companies have been accepted into YC.

For a group of people who are more likely to get interviewed, you'd think they look amazing on paper, they got into YC.

Startup School founders accepted into YC are surprisingly different.

In every city we visited, founders are constantly asking us to see if YC still wants to accept companies that are not perfect, that are like them but not perfect.

And the big takeaway is that YC is not afraid of warts, and we can assure you, no startup we've ever accepted has been perfect.

So dig a little bit deeper into these 106 companies from startup school that has gotten to a YC already.

40 of them had no traction when they got in, so that means no revenue, no users yet.

50 had no funding whatsoever, meaning 0 dollars cash in the bank.

Some of them didn't even incorporate yet.

Quite a few of them were still working at jobs or might have been college and still working part-time.

So this is 1 of the things is we encourage you, even if you don't get in, is to keep trying again.

A lot of people apply 3 to 4 times and on that fourth or fifth try they get in.

Some of the companies we didn't really like the idea they applied with and they actually pivoted during the batch and so that counts for a dozen of them and a lot of them applied late so by the time you watch this video you're applying late and we still encourage you to apply.

And finally, this is the most asked question in our tour, which is if I'm a solo founder, can I still do YC?

10 single founders got in from startup school.

We average around 10% of the batches around solo founders now, if not a little bit more than that.

We highly encourage every team to have a technical co-founder, but if you don't, it does not disqualify you.

In fact, 3 of the startup school companies that have gotten into YC were not technical.

All right, so how can you replicate their success?

It's very simple and we're about to, I'm about to repeat a lot of things we've already said during Startup School, but the best thing you can do is when you talk about your startup, There's a question on the applications, is what are you making?

And if you've watched Kevin's lecture from a couple weeks ago, the next few slides will seem very familiar.

So, 1 is be clear on what you're working on, no jargon.

Not only be clear, but don't use all the words in the dictionary, be very concise in how you get your point across.

So to be even more specific on that question on the application of what are you working on, startups that have gotten accepted into YC use on average 78 words to describe what they do.

So, 78 words might seem a little or a lot to you, but in fact, what it does is it looks like this.

It's 2 paragraphs and gets your point across well.

So if you have something that looks longer than this, then you should really go through your description and start cutting words and finding sentences that you really don't need to have in there.

Alright, so if this is what a description should look like, what should a description not look like?

Well, here's an example of, this is literally, this is actually 1 of my favorite ones, because, as you'll see next, of a description that did not get accepted or get an interview.

So we couldn't fit the whole thing in here, but if you read, like this guy, or I forgot who the founder is, but he basically knows he needs to write something short, but decides to write a wall of text.

In fact, that wall of text was the longest description we got of all applications in the past 2 batches.

It doesn't help us understand your startup any better.

It actually just confuses us more and frustrates us.

It basically tells us that you don't know how to be efficient when it comes to getting people to understand what your startup does.

So if you think about it, if this is how long it takes you to describe what you do, if you can imagine when you come in for a 10 minute interview, the interview would be done before you even finish your description.

Furthermore, what culminates at the end of YC itself is a 2 minute demo day pitch.

So again, that's even less time to get your point across.

And so you really need to start practicing now on how you deliver on how you explain your company.

The good news is, in startup school when you applied, or when you registered, you had to fill out your company description, and we actually forced you to write it in less than 200 characters or less.

Now this is a histogram of the number of characters of words that startup school companies use.

And you can see that a lot of you got to the 200th character and probably wanted to write more, but have to stop because we forced you.

The result is this description actually averages around 40 words or less.

So by force, we've made you do it less than the average of 78 words, so that's good news.

So when you transfer your descriptions to your OIC application, we suggest you to not expand much further than the number of words you've already used.

All right, so 1 thing we noticed and were worried about was the lack of editing on your hand when you entered in that Startup School description.

So over the course, over the 10 week course, we've been trying to help you make that description a little bit better.

In fact, a lot of the group sessions were designed to help you with that.

But as you've been practicing pitching every week, many of you didn't actually go back into your profile and edit your company profiles with a better description.

It's actually the 1 thing we do at YC to help startups more than anything else is really get down the 1 or 2 liner in their descriptions.

So the next startup school we're gonna probably focus more on helping you do that and forcing you to document your changes over time.

The median number of edits was only 1, so we think that most likely the description you have right now can be improved on drastically.

So if you need more tips on how to do this well, Kevin's last lecture, How to Evaluate Ideas Part 2, that's a name on the YouTube channel.

Please, please go watch, as you see a lot of the slides are lifted from there.

So, all right, I'm gonna let Kevin take over for the next bit.

Every week we ask companies to let us know about their progress.

If you got an email from the Kevin inspirational bot, then you know that basically we were trying to get you to just spend 10 to 15 minutes at the most to just tell us what's been going on with your company.

And in the last 9 weeks, that's been over 124,000 pieces of data.

And so we've got a lot of interesting insights from that.

The first thing is concerning what start school companies considered their biggest obstacle.

So, not surprising to us, but it is kind of worrisome.

You were worried about lack of resources and you couldn't move forward as a result of not having money.

And the other 1 that's interesting on here is like meeting a co-founder at number 6.

And the reason I want to kind of point these out is that if you look at what people said actually improved their KPI, the metric that they considered mattered the most, when we did the text analysis, it looks very different.

So you think your biggest problem is 1 thing, but the thing that would actually help you the most are very different.

So number 1, of course, is launching, getting out the door.

Once you launch, you can move that KPI, which is wonderful.

Other stuff on here, a lot of it concerning product and things dealing with the users.

If you're having problems where the difference between what you think your biggest obstacle is and the thing that makes the biggest difference to your KPI are 2 different lists like this, watch Adora's lecture.

She talks about how to prioritize your time.

It's actually doing really, really well on YouTube.

A lot of people have found her tips in there on how to think about your to-do list in a much more KPI driven way.

We asked you to talk to your users and tell us what did you learn from them and these are the top things that people got.

Not surprisingly, they're focused on product.

And basically, the best thing you can do is make something people want.

And the top 2 insights, because they're focused on conversion and monetization, I've got 2 lectures that we did back to back on improving landing page conversion and pricing.

So those are good places to start if you want to improve things for your users.

Now, actually most of the participants, unfortunately, in startup school did not launch.

And so when you were considered not launched, the KPI that you tracked was weeks to launch.

And so these are the numbers and how they came out.

People on average went from WTL, weeks to launch, of 7 weeks down to 5 weeks at the end.

For some reason that should have been to 0 by now.

What's actually super interesting here is that the median weeks to launch is about 4.

So that indicates that in the average there, it's being actually very much impacted by people having very large weeks to launch.

And so, if you haven't already, you're gonna find a theme here for this presentation.

Watch Michael's lecture on how to plan an MVP.

He talks about how you should only be making the first version that takes just a few weeks to launch.

And so even that meeting is double the number that we recommend for our companies.

In that talk, he also coined a new term that we've been using at Serp's going out YC, the heavy MPP, and this is if you're a hard tech or biotech company, you might need to build something that's a little more substantial.

And in fact, you guys actually believe you do need to.

You're almost double the number of weeks to launch that you estimate, And unfortunately, if you look at the graphs by comparison, so this is the average startup school weeks to launch as it's going slightly down over time.

You somehow add features over the course of the week.

And that's not good, because actually, from our experience funding over 200 biotech, hard tech companies, is that they should be following different advice or rules than other companies.

Which is why we recommend, if you haven't watched it, watching Jared's lecture on advice for biotech and hard tech companies.

He basically talks about 7 wonderful examples of YC companies that built a much lighter weight, heavy MVP, and creative ways of getting their company off the ground, even though they don't have millions of dollars and lots of time to build the first version.

For the companies that did launch, you guys did great.

So this number represents the percentage of the weekly updates that were submitted that came from companies that launched.

So at the beginning of the course, a third of the weekly updates came from launch companies, and by the end, half of them were from launch companies.

In fact, 2,253 startups, we can actually track, switched from weeks to launch to a different KPI during startup school.

To put this into perspective for us, it took over 10 years for Y Combinator to launch that many companies through our program, and in startup school we did it in 10 weeks.

All right, as you know, every week during Startup School we matched you with other startups to help you practice talking about your own startups.

And we rated, everybody at the end would rate each other on 3 metrics.

And would you want to work with the founders?

For the first question, over time, you guys got better at explaining your idea.

As you can see, the differential from each week to week was over 0.1%.

To put that in perspective, a 0.1% increase represents almost 100 startups because of the number of startups in startup school.

And by the end, there was a 7.1% increase overall.

All right, in terms of improving on selling yourselves, you guys also got better over time.

There was a 9.5% improvement from the beginning.

The biggest improvement was actually getting other people excited about your idea.

And so there was a 17% improvement since the beginning.

We know that there's a lot more work that needs to be done here, and we want to, in the future, create a lecture to help you get better at getting other people emotionally excited about your ideas.

Being able to do that helps you with things like recruiting and getting customers on board and also investors on board in the future.

If you want more help in structuring your investor pitch, Kevin's lecture, second lecture, It was called How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Part 1.

All right, so while the quantitative ratings made it easier to get founders involved, startup school founders loved it when you actually gave each other qualitative feedback, comments, after the group session.

We were amazed to see how supportive everyone was with each other in terms of giving this feedback.

In fact, over 93,000 pieces of qualitative feedback were created during the course.

So many of you offered to help with introductions to customers, often whispered words of encouragement that we know made a huge difference to someone struggling to make the magic happen.

1 of the main reasons for doing these group sessions together is sort of like emotional supporting group therapy because we're all going through the same things.

And so I think that achieved the result we were looking for in that sense.

The generosity we saw in the comments is what makes doing a startup in a batch incredibly powerful.

So thank you for everyone for taking the time to do this.

On the flip side, not all of you are great.

So 19% of startups who requested to participate in a group session did not show up.

So this graph shows updates, requests for group sessions and attendance and no-shows over the last 9 weeks.

Oddly enough, 23% of startups who submitted a weekly update didn't even request a group session.

We're looking for the next time, for the next course, of how to make this easier and more convenient for startups because we think that this has been actually helpful, not just in improving your pitch, but also for morale reasons.

Interesting enough, this graph actually shows where we messed up in the first week.

So that big gap there between number of updates submitted and requested shows that you guys were very confused about how to request group sessions at the very start of Startup School, and that's why we gave everyone a free meet on that first 1, and that sort of stabilizes as we get down here on the end.

Just like how you guys are probably using metrics to help improve your startup, we are too as well.

so we also asked you guys to submit how are you feeling?

What's your morale on working on your startup?

And overall, out of 124,000 pieces of weekly feedback, you can see the trend is you got a little happier over time.

But we actually wanted to segment this out to see what actually really impacted and what made a big difference for morale for companies.

And so it led to some of the most interesting and unique insights from the program for offset Y Combinator.

First 1, technical startups, no surprise, are happier.

1 thing to notice is you'll think that the difference here in changes are small, but because of the amount of data that we're collecting across each 1 of them, these are pretty statistically significant.

And so if you're looking to be quantitatively happier, these are ways to do it.

If you launch, you're a little bit happier than the unlaunched people.

1 thing that helped a lot of companies to rethink how they thought about launching was watching Kat's lecture on how to launch again and again.

It just really changed that bar from being a launch that requires press to being 1 that is just about shipping and deploying on a regular basis.

If you're full-time on your startup, you're a lot happier, obviously.

Probably because you can also make more progress.

That whole aphorism, money can't buy you happiness, not true.

Adora's got a good lecture on this, on focusing on revenue, how to set KPIs.

It's her first lecture from the startup school.

And I actually think it's 1 of the underappreciated ones.

It's a lecture that really talks about why 99% of you should be focused on revenue and be honest with yourself about whether you're actually doing that or not.

People who did not flake on group sessions were way happier than people who did.

Basically, feeling like you're doing a startup and having other people to talk to and being part of the community in batch meant that you're happier working in your startup than those who did not participate at all.

The happiest cohort was actually people who were in teams.

And this is actually 1 of the main reasons we always say that we want companies to try to have co-founders.

It is so hard to do a startup on your own, and this is usually, morale is the thing that kills a lot of companies and founders.

And so again, when we talk about we want you to try to have a co-founder, it is to help with the longevity of your startup, not because we just don't want to select those that don't have teams.

And then this was the most surprising thing that we learned from startup school, that founders and teams that talked to users were way happier over time than those who didn't.

And what's interesting about these 2 cohorts is that the people who did not talk to any users at all, they were the only cohort that actually had morale get worse over the course of start of school in the 9 weeks than those who didn't.

So the lesson, the moral of this morale, are you feeling sad?

The median number of users that start school teams talk to was just 3 users a week.

It actually provides a ton of insight for you, but apparently it's better than Prozac.

If you want more information about how to talk to users and a better way of handling that in a sort of structured way that helps you improve your product, watch Eric's lecture from the first week of startup school.

In summary, from this presentation, startup School helps you get interviewed.

Like you can get accepted even if you have a wart.

Try to write your description in 70 words or less.

You're probably taking too long to launch.

Practice makes you better at pitching, talking about getting people to understand you, get excited and want to work with you.

And lastly, talking to users make you happy, Which is why we're gonna switch over to talking to you guys Thank

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Kevin Hale and Adora Cheung - Startup School 2019 by the Numbers