- The Startup School team consists of YC partners, a batch director, a software developer, and a representative for feedback and data analysis.
- The team aims to provide support and resources for founders to work on their startups, improve their pitch skills, and build a global community.
- The program is designed to cater to different types of startups, including those at various stages of development and with different team compositions.
- The deadline for joining the program has been extended to August 4th.
- To graduate, participants need to submit 8 out of 10 weekly updates on their progress.

- To participate in the program, you need to submit something 8 out of 10 weeks and participate in 8 out of 10 group video sessions.
- Submitting a weekly update is crucial to be able to participate in a group session.
- To be eligible for the $15,000 grant, you need to graduate by meeting the requirements.
- The application for the grant and YC is due on September 25th.
- Participating in Startup School does not affect your chances of getting into YC in the future.
- The time commitment is about 2 to 3 hours per week.
- Important deadlines include Wednesday at 4 p.m. for weekly update submission and Thursday at 8 p.m. for group sessions.
- The software includes weekly updates, lectures, meetups, forums, and more.
- Tips for weekly updates include being honest, concise, and tracking revenue or engagement metrics.
- Completing your profile and keeping it updated affects the matching algorithm for group assignments.

- The video discusses the importance of accurately filling out information for the group matching algorithm in Startup School.
- It provides tips for participating in group sessions, such as sharing video connections and using desktop computers with broadband Wi-Fi.
- Weekly updates must be submitted by Monday to participate in group sessions.
- The video explains the structure of group sessions, including introductions, progress updates, goal setting, discussions, and anonymous feedback.
- Group sizes are smaller this year to improve participation and engagement.
- There will be 20 lectures by YC Partners, recorded on Wednesdays and released on Thursdays.
- Startup School meetups will be organized in various cities for participants to network and discuss lectures.
- A new directory feature allows participants to search for other companies and potential co-founders based on various criteria.
- Spamming the directory will result in a ban from all YC events.

- The co-founder matching and searching system does not guarantee finding a co-founder, but it allows for networking and starting conversations with like-minded individuals.
- The forums are an underutilized but valuable resource for getting help and advice from the community.
- Use the forums to ask for help and share expertise, as there are thousands of founders with different skills and experiences.
- The library contains written content organized by topic and stage of startup, which can be helpful when facing challenges.
- Startup School offers deals and credits from companies like AWS, Google, Microsoft, Brex, and Stripe, which can be revoked if shared with others.
- Next steps include submitting weekly updates, updating profiles and company information, browsing through the forums, library, and deals, and participating in lectures and group sessions.

- The Startup School team consists of YC partners, a batch director, a software developer, and a representative for feedback and data analysis.
- The program aims to provide support and resources for founders to work on their startups, improve their pitch skills, and build a global community.
- The program caters to different types of startups at various stages of development.
- The deadline for joining the program has been extended to August 4th.
- Participants need to submit 8 out of 10 weekly updates on their progress to graduate.
- To participate, weekly updates and group video sessions are required.
- Submitting weekly updates is crucial for participation in group sessions.
- Graduates meeting the requirements are eligible for a $15,000 grant.
- The application for the grant and YC is due on September 25th.
- Participating in Startup School does not affect future chances of getting into YC.
- The time commitment is about 2 to 3 hours per week.
- Important deadlines include Wednesday at 4 p.m. for weekly update submission and Thursday at 8 p.m. for group sessions.
- The software includes weekly updates, lectures, meetups, forums, and more.
- Tips for weekly updates include being honest, concise, and tracking relevant metrics.
- Completing and updating profiles affects the group matching algorithm.
- The video explains the importance of accurate information for the algorithm.
- Tips for group sessions include sharing video connections and using desktop computers with broadband Wi-Fi.
- Weekly updates must be submitted by Monday to participate in group sessions.
- The video explains the structure of group sessions and the importance of engagement.
- Group sizes are smaller this year to improve participation.
- There will be 20 lectures by YC Partners, recorded on Wednesdays and released on Thursdays.
- Startup School meetups will be organized in various cities for networking and discussion.
- The directory feature allows searching for other companies and potential co-founders.
- Spamming the directory will result in a ban from YC events.
- The co-founder matching system allows networking and starting conversations.
- The forums are a valuable resource for help and advice from the community.
- The library contains written content organized by topic and stage of startup.
- Startup School offers deals and credits from companies like AWS, Google, Microsoft, Brex, and Stripe.
- Next steps include submitting updates, updating profiles, using forums, library, and deals, and participating in lectures and group sessions.

YC Partner Kevin Hale introduces Startup School 2019 and walks through the program for this year.

You can still sign up for Startup School through August 4th at https://startupschool.org.

The Startup School team will be holding an AMA session from 1-3PM PT today on the Forum to answer any questions about the course and content here: https://www.startupschool.org/posts/24580.

Good morning founders, welcome to Startup School 2019.

I'm going to go over 4 things in this orientation.

I'm going to introduce you to the Startup School team.

I'm going to introduce you to your fellow classmates slash founders.

I'm going to explain how Startup School works and then give you a tour of the software, the events and the content that we're making for you for the next 10 weeks.

There are 5 people that make up the Startup School team.

We will act as the hosts and we'll also instruct some of the lectures.

He's in charge of helping you guys with all the logistics and answering your questions and helping you understand what's next and just being super helpful and responsive to whatever it is that you might need in regards to what do I have to do for startup school.

We have Kyle, he's built all the software and written all the code that you guys will be using for the course.

And he'll probably be adding new features as we go on based on your feedback.

And then we have Ashvin, who's going to be act as the person who's going to represent your voice.

He's going to be analyzing the data, looking at the stuff that you submit to us, and then looking at all your feedback, and even be reaching out to many of you to get an understanding of like, how is startup school going?

Are we sort of meeting your needs and helping me and Adora adjust what is necessary to make the course be so much better for you guys.

And then we have an army of YC alumni, and then of course all the partners who are giving lectures, who's going to be participating and helping us out.

They'll be inside of the forums, they'll be at our live events, and it's going to be super Awesome.

If you need help, this is the email, StartupSchoolAtYCombinator.com.

That person is probably going to be Steven that's manning that, but he'll triage it appropriately.

Where I hope you will ask for lots of help is from your fellow classmates, from the forums.

It is actually a lot of how sort of YC works.

People don't constantly come to the YC partners to get help, they actually rely on 1 another.

And it's through the forums where this is going to happen, where the community is built, and it'll feel really magical.

We've got a couple of goals for the Startup School team.

I'm hoping that you can use us as an excuse to work on your startup.

We have built this 10 week sort of structure.

We've built these set of lectures based on a curriculum that we think works for all different kinds of companies.

And we hope that you will use us as a vehicle for working on that passion project or idea.

We want to improve how you think and talk about your startup.

We want to help you understand how investors think about ideas, and We want you to get a lot of practice in on talking about your idea in a concise and clear way.

And then for companies that are already launched and have users or revenue, Startup School is going to be an awesome place for you to revisit first principles, to look at how you thought about the idea, and try to find, oh, where are there holes in your thinking, or where are there opportunities in thought that can help you sort of unlock growth or opportunities or even completely rethink how your business might work.

And then lastly, we want to build a global community of founders, something that we think hasn't been done before at this scale.

Now for most people who start Y Combinator and are entered into the batch, most of them have this thought that they're in the wrong place, that they're too early, that they're too late, or they have imposter syndrome.

And I want you to know that you are not alone, that you are in the right place, and that you're in good company.

There are 28,000 founders who are participating in Startup School and another 25,000 people who are auditing the class just to get updates and keep up to date on sort of the lectures and ideas that we're presenting.

1 thing I want to say is that more people are going to be joining the class.

We've actually moved the deadline because we realized that, hey, since we require 8 out of 10 group sessions or weekly updates to consider that as graduating from the course.

There's no reason why we should cut off signups until after the second week.

So the deadline now is August 4th, and spectators expect me to try to get you to join us founders over here and working on your startup sooner than you might think you're ready.

Now, there are 21,000 startups that are registered for Startup School.

And I want you to know that there are so many different kind of startups taking this class and that we have actually designed a program that's going to work hopefully for all of you.

11,000 of you are full-time, 8,000 of you are part-time and that means that we're going to work on helping you think about your idea in a way that make you feel confident about quitting that job, or figuring out what you can do when you have only limited amounts of time to work on your startup so that you're most productive on your startup.

We have 4,000 launched companies, but we also have 5,000 companies that only have prototypes, 4,000 who are just at the idea stage.

And that means that we've got content for all of you.

5,000 of the companies are actually teams and 16,000 companies are single founder companies.

Part of that has to do with the new single founder matching program that we've built into this year's software.

But I want you to know that we've got really great resources for you.

There's 12,000 companies that have at least 1 technical founder, which means there's 9,000 companies that have no technical founders.

And I want you to know that that doesn't mean that you're hopeless.

You have opportunities and we have content and inspiration that will work for you.

And then we have 4,000 companies that have at least 1 female founder.

And so you all will hopefully be able to find and support 1 another.

And I want you to know that you might be skeptical.

How can an online class be able to address all these different types of companies' needs.

And I want you to know that this is basically what regular Y Combinator looks like in an actual batch.

We have groupings, we have people who are non-technical, we have people who are teams or just single founders, we have people who are just at the idea and prototype stage, and we mix them all together, every single batch.

And the reason we're able to do that is because companies are more alike than they are different, and that for all of them, we always have to revisit first principles and that most of what we have to help them with is storytelling of their company, which everyone can always use help with for thinking about things from first principles to figure out like what are better ways of unlocking growth.

And most importantly, is we figure out how to match them and group them up with other people that are just like them, or have them be influenced by other people that are ahead of them.

And our group sessions are going to be designed to help you get just that in an online way, which we're really excited about.

These are some of the cities that have the most number of startups that are participating in Startup School.

For many of these, we are organizing our own live events, but we also know lots of other companies where people are self-organizing, lecture-watching events or their own sort of meetups, and we totally support you to do that, because 1 of the nice things about doing a company in a community is that you're not alone, you get a chance to sort of vent, and that sort of helps sustain you when things are difficult and hard.

And so, as we said, you are in good company and you're in the right place.

This is just a couple of the verticals that we have doing YC.

2,400 companies working on B2B solutions.

1,400 doing artificial intelligence startups.

400 companies working on blockchain ideas.

And 1 that I really, really love is that we have 97 companies working on moonshots, really, really hard tech solutions, which I'm super excited to be a part of.

You only have to do 2 things, and we've made it really, really simple.

It's the reason why we have such a high pass rate for startup school.

You have to submit 8 out of 10 weekly updates.

These are really quick briefs about your progress.

Basically you just have to submit something 8 out of the 10 weeks.

Show us that you're doing something on your company and doing some kind of self-reflection.

And then you have to participate in 8 out of the 10 group video sessions.

This is super easy and maintainable to do, and we don't ask that much extra time of you.

We want you to spend as much time working on your own startup as possible.

1 thing to Keep in mind is that you must submit a weekly update to be able to participate in a group session.

So if I was going to choose 1 to skip, I would definitely not skip the weekly update because that will mean you will automatically probably not be able to do a group session.

And so you don't want to be in that bucket because that's going to make it much more difficult for you to graduate.

Well, you have to graduate, which means 8 out of 10 on the weekly updates and the group sessions.

And then at the end of the course, you apply to YC.

That's a Wednesday on the last week of the course.

We'll actually spend some time talking you through and giving some advice about how to fill out that application.

And this works out really nicely, both for us and for you.

It works out well for us because we're reusing the same system that we use to read through thousands of applications.

So not only are you applying for the $15,000 equity-free grant, you're also applying for a chance at the $150,000 that we give to the YC core companies.

I want you to make it very, very clear that nothing that you do in startup school and nothing that you have submitted in the past, in past applications, affects your future possibility of getting into the next batch.

And the reason that you should believe us is that it would be ridiculous for us to have permanently rejected, for example, the founders of Dropbox based on their homework helper application and thinking that they would never be able to come up with some other idea.

So again, nothing about the stuff that you do, or participate, or submit during startup school means that it's going to affect your future capabilities of getting into YC.

I want you to know that we do not think of it like that, and I hope you do not think so either.

Now, after submitting on September 25th, we will do interviews in October.

And I want you to know that if you get lucky enough to be also accepted into the YC batch for the next time, but all you cared about was getting the equity-free grant, you do not have to take, except it into YC.

The other thing to keep in mind is applying for the grant is totally optional and applying to YC is also optional.

But in order to get at the grant, you have to apply to YC.

That just sort of makes things efficient for us and I think it just doubles your opportunity for something wonderful to happen to you.

So based on our basic requirements, those 2 things that we want you to do, it should take about 2 to 3 hours a week.

And that means taking about 15 minutes to write your weekly update, it should not take longer than that, you should not be writing a long essay about your company, We want you to practice being concise as much as possible.

That's going to help you through all the different parts of you talking about your startup, either with others or to your board or to your employees, et cetera.

We're going to generate about an hour of video content every week.

And then there's going to be 30 minutes to 1 hours in a group session, and then probably another 15 to 30 minutes to prep for that, depending on how much dedication you want to have for that.

In regards to what you should block off, we recommend Thursdays at 8 p.m.

This is the time that we've found last year most people were able to do group sessions or were available.

So we picked this time for everyone as a default.

If you can't make Thursdays at 8 p.m., you can switch that up and I'll talk about that later on.

Throughout the week, this is kind of the major things that comes up that you should expect.

On Mondays, we open up the weekly updates for you to start submitting them.

And then we also do a Monday AMA inside of the forums.

We record the live lecture at an office on Wednesday mornings, and then your weekly update is due by 4 p.m.

If you don't submit it by then, you won't be able to be matched up for a group session.

We need to have that deadline to give us enough time for our algorithms to run.

And then the video lecture is released for those people that didn't attend the live recording session.

That will be released on YouTube Thursdays at noon.

And then we have the group sessions that are scheduled Thursday at 8 p.m.

And then on Fridays we do an AMA also in the forums.

Here are the important deadlines just to reemphasize them.

Wednesday is 4 p.m., Wednesday at 6.30 p.m.

This is when the algorithm sort of locks the groups down so you can't change your time or be asked to be put into a different group after this time period.

We release the video lectures on YouTube.

So Again, we have the weekly updates and the group sessions, but we also have lectures, the meetups, the directory, the forums, the library, and the deals.

As you can see, There's only 2 things that are required for you to use in our software.

All the rest of this stuff is optional stuff, but these are the 8 things I'm going to go over for the rest of this presentation.

The update is about the progress that you made in the previous week.

We do ask you to tell us about your goals for the upcoming week, but for the most part, we're asking you to analyze the last week's work.

If you're getting stressed out about this, you're doing it wrong.

And you can find them under the My Updates tab.

Here's some tips to help you with your weekly update.

If the number is 0 in terms of progress made on your key metric, whether it's revenue or engagement, you need to write down 0.

Don't change your metric to something that is not as important, Okay?

If you do that, you will not help yourself.

You want to be really good at synthesizing and summarizing your experience so that way you can learn from it quickly later on.

If you are before launch, we're going to ask you how many weeks until you are able to launch.

And some people think that's a ridiculous thing because some people believe that it's going to take them months and months or even a year to get to launch.

And what we want you to internalize starting right now is that launch does not mean the polished thing that you feel comfortable sharing with the press and investors.

It is a thing that you can finally put in front of users and have them start using it.

So if you're at that stage, then go ahead and launch.

And if you're before that stage, we actually think it should not take more than 1 week or 2 for you to get that ready.

And we'll talk about that in week two's lecture.

So if you are launched, there's 2 different types of metrics.

There's revenue metrics or engagement metrics.

And almost all of you are in the category of being like, I'm eventually making money, sooner rather than later.

And so you should be using those revenue metrics.

The only companies that are tracking engagement metrics are ones who have to build a large audience before they can start collecting money.

They had to build a lot of engagement in users before they were able to turn on an advertising platform.

So if you are not in that category, then you will not be tracking, or you should not be tracking engagement metrics.

And then you should always be talking to users.

So we actually ask you, how many users did you talk to and what did you learn from them or what insights did you learn from them, whether you're launched or before you are launched.

And that is because that is the best way to make sure that you're building and making something people want, which is our motto at Y Combinator.

This is what that update form looks like.

There's additional stuff that is shown to you if you check off that you are launched.

Please complete your profile, keep the company updated, and add your co-founders if you haven't already to your company.

The reasons you want to do this is because it affects the matching algorithm when you're assigned for groups.

We sign you based on your location, we sign you based on your vertical, we sign you based on whether you are a company team or a single founder, and so you want to make sure all of that is accurately filled out right now.

I know a lot of you when you register you just fill that you know dummy data or filler information but you don't want to have that before this first group matching begins.

And then different features available to you when you're searching the directory.

So again, you want to make sure that these are filled out accurately.

You click on your face in the sidebar to access these 3 tabs.

Don't worry, we will send you emails with all the information as we go through every single week, so it's not like you have to do all the heavy lifting here.

Just make sure that you're accepting emails from StartupSchool at YCombinator.com.

These group sessions are done over video using our software.

If you have multiple co-founders and you are located in the same city, try to share 1 video connection.

Try to do them from a desktop computer, and then from a broadband Wi-Fi connection.

I know not everyone is able to do this, but if that is something that you are able to do, that will give you the best possible experience since it's video chat.

Remember that you have to submit a weekly update to participate in a group session, so make sure you do that on Monday.

Ideally when we send that out, but definitely by Wednesday at 4 p.m.

You can request a different time than 8 p.m.

If you pick a different time, you will match up with other companies in a different time zone and probably not close to you by proximity.

So that's just something to keep in mind.

The grouping algorithm is run at 4.30 p.m.

So 30 minutes after the updates are due for the week and then it will send you on an email to say like, hey, does this look good to you?

Are you going to be available for a group session?

What do you talk about in a group session?

Every week you're going to do the same thing.

You're going to intro yourself, you're going to intro what the company does, we call this a one-liner at YC.

You're going to share last week's progress very quickly, this should take no more than 30 seconds to a minute.

What were your biggest obstacles and what are your goals for next week, the big goals.

Then it gets basically opened up to discussion, and then at the end you're able to provide anonymous feedback through the software of the other companies, one-liners and pitches.

And so there's 3 questions that we ask you to rate people on, is do you understand what the company's building based on the one-liner?

Are you excited about the problem that they're working on?

And does this seem like the kind of team that you would want to work with.

And that way you're able to get feedback from lots of different people about how clear you are about your solution, about whether what you're working on excites or entices other people, and whether you're giving off the kind of energy or you're the kind of team that other people can see as being exciting or compatible.

And so, 1 thing to keep in mind is, you don't get access to your feedback unless you provide feedback to others.

When we ran these test group sessions, people really loved it.

Group sizes are between 5 and 8 companies.

If you did Startup school last year, this is very, very different.

Last year we had like 20 companies that you got matched up with and you worked with them every single week.

The problem with that format was that people sort of trailed off over time and then the later group sessions actually got worse over time, which we did not want to replicate.

So we did smaller group sizes, we match you based on all these different characteristics automatically, and Then if you're a single founder who's stated in their profile that you're looking for a co-founder, all the other people in those group sessions are other single founders looking for co-founders.

And then every week you'll match up with different companies.

And remember these are companies that are submitting their weekly update.

And so, over the course of the program, you will get to meet with between 50 to 80 startups, have lots of different practice, gets lots of different feedback from them, build up a connection with people that are close to you, that are working in your same vertical, or making the same amount of progress.

And what's going to be sort of awesome about this is we think this will result in, as you do the group sessions, it's going to get better and better over time.

So the last group session will be 1 of your best ones versus it being worse and worse over time.

Okay, we've got 20 lectures planned by the illustrious YC Partners.

We do open it up to Startup School participants to attend in person when we record those.

There's a little bit of a first come first serve for that.

You can look out for those emails a week before we film those.

We release the video live to everyone else in the public, Thursdays at 12 p.m.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Startup School 2019 Orientation