- Y Combinator's second annual Startup School has attracted a record number of participants, with 27,000 companies from over 100 countries and 8,000 cities applying to take part.
- Due to a glitch in the selection process, all 15,000 companies that applied were accepted, making this the largest class Y Combinator has ever taught.
- Startup School aims to maximize innovation and help startups succeed by providing knowledge and resources to as many companies as possible.
- The curriculum covers topics such as building a startup, acquiring users, running a startup effectively, fundraising, and future planning.
- This year, Startup School will include live conversations with experts and AMA sessions on the forums.
- The program is offering a $10,000 non-equity grant to 100 companies that complete and graduate from the course.
- Several companies, including Amazon Web Services, Google, Stripe, and Clerky, are offering deals and discounts to the participants of Startup School.

- The course has 5 main components: weekly class lectures, weekly group office hours, company updates, forum, and presentation day.
- Lectures will be recorded on Tuesdays and sent out with prep material beforehand.
- San Francisco Bay Area attendees can attend lectures in person, but there are limited seats.
- Lectures will be posted online every Wednesday for remote participants.
- Weekly group office hours are important for accountability and support.
- Each session is led by a moderator and founders discuss their company, goals, and obstacles.
- Groups without a moderator need to select one and attend a training session.
- Weekly company updates should include progress towards a key metric.
- The forum is a place for founders to communicate and seek help.
- Presentation day is optional but encouraged for setting ambitious goals.
- Inactive companies will be removed from the course.
- To graduate, participants need to submit 9 out of 10 weekly updates and participate in 9 out of 10 group office hour sessions.
- Completion of the course is required to be eligible for equity-free grants.
- Participants are encouraged to apply to the YC Core Program.
- The importance of creating a story for your startup is emphasized.

- The creation of the story of a startup is vital for success but often overlooked
- Startups are extremely difficult and having the right story can keep you going during tough times
- Founders need to tell a compelling and believable story that resonates with themselves and others
- YC helps founders craft and reimagine their stories
- Start with a clear and concise explanation of your idea
- Create a framework of your story that captures the essence of your startup
- Develop a pitch that communicates the key points of your story in a memorable way
- Work with co-founders to ensure everyone is on the same page and can tell the story effectively
- The attitude of "we'll figure it out" is important for startup success
- Submit weekly updates based on progress and hold yourself accountable
- AWS credits are available for participants
- Group office hours can be done online or in person, depending on preference
- Contact StartupSchool at YCombinator.com for account issues
- The selection of the hundred companies to receive $10,000 will be based on completion of course requirements.

- The main criterion for evaluating startups is whether they have completed the requirements of the course.
- Y Combinator looks at graduates' status updates, talks to moderators, and considers company information to determine which startups are most promising.
- Working part-time on a startup is unlikely to lead to success, as full-time commitment is usually necessary.
- There is no separate advisor track program, all startups are part of the same program.
- Weekly progress metrics can include days till public launch, number of active users, or engagement metrics.
- Hardware companies can use metrics related to progress in manufacturing, design, or other milestones.
- Startups can connect with YC alumni and partners through the forum and AMAs.
- The vertebrae of a startup's story are the key elements that should be memorable and convey the essence of the company.
- There will be a 12-minute break before the next session.

- Y Combinator's Startup School has received a record number of applications, with 27,000 companies from over 100 countries applying.
- Due to a glitch, all 15,000 applicants were accepted, making this the largest class ever.
- The program aims to help startups succeed by providing knowledge and resources.
- The curriculum covers various topics and includes live conversations with experts.
- A $10,000 grant is offered to 100 companies that complete the course.
- Several companies are offering deals and discounts to participants.
- The program includes lectures, group office hours, company updates, a forum, and presentation day.
- Participants need to submit weekly updates and attend group office hours to graduate.
- Creating a compelling startup story is emphasized for success.
- Startups can connect with YC alumni and partners through the forum and AMAs.

YC Partners Adora Cheung and Geoff Ralston introduce Startup School 2018.

You can find the lecture transcript and slides here: https://www.startupschool.org/videos/33

Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/

Good morning to you guys who are here live, but good day to everyone who is viewing this class online.

Welcome to Y Combinator's second annual massively open online course, Startup School.

I'm a partner here at Y Combinator and 1 of the organizers of this year's Startup School.

Starting today, we're hoping that YC's knowledge about entrepreneurship will help spur incredible innovation from all of you here and out there to create enormous value for the societies in which you live, for your friends, your families, your employees, and for yourselves.

We're going to cover just a few things before we actually get started on the course, so I hope you'll bear with us.

First, more companies than ever before asked to take place, take part in startup school this year.

27,000 companies from around the world asked to be part of it.

That's a number that kind of blows me away every time I think about it.

15,000 of those companies asked to actually participate in the class.

And that's from over 100 countries and over 8,000 cities around the world.

Now, Some of you may have heard that we had, in fact, intended to actually only allow about a quarter of those 15,000 to take the class, just because there are actual infrastructure limitations.

Well, I don't know if you did hear or didn't hear, but there was a slight glitch in our process and in the end, in the end, we accepted all 15,000 companies, give or take.

We accepted everyone, it's 15,000, give or take.

This means that this will be by far the largest class for startups that Y Combinator or for that matter anyone else has ever taught.

So congratulations on being part of the biggest class.

I don't know if that's great or not, but congratulations.

So let me just do a brief interlude about Startup School.

Y Combinator began in 2005 by funding more companies simultaneously than had ever been done before, even though we only started with 8 companies in our first batch.

Today we fund over 300 companies every year and work with them in an intense three-month program.

But there are many many more thousands who actually apply for each 1 of those spots and we always knew that there was a possibility of our knowledge having greater reach.

To maximize how many companies we could reach with our knowledge.

To get it to as many companies around the world.

To maximize, and this is our stated goal as a company, the innovation in the world because we think that that is almost always a really good thing.

We'd like to find a way for every startup to succeed and yes there is self-interest here because it would be awesome if 1 or more of you out there today was the next huge Y Combinator company.

We first experimented with the idea of greater reach in 2014 with a course taught by Y Combinator's president, Sam Altman, called How to Start a startup.

It was a conventional course taught at Stanford with the difference that there was an online component.

The lectures were videoed and then placed online.

Last year, we thought that course as a massively open online course with the difference that the classes would be coupled with online access, a community, software tools, and of course most importantly weekly meetings with groups and check-ins.

So this year We're going to reprise that idea with some notable differences.

We're still going to have a combination of in-person and online classes, but we have revamped software.

This year, Most of the curricula will be taught by YC partners and YC alumni.

There's as I mentioned new software for community and for management.

We're scaling larger than we ever have before.

This year is timed to coincide with a YC batch so that hopefully as many of you all as possible who want to apply to the YC winter 2019 batch can conveniently do so.

There's also a $10,000 grant, non-equity grant, available for 100 companies who complete and graduate from the course.

And in a few moments, my partner Adora will go through the criteria for graduation.

Also, for the first time, we've collected really an extraordinary library of startup content.

At the URL you see there, And I really encourage you guys to go look at it.

There's a link to it online when you log into the site.

It's an open library available to anyone.

And also, we have some incredible deals for the 15,000 companies that you can also see when you log in online.

And I really want to call out that the folks offering deals were not expecting to offer those deals to 15,000 companies.

And a number of them really, really, really stepped up.

Amazon Web Services is offering $1,000 credit to every single $1,000 of AWS credits to everybody.

Thank you, Google, for offering $1,000 in Google Cloud and Firebase credits.

And 2 YC companies, Stripe and Clerky, have also really stepped up.

Stripe is offering an incredible deal on Stripe Atlas, 50% off for all of the companies and $5,000 of fee-free payment processing.

And Clerky is also giving a fantastic deal, $599 gets you formation, a bank account and lots more from Clerky.

So briefly, I'm going to take you through the curriculum here.

Our first week kicks off with an introduction to get startup school and your company off the ground.

And then for the next 3 weeks, we dig in deeply into building something that people want and then figuring out how to get users for that something.

Then We spend a bunch of time talking about how to effectively run a startup with an interlude by YC partner Dalton Caldwell in week 6, which I think you'll find very helpful in terms of thinking through how to apply to YC, how to succeed at an interview with YC and at YC itself.

And then we finish up with some lectures on fundraising and with an eye towards the future.

Another new aspect to Startup School this year is something I'm really excited about, which is something we're calling conversations.

There's going to be 2 kinds of conversations, real ones, live, in person, with a notable expert in some useful domain, as well as AMAs, ask me anythings, on our forums, where the experts will respond to questions both asked in advance and live.

Actually, this week we have an AMA tomorrow and a conversation on Friday, which you can learn, that you'll learn more about.

So, if it's not obvious, we're doing a lot more this year, a lot of new things.

And Some of those things aren't planned, weren't planned, so we asked you to bear with us.

We're very effective, very tight, but small, but we'll fix everything that goes wrong as quickly as possible and respond to you as quickly as possible.

Understand that there's a big scale here and there are there are many companies that are taking startup school and we are going to do our best to make your all of your experiences as successful as possible.

So now Adora, the YC partner with whom I'm organizing Startup School, is going to go over some of the details as to how the 2018 class is actually going to work.

So, I am going to talk about the structure of the course.

There are 5 main components to this course, which you see up here, weekly class lectures, weekly group office hours, company updates, forum, and presentation day.

So I'm going to go over all of these, and at the end, I will demo how it actually works in the software.

So as you already know, each Tuesday, we'll be recording around 2 hours of lectures on a variety of topics related to building and growing your startup, which Jeff already did a good preview of.

Before most lectures, we will be sending out what we call prep material, which is like videos and slides to review so that the speakers can get to the good stuff ASAP instead of spending too much time on the mundane basics.

Please take the time to review those notes if you can.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, you will be able to attend these lectures in person.

Unfortunately, there's only a limited amount of seats, so we can't fit everyone each time, but we will confirm via RSVPs if you can attend the lecture.

So please only come if you get an invite to that particular lecture.

The speaker will give the lecture and then Q&A will be done afterwards.

However, most of you will actually be watching the lectures online.

We will be posting the lectures every Wednesday after the Tuesday lecture at around 12 p.m.

We encourage you to just watch whenever you get a chance.

As you may or may not know, we've already placed you in groups of 15 to 30 companies each, mostly based on location.

This is to provide a more intimate experience.

Consider this group your immediate support network for Startup School and hopefully beyond Startup School.

These are your go-to people when you need help or you want to discuss something related to your startup.

So 1 of the ways we make sure you leverage this group effectively is through weekly group office hours.

And we think this is actually the most important thing to participate in, even more so than potentially the lectures.

So you can think of weekly group office hours as 2 things.

1, it's a weekly check-in to keep everyone accountable.

And 2, it's like a group therapy session where you can air out your week, ask for help, and get feedback from your peers.

So the way that group office hours work is pretty straightforward.

The moderator calls the meeting to order.

And then he or she facilitates a discussion in which 1 founder from each company says 3 things.

1, their company one-liner to remind everyone what they're actually working on, which actually is quite a tough thing to say what you're working on in 1 line.

So you should help each other work on that.

2 is goals for your last week and why you did or did not meet that goal.

And 3, your biggest problem or obstacle that the group can help you with.

And then this is followed by discussion in which each company spends about 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the number of people who actually show up to group office hours that week, and the moderator goes last.

So like I said, each group has only 1 moderator.

Some groups have been already assigned a moderator.

These are volunteers from the YC Founder community.

These groups will need to select 1 amongst themselves.

So If you are in a group without a moderator currently, and you will know this via the software, which I'll show you shortly, your homework is to do this ASAP by Thursday.

So how to select a moderator for your group.

First, ask yourself if you are that person.

This involves extra time, energy, and thought, and so just be cognizant of the extra work before volunteering.

You will need to set the weekly schedule for your group, encourage and drive discussions, and constantly ask the group for input and guide the conversations.

Should you choose to accept this mission, we will be running a moderator training session this Friday.

Pacific and we will be posting the live stream, the recording of it afterwards if you can't attend.

So you should immediately get together with the group via the 2 channels we provide, which is video chat and group forum or some other way that's best for you, and figure this out.

1 easy way to figure this out is whoever volunteers first gets the role.

So please submit your choice by Friday, so that the right person knows to attend the training session.

We will send this out to you afterwards, so you don't really need to write this down now.

So the obvious question might be, what if no 1 in your group volunteers to be a moderator?

Well, the answer is if no 1 volunteers, then no 1 in the group can participate in startup school.

Your entire group will be auditing the class instead.

Whoops, I don't know what I did there, but there we go.

This seems harsh, but for this to work, we think having a moderated group office hours just based on experience is very important, maybe the most important thing for this entire class.

So we've made this a requirement to stay in the course.

So sometimes this week you should actually sit down and think with your other co-founders about a goal for a startup school.

That is at least 1 key metric that defines what success is to you by the end of the 10 weeks.

This might just be launching your product, but hopefully it's some kind of key metric like monthly recurring revenue, number of active users, and so forth.

And each week you'll be asked to submit an update of your company, in particular, whether you achieved your weekly goal for this key metric.

We find that submitting This adds an extra layer of useful accountability and will help you to drive to accomplish more than you would have otherwise.

So please submit this by Tuesday, end of day Pacific, excluding this week.

So the first day, I believe, is September 3rd.

So 1 of the things we're doing new this time and in which I'm personally excited about is the community and forum, which some of you may have logged in and already started posting.

This is the place where you can talk to fellow founders like yourself.

You can poll for opinions on a variety of matters related to your startups, and ask for help for things like, what's the best way to do x, y, and z, and so forth?

We've also created a private channel for your group.

And we think that most of the conversations you'll have will actually be in these private channels.

Talking to tens of thousands of people will be almost usually ineffective and tough for many topics.

So 1 of the first things you do if you haven't already done is log into the software, which is live now, and introduce yourself to your own group.

Only post things that will be helpful to you and everyone else.

If you break these rules, we unfortunately will have to remove you.

Finally, at the end of the course, we will have a virtual presentation day, where you'll pitch your company via video and slides.

This is where telling the story of your startup is important.

And Jeff will go over how to do this and how to think about it in a few minutes.

So while presentation day is actually optional, it's a good way to use this day to set an ambitious goal of what you would like to show off to others in 10 weeks from now.

There will be many of you who, if you take this seriously, will be amazed in 10 weeks by what you can accomplish and what you'll be able to present by just setting a goal, holding yourself accountable each week by 1, submitting updates, and talking about your progress with your group during group office hours.

So to help us keep the community tight and on track together, we will be removing inactive companies, unfortunately.

So if you don't submit updates and skip group office hours in the first 2 weeks, you will be auditing instead.

We want to work with you if you're serious about your startup and making progress now.

Some of you may decide this is not the right time to do your startup.

To officially complete the course, aka to graduate, you just need to do 2 things.

1 is to submit 9 out of the 10 weekly updates, and 2 is to participate in 9 out of the 10 group office hour sessions.

And as you know, as Jeff already mentioned, we are giving out 110K equity-free grants to the most promising startups.

Course completion is the minimum requirement to be eligible for these grants.

But regardless if you're aiming for this or not, We believe the success of your startup will increase if you actually complete the course.

So regardless, please, you know, we encourage you to just complete the course.

Finally, Jeff kind of already mentioned this, but while Startup School is completely independent from the YC Core Program.

We would love for as many of you to apply to it as possible.

In this vein, as Jeff has pointed out, we have a lecture dedicated to how to create the best application possible and the best practices for the in-person interview should you get 1.

The course just happens to finish just in time for you to apply on time, and so we hope to see many of you do so.

I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes talking about something that I think is absolutely vital to startup success but although it's fundamental is often somewhat overlooked and that is really the invention the creation of the story of your startup.

This might sound obvious or basic but it turns out that getting this right is actually non-intuitively important and the reason it is so important is because startups are so hard.

It is almost certainly going to be the hardest most difficult thing you will do in your professional career.

And if you don't create a story, the right story, that you can tell yourself to keep going when things go wrong, you'll quit and your startup will die.

My YC partner Aaron Harris, who's going to be giving a lecture Later on in startup school thinks and talks a lot about stories and I'm indebted to him for a number of the ideas And what I'm about to say So there are stories and there are stories and the famous author in Forster maybe said it best many many decades ago when he gave this example.

So the king died and then the queen died is certainly a story But it's not a very interesting story, is it?

It's not a story you necessarily care about.

But the king died and then the queen died of grief.

There's something in that story that seems to matter.

And it turns out, founders spend a lot of time telling stories.

They tell stories about what they're doing.

They tell stories about the future that they're trying to create.

They tell stories originally maybe to their parents, to their friends, to their family, eventually to co-founders, potential customers, partners in the company, investors.

But most of all, they need to tell a story that resonates with themselves.

It's a story of your startup that will nourish you, that will keep you going through hard times and setbacks.

It's a story that will persuade you to actually do this crazy thing, and it's a story that will maybe just, for those others, persuade them to join you on your journey.

Think how crazy it is to convince someone else to follow you on such an uncertain path.

So we actually spend a lot of time at YC helping people craft and sometimes even reimagine their stories.

So I'd strongly recommend that you do these things during these 10 weeks.

So start with your idea and then as Adora mentioned, create a 1, preferably 1 sentence, maybe 2 sentence explanation that is so easy to understand you could stop anyone in the street and they wouldn't just look at you blankly when you're telling them what you do.

Create what we call your vertebrae, the framework of your story that captures really what it's all about and that if you were to tell your story, you would expect hope that people might just remember because they will not remember your entire story.

And create a 2 minute demo day like pitch doesn't have to be exactly 2 minutes but create a pitch that captures the essence of your story and communicates those vertebrae in a memorable way.

And last but not least, work with your co-founders so that you're on the same page, so that you all share the same story and can all relate that story, tell that story in a way that's compelling and believable.

Because when you have it right it will be believable.

And equally importantly it will be memorable and it will, I hope, sustain you as you go through your path in your journey.

I hope that Startup School helps Everyone realize the dream and the company you're creating has a ton of success.

I just wanted to say 1 thing about 1 part of what Sam talked about, which is we'll figure it out.

Don't minimize the importance of getting that as part of the fundamental culture of your team.

In fact, as an example, Y Combinator might not feel to you guys like a startup, but it always feels to us like it's a startup, even though we're 15 years old now.

And we had a pretty big problem with startup school and we weren't quite sure how to deal with it.

And our small team sat down together and everyone said, well, we'll figure it out.

We're going to let everyone in and we'll figure out how to make it work.

Now, you guys will be the judge of how good a job we do figuring it out.

But that sort of attitude, this default towards positive action, makes for great startups.

Any questions you have, we're going to take whatever questions you have, if any.

Then we're going to take a short break and then we'll continue with the second half, the second lecture today on startup mechanics, led by our incredible legal team from Y Combinator who's hiding in the corner over there.

When should we submit the weekly updates?

Should we do it nice and early, or should we try to get as much done as possible and kind of wait as late as possible and submit them close to the deadline?

So the updates are to drive progress in your company.

And it's usually better to have an update that is better than worse.

So if you think you're going to get 5 sales between now and the deadline, well, get the 5 sales and have a better update.

I would actually in general recommend doing them on a pretty consistent temporal basis just because that gives you some clues to your progress.

But look, they're a week apart, so the importance of a few days is not going to make or break your startup.

The important thing for the updates is to have a measure that you hold yourself to that really tells you whether you're making progress or not.

Because a startup that doesn't make progress is going nowhere.

You know, when the, when, When Chesky and Nate and the folks at Airbnb were at YC, they used to wake up every morning and see their revenue graph on their bathroom mirror.

That drove them, and you know, it helped.

And it worked out for them, so why not you?

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Geoff Ralston And Adora Cheung - Introduction To Startup School