Startup School 2019 Orientation

Good morning founders! Welcome to Startup School 2019. I'm gonna go over four things in this orientation. I'm gonna introduce you to the Startup School team. I'm gonna introduce you to your fellow classmates/founders. I'm gonna 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 ten weeks.

There are five people that make up the Startup School team. Me and Adora are YC partners. We will act as the hosts and we'll also instruct some of the lectures. Steven Pham is the batch director. 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 you have to do for Startup School.

We have Kyle. He's built all of 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 Ashman, who's going to act as the person who's going to represent your voice. He's gonna be analyzing the data, looking at the stuff that you submit to us, and then looking at all your feedback and even reaching out to many of you to get an understanding of how Startup School is 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.

Then we have an army of YC alumni and, 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: startupschool@ycombinator.com. That person is probably going to be Steven that's managing that, but he'll triage it appropriately.

Where I hope you will ask for lots of help is from your fellow classmates and from the forums. It is actually a lot of how sort of YC works. People will constantly come to the YC partners to get help; they actually rely on one 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 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.

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 where there are holes in your thinking or where there are opportunities in thought that can help you unlock growth or opportunities or even completely rethink how your business might work.

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 impostor syndrome. 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.

One 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 kinds of startups taking this class. 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. That means that we're gonna work on helping you think about your idea in a way that makes 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. This is a record for Startup School. 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 are 12,000 companies that have at least one technical founder, which means there are 9,000 companies that have no technical founders. 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. We have 4,000 companies that have at least one female founder, and so you all will hopefully be able to find and support one another.

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? 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.

The reason we're able to do that is because companies are more alike than they are different. For all of them, we always have to revisit first principles and 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 better ways of unlocking growth. Most importantly, 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.

Our group sessions are going to be designed to help you get just that in an online way, which we're really excited about. Companies are in over 140 countries. 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.

We totally support you to do that because one of the nice things about being 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. 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 one that I really, really love is that we have 97 companies working on moonshots—really, really hard tech solutions—of which I'm super excited to be a part.

Here is how to graduate: you only have to do two 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 eight out of ten weekly updates. These are really quick briefs about your progress. We have no content restrictions; basically, you just have to submit something eight out of the ten weeks showing us that you're doing something on your company and doing some kind of self-reflection.

Then you have to participate in eight out of the ten group video sessions, and that's it. 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, so this is not going to be onerous.

One 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 one to skip, I would definitely not skip the weekly update because that means you will probably not be able to do a group session, and you don't want to be in that bucket because that's going to make it much more difficult for you to graduate.

How do you get the fifteen thousand dollar grant? How do you become eligible for that? Well, you have to graduate, which means eight out of ten weekly updates and the group sessions. At the end of the course, you'll apply to YC. It's a super simple application that is due September 25th—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, and that's all. It's a two-for-one for you guys!

Not only are you applying for the $15,000 equity-free grant, you're also applying for a chance at $150,000 that we give to the YC Corp 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 and past applications affects your future possibilities 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, so let's just remove that myth. 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 accept it into YC.

Right, 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 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.

Time commitment: so based on our basic requirements, those two things that we want you to do, it should take about two to three hours a week. 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 with others, or to your board, or to employees, etc.

We're going to generate about an hour of video content every week and then there's going to be 30 minutes to 1 hour 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. your local time for the group sessions. This is the time that we've found last year that 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 come up that you should expect. On Mondays, we open up the weekly updates for you to start submitting them, and we also do them on what day AMA inside of the forums.

We record the live lecture at an office on Wednesday mornings, and then your weekly update is due by 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday Pacific time. 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 give us enough time for our algorithms to run, and then the video lectures release for those people that didn't attend the live recording session. Those 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 re-emphasize 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.
• Thursday at 12 p.m. we release the video lectures on YouTube, and 8:00 p.m. local time is when group sessions start.

What's in our software? So again, we have the weekly updates and the group sessions, but we also have lectures, meetups, the directory, the forums, the library, and the deals. As you can see, there are only two things that are required for you to use in our software. All the rest of the stuff is optional, but these are the eight things I'm going to go over for the rest of this presentation.

Weekly updates: we start asking you Mondays at 12:00 a.m. 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, you need to analyze the last week's work.

So it should take about 15 minutes; it should not take longer than this. If you're getting stressed out about this, you're doing it wrong. They are due Wednesdays by 4 p.m. and you can find them under the “My Updates” tab.

Here's some tips to help you with your weekly update: you've got to be honest. If the number is zero in terms of progress made on your key metric, whether it's revenue or engagement, you need to write down zero. Don't change your metric to something that is not as important, okay? If you do that, you will not help yourself, and you're not tricking us.

You want to be concise again; it shouldn't take that much time. You want to be really good at sizing and summarizing your experience so that way you can learn from it quickly later on. If you are before launch, we're gonna ask you how many weeks until you are able to launch.

Some people think that's a ridiculous thing because some people believe that it's gonna take them months and months or even a year to get to launch. Well, we want you to internalize starting right now that launch does not mean the polished thing that you feel comfortable sharing with the press and investors. It is a thing that you could finally put in front of users and have them start using it.

So if you're at that stage, then go ahead and launch! If you're before that stage, we actually think it should not take more than one week or two for you to get that ready, and we'll talk about that in week two's lecture.

99% of you should be tracking revenue, so if you are launched, there's two different types of metrics: there are 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.

So Facebook is a good example; they had to build a lot of engagement and 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.

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. 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 are additional sections that are 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. 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, and we sign you based on whether you are a company team or a single founder. You want to make sure all that is accurately filled out right now. I know a lot of you when you register just fill that, you know, dummy data or filler information, but you don't want to have that before this first group matching begins.

Then different features are available to you when you search the directory. So again, you want to make sure that these are filled out accurately. This is what it looks like; you click on your face in the sidebar to access these three tabs.

Group sessions start at Thursday at 8 p.m. local time. 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@ycombinator.com.

These group sessions are done over video using our software, so some tips: if you have multiple co-founders and you are located in the same city, try to share one video connection—that'll sort of make it a lot smoother. 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 8:00 p.m. on Thursday; you cannot request a different day—it’s only on Thursday. 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 an email saying, “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 gonna do the same thing. You're gonna intro yourself, you're gonna intro what the company does—we call this a one-liner, YC. You're gonna 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 just basically opens up the discussion, and then at the end, you're able to provide anonymous feedback through the software on the other companies' one-liners and pitches.

There are three questions that we ask you to rate people on: do you understand what the company's building based on the one-liner? Are you excited about the problem that they're working on? Does this seem like the kind of team that you would want to work with?

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.

One thing to keep in mind is you don't get access to your feedback unless you provide feedback to others. So it's super valuable! When we ran these test group sessions, people really loved it, and so please keep that in mind about the groups and matching.

Group sizes are between five and eight companies. If you did Startup School last year, this is very, very different. Last year, we did have 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, 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 stated in their profile that you're looking for a co-founder, all these other people in those group sessions are other single founders looking for co-founders. Then every week you'll match up with different companies.

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, get lots of different practice, get lots of different feedback from them, and 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.

What's gonna be sort of awesome about this is we think this will result in, like, as you do the group sessions, it's going to get better and better over time, so the last group session will be one of your best ones versus it being worse and worse over time.

Lectures: okay, we've got 20 lectures planned by the illustrious YC partners. We record those on Wednesdays at 9 a.m. We do open it up to Startup School participants to attend in person when we record those. Most of those are in San Francisco; there's a little bit of a first-come, first-served 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. We will also do some bonus lectures and workshops. All lectures will be followed by a Q&A, and then one thing that we changed is we made sure all lectures are 20 minutes or less. I think that's sort of more appropriate for the YouTube generation, and we'll make sure that we are focused on giving you, in a concise way, an efficient way, information that is tactical, that is practical, and something that you’re going to be able to use right away.

Hopefully, these are the locations of the lectures. So in July and August, we're doing them at YC's SF office and then in September, we're taking Startup School on the road, and so that’s why they're located in other cities.

Meetups: one thing we did that's new this year is that we're organizing events for Startup School participants in cities all around the world to meet one another. We're gonna have YC partners there, we're gonna have YC alums there, and then we're gonna do just like a giant Q&A and maybe have some discussions about the lectures and just give you an opportunity to feel like you're not alone and meet other people.

They're gonna happen on evenings between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. They'll usually be on Saturdays, and you should check the schedule; you'll find that under the events section on the sidebar. Here are the list of cities. We're super excited about these; we'll probably add some more Startup School meetups after Startup School is over.

That's gonna be like the wonderful thing we'll have about this is that we'll continue doing these live meetup events if they end up being really popular. Anyone who's done Startup School will have access to participating in them when possible.

One thing I want to keep in mind is I do not think that you should spend a ton of money or time trying to make it to one of these meetup events. If you're accepted, we're going to try to make sure that it's meant for locals, and really, I want you to spend as much time working on your startup rather than commuting. So heads up on that.

Directory: alright, so this is a new thing that we've built into the software thanks to Kyle. It helps you find other companies. You can filter by name, description, the vertical, and the proximity to your city. All companies from your group session—so whenever you do a group session, those five to eight companies—what we will do is make those available inside of the directories, so you can easily find those and you don't have to exchange contact information after a group session.

If you're looking for a co-founder, this is where you'll be able to filter by other co-founders who are also looking, so this will be super valuable to you, especially since there are 16,000 single founders, and 8,000 of you are self-proclaimed technical founders, but there's also 1,000 that are not technical. So it's almost like there's one for each one of you, and hopefully, you will find one another.

There are also 2,800 female single founders in their directory. You can't search by just females; we decided that might result in some other adverse effects that might be unwanted. But I want you to know that there are gonna be a lot of people in there looking to find some kind of magic.

One thing I want you to keep in mind is not to spam the directory; you will be banned from all YC events if you're caught doing this. Unfortunately, we already had some people abusing the system. This is what the directory feature looks like.

Here are some tips I want to give to you about what you should expect from this co-founder matching and searching system: do not expect that you're going to have a co-founder by the end of the program. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I actually think that is not your expectation. What you should hopefully be able to do is talk to a ton of other people that are in similar situations, have the same shared risk profile, and hopefully just start conversations, start sharing favors, and seeing who are the people that you might want to do a side project with or work on a feature with or just help out.

During that blossoming of that small exchange of favors, you might start having the conversation to say, “Hey, I like to spend a lot of time with this person. I like making stuff with them; maybe we can start entertaining the idea of being co-founders.” So again, during the course, I imagine that's probably not going to happen, so you should set your expectations on just meeting, talking with people, seeming helpful, getting inspiration, getting support from one another, and then seeing where that might carry you after the program.

Forums: so again, it's usually the most underutilized resource I've seen in Startup School, but it is one of the most valuable things that we have in the actual YC program. So I just want to spend some time on this.

When you post to the forums, the only rule I really have is make sure that it's a post that's gonna help the community. Don't have posts that are purely selfish for yourself; don’t just promote; don’t just have odd discussions. It should be something that, like, the community would benefit from, even if it's other people answering a question or problem that you might have.

If those answers you can see that's something that will help other people, great—that should be your guideline. If you're an expert trying to go through the forums and help other people, one of the things that's going to be nice about our forums is that we actually do customized emails and digests based on your level of expertise.

So I'll explain a little bit about that in a second. You want to search before you post, therefore you're not posting duplicate content, and all that stuff gets aggregated in a nice way. Don't spam or scrape any in Startup School; it ruins our resources, but also, it's a waste of your time to do things like that.

We organize AMAs; these are very, very popular posts in the Startup School forums. On Mondays and Fridays, we either ask different experts from the YC alumni or we'll have panels of people to answer questions. If you want to launch your company to the Startup School community, then you should post on the Startup School discussion forum. If you need technical support help, like programming or engineering questions, use the engineering channel.

But overall, try to ask the forum for help, because out of 28,000 founders, you guys are experts in all the different types of categories. So we have like 9,000 engineers, 6,000 people who get product, 4,000 people who have experience doing operations, 2,000 salespeople, 1,300 designers, and 1,100 scientists. So as a result, the odds are that there's someone who has some kind of experience, some kind of hack or tool that can help and answer your question, and so in the forums is where you should utilize that expertise.

This is what those forums look like. They're super great. Library: so this is pretty straightforward. It's all our written content written by YC partners, alumni, and experts we trust. They're organized by topic and stage of the startup. We have no required reading in Startup School, but I really recommend you taking the time to go through the articles, especially when you're stuck on one of those sort of topic areas.

I always find it enlightening every time I go back and read old PG; I always glean something new out of it that I forgot about from before. And so hopefully you will be able to use this newly acquired wisdom to your benefit. We're constantly updating with content from YC, so make sure you use it.

Deals: Steven, the batch director, has killed it for you guys. He's crushed it with giving over $30,000 worth of deals and credits for you Startup School companies, and they are from good companies: AWS, Google, Microsoft, Brax, Stripe, etc. Some of the deals actually get even better and sweeter if you graduate from the program, and again, we make it really easy for you.

So if you graduate, more free stuff for you. Do not share the deals with others, or they could be revoked. So basically these are for the Startup School community; do not share them with others. This is what that looks like; you can find it in the sidebar.

Alright, whoa! That's all the software. Here are your next steps: submit your weekly update. Kyle's probably already sent you an email; you've got to do it by Wednesday so that you can be part of the group sessions. Start this week on the right note. If the numbers are zero, if you are not launched, if you haven't talked to any users, that is okay—just write that down and then recommit yourself to make sure that that's not what's gonna be put out for the next week.

Update your profile, your company, and add co-founders if you need to do that. Then, browse through the forums, the library, and the deals. Look through the directories—who else is also closer around you, and see if there might be stuff that you might want to participate with informally or not.

On Thursday, we're launching our first lecture and group sessions. We're really, really excited about Startup School 2019. I'm so thankful and humbled about so many people participating in this program, and I can't wait to show you what we've been working on. Good luck, and I'll see you out there. Bye!