Y Combinator will now run its online Startup School multiple times per year
0Reported today on TechCrunch
For the full article visit: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/10/y-combinator-will-now-run-its-online-startup-school-multiple-times-per-year/
Y Combinator will now run its online Startup School multiple times per year
Back in 2017, Y Combinator began offering a 10 week, once-a-year online course called Startup School. Part forum community and part video classroom, the program offers up a variety of lectures on topics like raising money or evaluating startup ideas, as led by YC partners and other entrepreneurs from their network.
Three years and 40,000+ students later, they're switching up the schedule; beginning in 2020, Startup School will now be running multiple times per year. It's also shifting from being a 10-week program to being an 8-week program.
In its first few years, Y Combinator set a hard cap on the number of founders it accepted into each Startup School session. After acceptance letters were accidentally sent to the wrong teams in 2018, the company opted to let in everyone who applied, modifying the program to focus less on personal advising and more on small peer-to-peer advice groups. It sounds like they're sticking with this strategy moving forward, as an FAQ on the Startup School site notes that they "do not have a limit on the number of participants" with this year's sessions.
Took part in Startup School previously and curious if it's worth doing again? YC says that while "a few lectures will be updated or replaced", the video content of 2020's Startup School will be largely the same as 2019. The structure of the course itself will see some changes, though: they'll be doing fewer group video chat sessions, but introducing weekly Q&A sessions with YC partners.
Just how many times "multiple times per year" will actually be still seems to be up in the air; YC tells me that they're still working that out. In a post announcing the change, YC notes that its first 2