A year ago, YC went from running 2 batches / year to 4 batches / year. We did this because we wanted to give founders more flexibility to do YC at the right time for them. It seems to have worked - a lot of founders have told us that they were only able to do YC because the new schedule fit their timeline.
Early Decision was driven by the same motivation. We talked to a lot of college students, and we learned that most graduating seniors interview for their after-graduation job in the fall of their senior year. For the ones who are interested in doing their own startup, this creates a bit of a dilemma. If they don't interview for jobs in the fall in order to apply to YC later, they're risking that they might be left without any options.
We created Early Decision so that they can apply to YC at the same time they're doing recruiting for regular jobs, the fall of their senior year. If they get into YC, they can confidently turn down their other job offers without worrying they'll be left without anything.
Note: this isn't really a new idea. We've quietly done this from time to time since 2018, but we didn't create a dedicated flow in the application software for it, so most people didn't realize it was an option. Hopefully by productizing and popularizing it, we'll make it easier for college seniors to start companies.
-graduate and work 100 hour+ weeks as investment banking associates.
-join other people's startups where they work crazy hours
-work hellish hours in PhDs/med school/law school
Yes, being a founder is hard and can be absolute hell at times. But so are some of the "normal" things ambitious students already do post-graduation.
It's not like YC is saying you either do an internship with free lunches, corporate yoga classes and kombucha on tap or you dive into the trenches of being a YC founder.
At any rate, for most of the HN crowd who work a fairly routine IT or an office job, 80+ hours sustained for months and months might seem impossible, but join the military, work on a ship, work on a farm, work the oil fields, work in investment banking, work in a film crew which threatened to go on strike in 2021 for having 98 hour work weeks for months on end... and you find that while it's not common, it certainly happens in various fields.
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Many of the people in our YC batch were doing this for the duration of the batch. My cofounder and I both have families and managed to make a similar schedule work (with more peaks and valleys).
The last few weeks have been a crunch where I’ve been getting a lot closer to a true 140ish. That is unsustainable and I’ve had to go into it knowing that the price is future productivity.
But as a student with no commitments, 100hrs a week feels like the norm in YC startups right now.
The thing is those kids still have massive cognitive gifts - I’m not going to use a loaded word like talented or whatever - and have worked very hard in the past. It’s just that the journey to the thing they want to do no longer rewards hours.
Paul Graham is like the Mr. Beast of seed investing. He wants to make the best SEED STAGE INVESTMENTS in the world, to mock a Mr. Beast PowerPoint. He doesn’t want to get the kids with the highest potential, or the kids who work the hardest. They are very sincere and supportive - I mean, who the hell in your life is willing to risk $525,000 on an idea with no traction?? - but they are not out to anoint a category of kids as the “ambitious” ones versus the unambitious ones. You can be ambitious about being a writer and find success and wind up writing very little!
But nobody's closing that option, are they? YC is simply offering another path.
There are different kinds of ambitions of course. Not all of them are about money, some are about creative fulfillment or family or whatever. That's totally true.
But it's not like anyone's yanking those people out of their kombucha-on-tap associate job and forcing them into YC.
One commonly repeated piece of advice that almost all successful authors state is to write a lot, a lot, a lot. Like just practice writing, it doesn't have to be good.
I hear this often said about many other creative endeavors as well, including painting, cooking, game development/design, etc... It often seems like really good artisans just pull greatness out of thin air, but that's because we often only see the successes, not the failures, but I am reminded that even the best writers, poets, and artists in general spend a great amount of time just creating content that no one will ever see.
In the last year alone, I've had to bow out of co-founding two promising startups with good biz co-founders, because first-year MBA students wanted to finish their degree before they sought funding.
Two ways funding could help:
1. I couldn't afford to work over a year as a technical cofounder, executing in full-time startup mode like usually needs to be done, with no income. While they were part-time, and getting an MBA and networking out of it during this period. Even ramen lifestyle funding would've made this closer to an equitable balance of contribution and risk among the cofounders.
2. There's also the concern that MBA programs seem to push students to have a hypothetical startup, so there's always a chance that the MBA student won't be fully committed to actually do the startup once they graduate. Maybe accepted funding could make this a firmer commitment. (Even if there's no contractual obligation to pursue the startup, I'd guess that new MBA graduates don't want to burn bridges in the small world of investors, so would take the commitment fairly seriously.)
But if the follow-through doesn't happen, then the whole thing was probably a huge waste for non-MBA-student co-founders. (Unless those co-founders weren't really committed themselves.)
I'm tempted to think that YC knows better than I do here, but my experience suggests this is a bad idea. The worst managers I've had were inexperienced, and someone who's 22 won't know when they need someone experienced, or how to talk to customers. Many of them may be too nervous to act, and since they can apply under the safety of also applying for jobs they may not be as motivated. I suspect this is just a ploy to get more Stanford grads to apply but I'm not sure it's the best way to go about it.
1. it's a short commitment - only 3 months. more time-bound opportunities should be available to kids coming out of school. too many people go straight to big finance/law/tech/etc and get stuck because they don't want to give up the salary or safety.
2. get access to a network that is very difficult to get access to otherwis
3. better status boost than most other things you could be doing. There are likely better status signals about someone's abilities/intellect than YC, but i'm guessing they are few for people in the valley.
4. Get to work on something you are interested in
5. learn a lot very quickly.
6. gives you a lot of optionality
yes, YC is trying to make money but they do seem intent on developing talent and this is a good avenue for that.
Seems like a bad signal for YC though - if you aren't committed enough to quit school or at the very least reject job offers and do your startup anyway - feels like you might not be committed enough to do what it takes?
But if anyone does, YC knows how to pick founders with the right mindset.
Maybe you could offer that as a “waitlist” option.
That being said, I can see this being useful to a lot of kids. Certainly beats going to grad school for someone who wants to start a company. Keep in mind that a 500K SAFE doesn't force a founder to go big or zero-out.
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