The most senior students teach you all the basic stances/punches/kicks/throws. The sensei helps you put it all together into a coherent fighting style.
That sounds nice. When I was training, it was: senior students teach you the basic moves, and then the teacher chases you around with a big stick telling you to move faster.
These sorts of additions to the YC team provide a great example of how YC will scale its model. There's so much shared knowledge and know-how among the alumni and that's what will enable YC to create hundreds of companies a year without sacrificing quality.
This kinda looks like an apprentice-ship training system! The master adviser trains up a few keen trainees, these then in turn become masters who train more apprentices etc...
Maybe it IS a pyramid scheme all along! I did have my suspicions with the recent discussion / evaluation of YC performance.
A pyramid scheme is a zero-sum game where wealth accrues up the pyramid in exchange for promises of future riches to the new recruits. YC startups thus far have been a positive sum game to the tune of $4 billion. Additionally, new YC companies aren't required to pay anyone for the things YC provides (as opposed to a pyramid scheme).
Funny you mention the word alumni, because it made me think of the operational structure and salability of a fraternity where past members serve the same positions that once served them.
As part of YC winter 2011 I've already had office hours with both Sam and Garry. The nice part of having so many advisors is that each advisor tends to specialize in different areas (Garry is great with design and UX and Sam has good advice on social products and fundraising).
A wider variety of expertise is super helpful for the increasingly diverse group of YC companies.
This move seems to indicate that the startups are having issues getting access/undivided attention from the 'senior' partners. It is great that ycombinator has become so successful but the value prop of it seems to be diminishing as it grows. If I wanted to collaborate with other founders there are plenty of meetup groups I could attend without giving up a large share of my company.
Ouch! ;) I'm probably biased but a big part of the value we've received from YC has been from access to alumni -- for example, when going out for our series A Sam was actually the most helpful out of anyone we spoke to, having just gone through the process himself (and done a killer job!). I think the view we can bring as alumni going through later stage startups is that we have immediate relevant operational experience to earlier stage startups.
Totally agree with you, Justin. Garry and Sam were hugely influential for us at really important junctures during YC, and have continued to be helpful afterwards.
that wasn't intended to diminish your personal value or expertise. I think there is a general concern that future YC batches will have less personal involvement from the people that made YC compelling.
From what I've heard from people in YC, Sam, Garry, and a few other YC alums have been incredibly useful, in addition to the senior YC partners. The only bottleneck has been food distribution at events.
No, this is in addition to office hours with the regular partners. And we can tell if there's any shortage there, from the length of the office hour request queue, which at this moment has only 2 requests in it.
but the value prop of it seems to be diminishing as it grows
Just some of the things that have become better as YC has grown...
- guaranteed convertible debt money waiting for you after YC
- meetings with the best VCs
- tailored advice from (more and more) folks who have done it again and again
So even in the worst case scenario where your point re: access turns out true(I do not think it is), there are many, many things about YC's offering which get better for each coming batch.
This is my point, you can get this advice easily outside of YC.
I disagree. There are a lot of experienced people willing to learn about your business and provide you valuable insights but in almost all cases, they have some interest of future gains - such as investing in a future round.
When that is not the case, it is still pretty rare to get someone experienced to really get involved in your business and offer non-generic advice over a prolonged period of time.
Re: collaborate with other founder: Not exactly. I'm pretty sure if I wasn't in YC, I wouldn't have been able to get a meeting with Justin, Emmett, Garry, or Sama (JEGS) so easily.
In addition, they've seen a lot in the past years, through pivots, raising, building a team, and through their ups and downs. They've been quite forthright in sharing their own experiences, and are valuable in their own ways that pg, harj, and pb would not necessarily be able to impart. As great as the senior partners are, and as much as they have seen, they have limited experience. Having the JEGS for office hours adds additional color and perspective.
It seems that with each session, YC takes on more and more companies. Will this extra help continue to make this a YC norm? Has there been an upper limit defined?
We can handle about 20 startups per (full-time) partner. Maybe 25. So with 10 partners advising startups we could get up to 200-250 startups simultaneously. Not that we expect to anytime soon; the point is just that if there is a limit, it's not immediately in front of us.
I think I expected the number to be in that range, It just seems large so I just didn't want to seem crazy. But that being the case, should I expect to be 1 of 65 in the next batch? 1 of 70? ;)
Ok. That was tricky. I'll ask it in a less loaded form. Should we expect 65 to 70 to be the cut off for the winter session?
Depends how much applications increase. Between w2011 and s2011 they increased 84%, but that was faster than usual. 10-20% seems more likely. So maybe we'll end up with 70-75.
You're growing from batch to batch, but if you could reach 200 startups by your estimates, why not grow even faster? Is it just a matter of "slow and steady"?
Our growth is entirely a function of the growth in applications. So we don't have much choice about our growth rate. To grow faster we'd have to fund people we thought would fail, and to grow slower we'd have to reject people we thought would succeed. Either would be painful.
An interesting metric to look at would be how many borderline rejected founders are going on to achieve valuation x compared with companies funded. Of course though the YC program itself introduces another variable into a measure like this.
I'd guess they'll keep going until they see diminishing returns. PG has said y-combinator is an effort to mass produce the startup (don't have the direct quote offhand). With that in mind, they seem to be looking to optimize the entire experience rather than just seeking to maximize profit. I imagine they'll let it grow only to the point that they still feel like they can work with each of the startups in some capacity (and within reason).
Four more guys! That'll really help scale to a more gender-balanced group of companies!
No insult to Sam, Garry, Emmet, and Justin who I'm sure are very talented. But given how Jessica Livingston talks about how hard it's been for Y Combinator to attract female founders and then they do something like this, I really have to wonder how much they're trying to change.
I think you're insulting female founders by suggesting that their decision about whether to apply to something like YC would be determined by the gender of the partners.
Surely male applicants wouldn't be scared off if most of the YC partners were female. Why assume female applicants are any different?
If more YC partners were female, it could result in more women applicants because it might provide encouragement to potential female startup founders who are on the fence that successful entrepreneurship in a male-dominated startup environment is achievable--and ultimately worth striving for. Social science studies point to a gap between similarly-qualified men and women on their respective levels of self-confidence and risk tolerance. The implication of this gap is that while the gender makeup of YC partners wouldn't affect the decision of most men to apply, the presence of women could have the effect of encouraging women to apply by demonstrating what can be achieved.
Ultimately, this is a pipeline issue--there are just not enough women founders who go on to be angels and VCs.
It's not a matter of women being "scared off". Diversifying the people at the top is one of the key steps to getting a more diverse organization. This was an opportunity to do it. YC chose not to.
In contrast, there's 500 Startups, where Dave McClure is actively reaching out.* Which environment is likely to look more attractive to women entrepeneurs?
"She got into YCombinator. She must be good." vs "She got into 500 Startups. She must be good. Or they must have tried to recruit her because of that pronoun I keep using."
This is also why affirmative action hurts the careers of people who ostensibly benefit from it, if they don't get into Harvard: at Harvard, the black/white SAT gap is fairly small. Everywhere else, it's huge, so there's a big adverse selection problem, and of course employers know about it.
I agree with Jon. Dave McClure reminds me of Albert Passingham, the son of a single mom who helped encourage women to stand up for equal pay. The role of Albert was depicted in the film Made in Dagenham http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371155/
Because they have a hard time getting female founders, they have almost no female alumni to pull on. They want only the cream of the crop for this highly important role, and I can't think of a single female YC alum whom they think of as highly as they think of Sam et. al. Maybe Jessica Mah in a few years, but inDinero is too young for her to lose focus now, and she doesn't have as much experience as they're looking for yet. And I don't think they're comfortable inviting in people with whom they haven't worked.
This problem is a lot bigger than YC. It's not that women don't do YC, it's that women don't do startups. YC has a few hundred active startups to herd, and I think they just don't have time to address these problems of the larger startup landscape.
The most senior students teach you all the basic stances/punches/kicks/throws. The sensei helps you put it all together into a coherent fighting style.