Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #89 - Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung are both partners at YC.This episode is about Startup School. It’s a free, online course we’re offering that starts on August 28th.We’re also offering equity-free grants of $10,000 to 100 companies that participate in the course.Anyone can sign up for the course at StartupSchool.org.Read the transcript here.The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.***Topics0:40 - What is Startup School?3:40 - Who are the speakers this year?5:00 - What are the different paths in Startup School?7:00 - Success stories from last year’s Startup School.8:55 - Why offer $10,000 grants?10:00 - What deals are offered to the startups in Startup School?11:00 - When does the course start?12:45 - What are the requirements to complete the course?15:15 - What are the topics that will be covered?18:00 - What happens during office hours sessions?22:30 - Who else is working on this course at YC?

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Jeff Ralston and Adora Chung. Jeff and Adora are both partners at YC. In this episode is about Startup School. Startup School is a free online course we're offering that starts on August 28th. We're also offering equity-free grants of $10,000 to 100 companies that participate in the course. Anyone can sign up for the course at startup school.org. All right, here we go. All right. Jeff and Adora, thanks for coming in. Thanks for having us, Craig. Hello.

We're here to talk about startup school. So, Jeff, could you break down what's happening this year with startup school? Sure. Well, startup school began a couple of years ago with a course Sam taught online called How to Start a Startup. And last year we evolved it into a course we taught with Stanford called Startup School. And we're continuing that this year. It's an open online course that is a new. is a way for us to reach as many companies as possible throughout the entire world

to help maximize really the amount of innovation and amount of value created by startups everywhere in the world. And Adora, how is the coursework differing this year from any previous version? Well, there are a lot of similarities. So it's a 10-week course, and you can either audit the course or you can actually be part of the, you can apply to be part of the course. And to be part of the course, you get, obviously, access to the materials and lectures. You're put into a group.

You get an advisor who you will meet once a week to, you know, go over the obstacles that you're having. But more importantly, to talk with other founders as well who are in, you know, dealing with similar challenges. And then also you have access to a community, which will be a forum in which you can talk to everybody else. who is taking startup school. So it's really great because at the end of the day, what we want to do is reduce the barriers to starting a startup. And I come from the middle of nowhere personally. And so, you know, it's near and dear to me because I, you know,

I didn't learn about startups until very late. Like I would consider like a late bloomer compared to people who are from here. And so I think that what's important is to give people out there who are not in Telecon Valley access to. to community, access to mentorship, and access to really great knowledge to build their startup. So the amazing thing about startup school is it's not just the content. This is really unique. It is about the community and the mentorship that every single one of the founders in this

advisor where you get assigned an advisor and you meet with them on a weekly basis. Now, it's also true that the content this year is going to be different than the content last year, all of the content from the last two years is available online, will remain available online, and is relevant and useful. But it turns out also that the content relevant to starting a startup is both broad and deep. There's a ton of things to cover. So we're going to cover everything a little bit differently. We're going to go over similar areas of a startup, how to get going, what the mechanics are, how to think about product, how to think about growth, how to think about fundraising. But we'll do them all in new and different ways that I think will be valuable

additions to the set of content that we've already actually made available in a public library that you can get at at startup school.org slash library. And the speakers for this year? Is that list public yet? Well, the list is about to be public. I think simultaneously, with the publication of this podcast so we can start to talk about it. One of my favorite speakers is going to be Adora. And we're really focusing on

on YC partners and YC founders for this startup school. So a number of YC partners are going to be participating. I'm really excited to say that Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston will be taking part in the course and giving some of their wisdom, which is also broad need to founders everywhere in the

world. But we're also going to have other YC partners, Sam Altman, who's the president of Y Combinator, will be giving a talk. Michael Seibel, the CEO of Y Combinator, will be giving a talk. So we have an amazing lineup of folks who are going to be out there talking. Okay, cool. So we should just clarify all these questions around the tracks right now. I think that, like, isn't necessarily clear for folks who have maybe participated before or just heard a little bit about it. So, Adora, could you explain, like, the different paths of going through startup school? Yeah, so there are two paths. One is you can audit the course, in which case you just get access to the live stream and lectures and the notes.

Or you can be, especially if you're full-time founders, you can just apply and be part of startup school officially, which means, like I said, before, you get access to, to mentorship, mentor, sorry, advisors, you get access to the forum, you get exclusive deals, like with Amazon, Stripe Atlas, and so forth. And you also can qualify to receive a $10,000 equity-free grant from us. Right. If you complete the course. And we're going to choose 100 companies that get that grant based on, well, how they do during the course.

and the information we're going to get from the advisors and the progress that company makes. So we're going to judge how promising that company is, those companies are. Yeah. And those companies, could they apply at any stage? Like, who are the founders that you guys are looking for? I think the most interesting are people who are early stage founders. So either they have an idea and they're ready to work on it full time or they are currently working on idea. And anywhere from no users to any number of users is fine.

I think we can be helpful along those lines. I think startup school is, it's fair to say, is certainly targeted at very early stage companies. There is knowledge in the knowledge base that we built in the past and are continuing to build with this year startup school that is probably useful to companies in later stages as well. well. But for the most part, this is, I think Adora put it well, is about lowering the threshold for people to get started to really get your startup going. Got you. Do you guys recall, so from last year, were there any success stories that kind of stood out to you? So we had 38 companies who actually got into our core YC program after going through startup school. And so they don't, I think for the most part, most of them did a lot of their iteration and

talking to users during startup school. And they learned a lot how to do that. Which I should just pause you and say that. That's a very high percentage of the batch. Like 38 companies out of... Across 2 batches. Yes. But still, even across that, that's 10%. Yep.

Yeah. And success stories. I mean, I'm very excited about a few of those companies. So one of them is actually, I worked very closely with in my group. It's Connection IP. They actually went through MOOC with something in the legal space, which they're still in. But they iterate it towards their current. product during startup school.

So I think that's really exciting. Cognition IP is their tech-enabled patent law firm. So if you need any patents, you should go to them. I should just add a door through in this term, MOOC, which we often use internally to talk about the course. That stands for massively open online course. And it's sort of a most people know that term. But this is how we think of startup school.

It's a MOOC. It's for everyone. It's open to everyone. So no matter what, if you apply to be part of the main course and get an advisor and for whatever reason, and we do have a limited number of advisors, so we can't take everyone, but you can still take the course. Everyone who applies can audit the course, can go through all of the lectures and see all the content. And at the end of the course, as we said, all of the content is going to be available online. Gotcha.

So given the success of last. year's MOOC, which Jeffie were organizing. Why did you decide to do the grants this year if it was already working? We want to maximize the amount of innovation in the world. And it's just a hard fact that starting a startup takes cash. So to be honest, it's a bit of an experiment, right? Certainly it helps to attract companies to come do startup school. We think startup school is good for them.

We drive no benefit unless they apply to Y Combinator and get into Y Combinator, except we think it makes the world a better place to have more startups. So it's good if more do startup school. And we think that the most promising startups that don't get into Y Combinator, but still have a shot, have a better shot if they have some capital to work off of. So our fervent hope is that by giving $10,000 to these 100 startups, will have startups that might otherwise die, not die, and succeed and thrive and become viable companies.

Gotcha. Okay. And so just to clarify the deals you mentioned earlier, what are they explicitly so people know? Oh, the exclusive deals. So we have cloud credits from Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean and maybe some others. And then every company that comes through will be able to incorporate and invest. create a bank account with through Stripe Atlas. They're amazing company to work with.

And Clerky for incorporation. Yes. And we'll have a bunch of others, but those are the highlights. Cool. So applications are open right now. They've been open for a week. They've been open for a week or more when this podcast comes out. Two weeks.

Yeah. Yeah. Once the podcast, it'll be two weeks. And I do want to really encourage people to get their application in. And it turns out this is a really popular thing and lots of people are applying and we're already thrilled by the response. It's great. We have thousands and thousands of companies already applying. And when will the course begin?

The course is going to begin the week of August 27th. It's going to actually have a live in-person component in Mountain View, California at the original YC offices on Pioneer Road. I'm behind our way, excuse me, but also the, obviously we can't take everyone there since there will be many thousands of people taking the MOOC. So all of the lectures and the slides will be made online, made available online shortly after each lecture. And who can attend in person? How does that work? We're actually working through that. We think, you know, we think the demand is going to be super high.

and we want to be as equitable as possible. It's a really interesting, correct, the startup companies in Star School are the companies from around the world. But it's also true, there's a good number who are in the Bay Area. Yeah. So we don't expect or really even recommend people travel to come and try to come to the course because that actually will probably detract from your startup. You should be focusing on startup, the startup itself,

and building your company and talking. to your users and building your products, not traveling out to Mountain View. But for people who are local and who want to come in, we'll have some mechanism for them to reserve a spot and come in and actually attend the lecture in person. And just to clarify or to add on to that is the live is just, you know, an option. It's not a requirement for course completion or to qualify for the $10,000. But there are requirements. I'm sure

I was about to say that but we to be eligible to take part in a presentation day at the end where you can present your company and hopefully there'll be an audience of investors and other

and the community to take a look at what you've done, what you've accomplished, but also to be eligible for the $10,000 grant. You need to to attend nine out of ten of the weekly group meetings with your advisor, and you need to consume at least nine out of ten of the nine out of ten?

Yes. 18 out of 20 of the lectures that occur on a weekly basis. Okay. So the course, Adora mentioned this. The course runs from 10 weeks starting on the week of August 27th, and it, we're going to runs through the end of October. Not coincidentally, that is right in the application period, going into the interview period for our winter 2019 batch.

So we actually will help people apply to YC. We'll give you maybe not insider information, but accurate information about how to think about creating an application and having your best shot at having your company considered for membership in that. There's a lecture dedicated to that. There will actually be a lecture dedicated to helping people do that. Look, it's hard to get into our core YC program. The admission rate is somewhere between 1 and 2%.

So we think that alone is a great reason to come through startup school. The main reason startup school will help you get into YC, however, is not because we have a lecture dedicated to that. The main reason it will help you get into YC is because we sincerely believe it will make your startup better. Right. And you will have the forcing function of working with a group over 10 weeks. Well, that's part of it. It turns out that the forcing function of working part of a group and having a community over 10 weeks makes your startup better. It makes you focus.

It makes you achieve. It makes you grow. So we expect those things to really be relevant to the companies that are applying. So in addition to this section on applying to YC, What else is in the curriculum? Like, let's go from the beginning of the first course and then just go from there. Yeah, this is hard because we have to do it from memory and it's 10 courses. But it follows an arc that I think will be pretty familiar to folks.

We're going to start off by talking about some of the really basic ideas behind starting a startup. Why you do it, how you should think about it, how you should even mechanically go about doing what you need to do. do. Some of these things, every part of doing a startup is hard, but sometimes just getting over those first, you know, small steps is the key thing to actually getting on the road to building your startup. Then we'll spend a fair amount of time talking about product. What is a startup without, what is any company without a product? YC's motto, it turns out is make something people want. So we'll spend a fair amount of time talking about, well, what it really means to make something people want to find sort of the proverbial product market fit. And then we'll go on

to talk about, well, so how do you think about getting users and growing once you start to have a product that's reasonable? And then, you know, we'll spend a fair amount of time on that and we'll spend a fair amount of time on on things like how to think about running your company and hiring people and and then we'll transition to to talking about fundraising how that works how you think about cap tables and and as we get towards the middle part we'll talk about applying to YC which is sort of right in that sort of in a lot of people think about YC as a mechanism for fundraising although I tend to argue it's much less about fundraising. That's a piece of it and way more about making your startup more likely to succeed.

And then we'll have some cool stuff at the end that will revolve around thinking big. Thinking big. About the future. Thinking about the key things that make startups succeed and fail. and even psychological and emotional things because as anyone who's done a startup, a door has been through this

as an intense way as you possibly can, a startup is an emotional roller coaster. It's really complicated and hard. And coming out the other end, as good a person or better as you enter in the beginning, is really a hard challenge. What about those sessions with advisors? Around YC, we talk about offices.

hours and group office hours and advisors and all that stuff. I think it's not always clear what actually happens during those meetings. And to be clear, like, these are online sessions with your advisors. Yeah. Just so online. And so they're happening weekly, correct? What's actually happening during the? Because, you know, following the coursework is interesting, which is like the traditional

model if you're working with a TA, for example. But in reality, they're more talking about what, product growth during the whole course? I would say the coursework is a little bit more on the theory side and abstract and an attempt to teach everybody. Yeah. Something relevant to what they're doing. And then in group office hours, it comes down to more tactical things and very specific things. And so we're going to try to group you with fellow founders who are working on similar types, similar industries and obviously, hopefully similar locations. So you don't have to get up at wacky times for this. But most importantly, I think the, The general structure is you come in and you describe, you know, what has happened in briefly, what has happened in the past week. Have you met your goal? If not, what was the main obstacle and how can the group help you?

And so the mentor actually is not there to, I would say, tell you exactly what to do. They're there to facilitate a conversation because I think in most cases, a lot of the things, a lot of the problems you run into, other founders have run into and just very, very, in different forms. And so it is other founders who will probably help you the most. And so that's what we're, that's what we're hoping for. The important aspect of the hours, even though they're done in group, is that they're actually individual attention for each company. Each company gets to spend time talking about what they're working on, what progress they're making, what problems there

or barriers they're running into and and it's as the Roar points out it's both the advisor and the other founders within that context who can help and and you know take part in the community of startups trying to be successful

it's actually the coolest part I just actually it's worthwhile saying just a word on the advisors who I think more than anything make this work and it's really a testimony to the power of the YC network that

YC founders are so interested and like I don't know how how open I should be about this but I'll just say we don't pay these folks to do this. They volunteer their time for a free course

to spend time with companies that they've never heard of before and to help them be successful and these folks are amazing they're in many in most cases, working on their own startup at the same time, but they dedicate their time, their very valuable time to help these strangers make their startup work. And it's really more than anything else what I think makes startup school powerful.

And interesting beyond sort of any online course you can follow and, you know, and any book you can read about how to start a startup. This is way more real, way more effective, and I would say way more substantive to the future success of your startup. Yeah. Well, I think it really helps you stay locked into the course because that's been, you know, churn has been a huge problem with many MOOCs, right? I think it's not uncommon to have less than 20% of the class finished. 5%. Five percent is a standard from a single digit percentages.

Right. And last year, 56% finished. And our goal is higher this year. And I think Adora pointed out, you only get a chance at the $10,000 if you finish. So we expect that is one of the reasons we put this in place at the tail end of the course because we think that is going to incent people to finish because we think it's good for them to finish. And your startup then has a better shot. Right. So before we move on, I think we should also shout out the people at YC that we're working on.

with you guys because it's not just you too. No, not at all. So who else is working on it with you? Well, Stephen Pham has... Stephen's the main... I mean, Stephen does more than anyone. He's amazing. He worked on it with Sam last year.

And I think he worked on startup school too. How to Start Up as well. But he's amazing. He recruits the advisors. He puts all everything together. He makes it work when it works. So he's sort of, he's the guy. Yeah.

And then we have two engineers who are working with us as well, Ramon and Kyle. On the YC software team. Because there's a whole software side to this, obviously. Yeah, we built, like for the most, we build this ourselves. We use our own software and we manage it with their own stuff. We actually, it's actually non-trivial to put together software that makes it, that makes it scalable to work with, you know, thousands and thousands of companies.

Yeah. Obviously, we have smaller scale, but even within YC when we have hundreds of companies we're working with, we need software. to help us scale. At this level, we need it all the more so. And so they've done it. They did an awesome job last year. We're improving it again.

This year we get lots of feedback from the companies and from the advisors and how to make the software even better. So, yeah, Kyle and the Vermont have been amazing. Yeah, right on. So on a personal side for you guys, when you were startup founders, which of these classes do you think would have been most valuable to you? Like, what was the thing you knew least about where you could have learned the most? probably all of it

when starting off oh my gosh I mean I'm from a slightly different generation and when I when I want to start a startup there was nothing available and the the there's there's we said this before but it's worth

repeating the content's awesome like just if you if you go to that that URL I mentioned for the library and you start going through there it's incredible. There's also a lot of startup content elsewhere on the web and some of it, not all of it, but some of it's pretty good too.

I happen to believe that the startup content that's been put together, both at Wyss. So it's a mix of startup school content and other content that's been generated and on some external content that we think is actually particularly good and we point to. But that coupled with the community and the mentorship that startup school represents, that alone is worth the price of admission, which is free.

But that alone is amazing and game changing as far as I'm concerned. You haven't answered the question. My question is, my answer is the community and the focus and having that. For me, like, again, the content is great. It's fantastic. But you did nobody around. you. Yeah.

I think I answered the question. You're right. You did answer the question. My bad. Adora, same. Yeah, I think in general, when you think about YC, it's all about the network. And, you know, it's a community of high quality entrepreneurs. Yeah.

And you can't get that anywhere else. And so we want to do this for startup school as well. It's like you can live anywhere and plug into a network. You don't, you know, like this will be the highest quality place you can be at to talk with people about your startup. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for making time. Hey, thanks a lot.

Craig. It was fun. Yes. All right. Thanks for listening. So as always, you can find the transcript and the video at blog. dot ycombinator.com. And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast.

See you next time.