Do YC After You Graduate: Early Decision for Students
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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.
Y Combinator introduces 'Early Decision' for students, allowing them to apply before graduating, sparking debate about the implications for young founders and the startup ecosystem.
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There's many founders in the country who are just as driven and motivated, but have real-world situations that cannot allow uprooting themselves for several months, two very common ones:
- new parents
- disabled family members, or are themselves physically disabled
The discourse on Hacker News has frequently chastised companies demanding RTO, and some of the companies in your portfolio are remote-first (or remote-only), why does YC make the same kind of RTO demand with batches?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmFoNXkQTt8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkZ8MAk2oH4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z-_py5WgOM
But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.
You mean those spending levels?
Plus if rich fucks can't buy a building to put their name on that kids will walk through they won't donate money.
You make it sound like it's a decision based on school administrators putting learning first.
Then I started another. Horrible failure! Then another. And another!
And now I own a successful company built off all my previous learnings and failures. The “rich fucks” work for me now!
This is not true. I know several people at different institutions - decent schools - that have most or (in one case) all of their courses (at Queens) via remote delivery.
YC is so early on some of these deals that the primary gauge is team - which means personality of founders. Very hard to measure remotely.
I'm in a group, not as big or famous, that does early checks. We're 95% remote. IME, it's so hard to make those judgement calls through web-cam.
Agreed that founder focus is a big factor and that life gets in the way (of deals). However, if you don't like YC conditions there are 100s of other places to (attempt a) raise.
We're just addressing different steps.
Moreover, for better or worse, the all day every day work culture typical of venture-backed startups isn't really compatible with being a new parent etc. anyway.
> Asset Value = Equities + Liabilities
> /? startupschool pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=startupschool+pricing
/? site:startupschool.org pricing: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:startupschool.org+prici...
> Startup School > Curriculum > Ctrl-F pricing: https://www.startupschool.org/curriculum
YC Library: https://www.ycombinator.com/library
/? YC Library : pricing: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/search?query=Pricing
The amount of wheels you won't have to reinvent if you work at another company are astronomical. From engineering practices to sales to management, there's a lot you don't want to innovate on. Starting a company is really hard, and it's even harder if you've never seen first-hand how a functional company works. Your future employees will thank you.
You can go an entire career without seeing how a functional company works.
having worked at a few dysfunctional companies, there's value in it. you learn to spot red flag decisions and the kinds of people that tend to cause organizations to explode from within. a Lot of the success at my current company can be attributed to decisions I've made that came from experience at failed startups where we did the opposite.
There’s a lot of focus in the media and in accelerators on the 22 year old with a dream, but it’s nice to have a real adult in charge when the stakes are high.
Not to mention, if you have no work experience, you have no idea what problems are worth solving. So you end up with junk startup ideas from the latest fad / hype cycle.
But a senior partner at a law firm knows the pain points of being a lawyer and they can now start a company to fix them.
And a senior quant at a hedge fund might have some good ideas for automating tedious back office processes.
Still, I think you need to be well connected, or already profitable for VC fundraising.
Otherwise your just another programmer with hacked together prototype.
And those who can't.
I've already wasted too much time creating small prototypes and then cold calling/emailing VCs/YC.
It's a big club and I'm not in it, at this point I'd rather just make weird games with my friends and open source them versus trying to chase a dime.
I do think many college grads generally don’t understand how business works though because they just haven’t experienced it yet. School is a totally different beast.
You'd be surprised how many times you can "iterate and fail quickly" only to end up at an established practice some other shop has been doing for years. It is important however to understand the why behind the decisions as otherwise you're no better than just figuring it out yourself
Personally I would caveat that they be a small company. Large companies are a very different beast. What it takes to get ahead and succeed at there is often very different from a startup, in ways that don’t become obvious until you’ve worked at a startup.
Rather than learning which wheels not to re-invent, you have one data point and reflexes that you’d need to deprogram.
Working at the company I most highly respect and would want to emulate (Stripe), I don’t think the skills would have been at all the right ones. (Admittedly I was in a highly toxic and political org.)
If you want to get rich by 30, you basically have to start a startup or get into a top small hedge fund out of undergrad.
Have fun, learn, develop and grow your skills and network, take the investment, but it’s important to be honest with one’s self about odds of success and outcome. If you win, respect and appreciate the lottery ticket for what it was. Hard work and years of grinding is table stakes, but you can still fail (and most do).
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/pulling-back-the-curtain-...
https://www.marketsentiment.co/p/the-yc-report
I’d rather have a 50% chance at my own startup being alive after 10 years than go work some big corp job.
If you're young, talented, single and bringing home $200k a year including RSUs, you are on track to basically do whatever you want in a decade. Make it to senior manager / Staff level and you should be clearing $400k a year at least. And if you do it smartly you're working 9-5, not some 996 bullshit. That's a ridiculous amount of money.
It's not as sexy as building a startup. But at least for me the ROI has been incredible. And I'm not super smart- my whole college career I looked down at people who spent their lives in front of a computer. I completely missed the trend of tech and Silicon Valley, and I definitely don't work any harder than the next guy. But if you do good work I've found that it tends to pay off.
If you spent the last 10-15 years as an engineer/manager in FAANG (and these past 5-10 years have been very far from what’s called the “golden age”), and were financially responsible, you’re a multi millionaire, most likely still in your 30s.
If you’re a couple that worked there, well damn you’re not just rich you are wealthy.
I can’t think of a better starting point for founding a startup. Or retiring.
Sacrificing 10 years seems a lot when you’re fresh out of college. But 1. it’s not really a sacrifice since your life is much more comfy than most 2. in the grand scheme of things 10 years is not a lot. You will most likely spend way more time on a failed startup while having the worst time.
The chance of winning most popular US lotteries is approximately 1 in 300,000,000. In comparison, the chance of IPO-ing a YC company is approximately 1 in 300. You can count how many orders of magnitude of difference that is.
17 YC IPOs over how many total YC founder years (Lifetime YC companies * # of founders * years YC company active, roughly)?
(I’ve put a lot of thought into being a founder, from an aggressively data driven perspective about how to spend time, which is non renewable)
A more useful comparison would be a serious statistical analysis between startups and other occupations.
And I concur - in this AI hypecycle more than ever it seems to be about how can peacock the best. Its neck and neck with the crypto hypecycle a few years ago for the incidence rate of vaporware and snake oil. Sure there are some legit founders building meaningful product but they seem to be a small minority.
there are open weight models which are SOTA.
not sure how you plan to monetize it.
Tell me how you can make a profit or if you even have a plan to make a profit..
or your plan is to sell it to a higher fool who believes that they can sell it to an even higher fool....
Oh. Sounds similar?
FWIW, to me entrepreneurship is an amazing path, but starting a company right out of college?? There’s a LOT of skills to develop. Have someone to copy. Make sure you draw enough salary. Keep an identity outside of your company (networking!) so you can pick yourself up if (when) it crashes.
I know, I know...there are examples! And yes, there are, but statistically, they won't be you. You're playing the lottery, only it's a lottery that steals your youth and gives you psychological problems.
If your only goal is to get rich, then don't do a startup. You have to have some more fundamental reason, or the agony will beat you.
Its an outdated take to think people arent doing this
I also live in NYC. I lived in SF, during possibly the all-time greatest period of wealth creation in the last 50 years. I knew billionaires when they couldn't afford bar tabs. I ate leftover boxes of Obama-Os (again, Google it) that nobody wanted.
I'm still telling you the truth. Every one of those people who succeeded went through hell and back, and even then there was no guarantee that there was a reward at the end of the hell. Doing a startup is like getting punched in the face repeatedly for many, many years, with only your faith -- in something -- to carry you forward. You have to have more than just a desire to be rich.
And again, I think you would've simply responded "I have" rather than ask me what I think. Obviously I could be wrong.
I was told that we were given them, but maybe they were surplus? Either way, real boxes.
I am 30, I am rich by most measures of wealth and probably in the minds of most college grads. I worked in various big tech companies (incl stints in FAANG) after graduating with my BS in CS. A lot of my peers did do startups, and they had varying degrees of success. But almost everyone who went to big tech has set up their next generation for success at this point
YC startups are a bit above average, but still most startups fail.
If you care about building wealth, taking a stable engineering position straight out of college and working hard is a great path
I'm not very liquid at the moment. My salary is a measly 60k a year. Most of 80k that is my share of the profit will stay in the company instead of go into my pocket, but the 33% ownership in the company is valuable. Very typical valuations for companies in general is 10x profit, which would mean my share of the company is worth 800k. Companies getting strategically acquired can be 20x revenue, which makes my share of the company worth 4.7million.
At FAANG I would have likely made a liquid 300k * 5 = 1.5million, which would allow me to spend more money and enjoy life right now. However, the next 5 years with my company will likely be a lot more valuable. If we manage to grow 30% a year then after 5 years profit will be 900k. That means 300k a year profit share, 3m valuation at 10x profit and 17m valuation at 20x revenue.
Heck you’re making less than a run of the mill enterprise dev is making in a second tier major city in Atlanta
And as a founder, you still need to do well to do better off than a BigTech employee and statistically you won’t come near.
And on top of that, you’re sounding like every startup that doesn’t realize that they can’t linearly project growth based on past performance. The first cohorts are almost always easier than later cohorts unless it is a platform with network effects.
You make your money first, let it make money for you and then do a startup.
Many will enter, few will win lmao
I also feel like highly intelligent people might quite reasonably decide for themselves that they shouldn't have to take on that kind of risk to get what they want out of life.
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I'm not sure what this is supposed to show, other than that YC funds a lot of startups and a lot of them are working in AI, which is what you'd expect during any major tech wave.
In fact, YC funds so many startups that your list is actually misleadingly short, unless you meant to argue that AI startups are a low percentage.
110 of those were from their summer 2025 batch of 170, so your statement is actually misleading unless you meant to argue that 65% is a low percentage.
Specifically, the one described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45287474.
Kiko the Monkey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KaWPYOLuT8
Looking up the founders is fascinating too. So many of them seem to have graduated and immediately started trailing what appear to be a string of back-to-back failed businesses, rarely with more than a year of staying power per attempt. It's hard to tell if that's "failing quickly" (desirable) or "frantically trying to get-rich-quick" (undesirable and what I run into in Melbourne most often).
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.)
The problems start when you fire someone with equity closer to the cliff
Anyway, I don't get the original post, IMO an MBA is not the kind of degree that is worthy of delaying founding a startup
I'd guess there's usually no point in a technical co-founder "firing" their capable business co-founder; it just ends the company.
While the technical person is spending most of their time on technical bits (no matter how much customer-facing product management time you have), etc., the business person is spending most of their time on relationships (investors, partners, customers, etc.). To a large extent, they take those relationships and reputation with them wherever they go next.
Unless the technical cofounder has some very rare and marketable technical expertise that the business people recognize (e.g., some recent big AI invention, or a fancy title at a FAANG), the technical cofounder will probably be considered an ordinary commodity by most.
> IMO an MBA is not the kind of degree that is worthy of delaying founding a startup
My guess is that an MBA from one of the most prestigious programs is usually worth delaying founding a startup. The MBA student can lay some of the groundwork while in the program, get mentoring and connections, and then out-execute many competitors once the student graduates.
The kinds of startups a lot of us have been thinking of are essentially the last 20 years of mostly ZIRP investment scams, but that can't go on forever (current dotcom-bubble-like "AI" hype wave low barriers to acquihire exit notwithstanding). I'd guess more people will have to do viable businesses than our field has in a long time.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Jared's description about why YC is doing this now seems clear. If you know more or better, you're welcome to make a substantive argument. But please don't use this site for shallow putdowns—it's not what it's for.
There is no need to rush to get into YC, and it would help to get actual experience in a job before setting out to build a whole company.
edit: removed snarky attack
Please don’t comment like this on HN. Your point would carry more weight without the snarky personal attack.
With no disrespect to YC, of course.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/an-ugly-truth-mark-zuckerber...
Unless ... your point is that all YC founders are homogeneous interchangeable cyborgs? ( surely not ).
When pg and others talk about the qualities they look for in founders, they use terms like “formidable” and “force of nature”.
Execs universally love working with people who maximize proactivity and strong opinions. The opposite of what you think.
Only if they share the same strong opinions.
I'm not really concerned with that. I'm more interested in the aggregate effect of putting a significant amount of the industry in the hands of a few ignorant twenty somethings and the small group of wealthy people from the bay area who are on all these boards. That is a frightening level of power concentrated in the hands of a small and anti-democratic structure.
The idea that someone fresh out of college should start and run a business is deeply concerning. These are kids who have just (hopefully) learned about ethics and what it takes to run a business, yet you expect them to be responsible stewards of their users' data, to comply with laws and regulations, while you throw $500,000 at them, give them minimal guidance, sell them fantasies about infinite riches, and skim whatever you can from the top.
Yes, I'm aware that Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and others, started their businesses before even finishing college. But a) these are outliers, and b) when someone refers to users of their products as "dumb fucks", do we really want to put them in charge of running a company?
Hard to buy that "here's another option" is predatory.
Life is short. Play long term games with long term people. While a batch bakes in a season, a cap table rests like a boulder in a hillside. If you’re smart there are better ways to find a lever with which to move the world.
Consider incentives. Don’t accept a hammer when you need a bulldozer. Don’t ask which paths exist: find where you want to be, ask what needs to be done. Do it.
Post Paul Graham YC: reserve your YC spot now. There’s no downside!
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