How my 10 weeks at Y Combinator’s online startup school were like

Disclosure: Y Combinator is an investor in Tech in Asia.

In early March 2017, I found out that Y Combinator (YC) had announced its first online startup school. That really made me happy because we tried getting into their offline school twice but received negative responses.

YC is one of the largest startup accelerators in the world. It was founded in 2005, and now-famous companies like Stripe, Airbnb, Weebly, Optimizely, Dropbox, Reddit, MixPanel, and Twitch have gone through the program.

During the accelerator program, YC invests US$120,000 for 7 percent of a company. It’s fairly difficult to get into that.

So, I was glad YC decided to expand their horizons and organized their first online school. It’s free and YC does not invest or take any stake in the companies.

I submitted my application as soon as I found out about the new online school. A few days later, I got a letter saying my application had been accepted. Awesome! I was so happy that I even printed out the letter and posted my happy face on Facebook.

On the very same day, I was added to a group chat and a closed group. Thus began my time with YC Startup School!

So, what was this school like?

Groups and chats

The first thing we did was join a general chat group (aka the “town square”). There, we could share messages that were visible to all the participants of the online school.

On the first day, we mostly just got to know each other. Later on, there were different discussions in this channel. People collected feedback, discussed pricing, looked for developers, etc.

All of the participants were broken up into groups according to time zones. My startup, AcademyOcean, landed in group #25. Each group had its own separate chat channel, which was a much more comfortable environment compared to the general channel. Everyone got to know each other right away, but just through chat messages, as we hadn’t seen each other’s faces yet.

Soon, our mentor, Vishal Joshi, joined the group and let us know that the first office hours would be held on Wednesday and that we’d have to attend. But what exactly were office hours?

Office hours

At the designated time, we were sent a link that directed us to a conference call. All the startups in our group were there. Vishal told us what his company, Joy, does and suggested an interesting format for our discussion right off the bat. Each startup would share its pitch, and then Vishal would choose a random group member to summarize what he had heard and gotten out of the pitch. Each member got to speak.

Group #25

Mentoring

Startup map

Lectures

Updates and metrics

Virtual demo day

Completion