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by jdcaron
1806 days ago
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I feel like sharing my experience I had with the YC Startup School program might be appreciated by some of you. I joined the program when it was first announced. It means I followed the program and I joined the soft-launched cofounder matching platform. I mostly have positive things to say about the startup school program, the curriculum is fair to the reality of starting a company. It doesn’t try to upsell you on doing it. It’s also covering the most important topics of starting an organization / project. I had a less positive experience with the cofounder matching platform. I am trying to be as objective as possible here, the odds of matching two “ready” humans to work in harmony on an extremely difficult project are extremely low. The numbers are brutally honest here with 4500 matches and only two startups (.0004%) enrolling for the YC Core batch. Yes, that’s three zeros. So many fishes but so few working matches. My biggest grip against the platform was that barely anybody respect the hard requirements. I had very few but one was very important to me, the other co-founder had to be also technical. I received a flood of non-technical cofounder asking for a match. I felt pretty bad about leaving these folks unanswered, so I put the time to create a generic and respectful email to explain why I am set to match with a technical cofounder only. It’s also mind blowing how many co-founders are already set on their ideas already. I consider myself quite flexible by bringing 5 potential ideas I would like to work on. I think I am also flexible in a way that I am also open to work on somebody else idea, as long as I would want it for myself. I matched with so many future cofounders that were already in a mindset that their project was the thing that they could not see themselves not working on it. I might be wrong but from my experience their progress as a company was almost nil (landing page with no clients). While most of the ideas weren’t ground breaking. So, prepare yourself to spend a lot of time on figuring out if something has any potential or not. It’s a bit hard on the morale to decline so many humans. I gave my 100% to do it as well as I could. Oh, and I won’t go too deep either into that subject but a lot of co-founders are in for either the fame or the money, not really my style either. Money is required down the line but it shouldn’t be the main target. Once again, prepare yourself to decline a lot of people if your profile attracts a lot of attention but it doesn’t match what you are looking for. All in all, kudos to the team at YC. What they are doing is extremely hard and they did a great job. The complains about matchmaking being extremely hard is similar to stating that water is wet. Oh and funky observation. When an organization like YC is building their own social network from scratch, it shows that in 2021 there is still no trustable social network platform to build upon. |
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No: it shows¹ that there's no trustable social network platform with a high density of startup founders. The Fediverse is plenty trustable, but most people there aren't inclined to found a startup.
¹: But it doesn't even show that; all it shows is that YC thought they'd benefit from making their own.