[enra]

I was in the S12 batch “the batch that killed the YC model” with 80+ teams I think. After that they switched to the group model where the batch is divided in to groups and each group has specific partners. In our batch is was definitely challenging when you often got a randomly assigned partner each week and most of the time they didn’t know who you are or what you do. However, Coinbase, Instagram, Zapier etc came out of that batch.

For me as first time founder YC was super helpful and they really drill the right kind of mindset for you. Build product, talk to users. The stuff they tell you is often very simple but I think lot of founders naturally complicate the startup building and focus on the wrong things because they think thats what should do. YC cuts through all the bs and just makes you focus on the few actually important things

[edouard-harris]

> However, Coinbase, Instagram, Zapier etc came out of that batch.

(By Instagram, I imagine you meant Instacart?)

[dsugarman]

Yes Instacart, although Kevin Systrom did visit us for one of the weekly YC dinners to share his wild startup story.

Easily the most memorable summer of my life. I agree that even though we were told everything was falling apart at our batch size, it was arguably the best batch of YC, there was some real magic.

[enra]

Yeah, meant Instacart. Autocorrect