You Need To Be At Startup School

If you have a startup, thinking about creating a startup, or even if you are just interested in how startups work you need to know about Startup School. It is a fantastic resource created by Y-Combinator to share their knowledge and expertise with the world and it is 100% free.

For those uninitiated, Y-Combinator is the world’s most successful startup accelerator that has helped over 3,000 startups since 2005. There have been hundreds of successful startups that have come out of YC including the likes of Stripe, OpenSea, Airbnb, Door Dash, Reddit & Twitch. If you are lucky enough to be accepted into their accelerator program it is a big deal and you then have a massively unfair advantage as a startup compared to those who don’t go through this system. Arguably the biggest advantage of YC is the exposure that you get to capitalise on, exposure to great like-minded people, exposure to the press, and exposure to investors at their demo day that they hold at the end of the accelerator program. There is also a $500,000 USD cheque in exchange for 7% of your company that they give you upfront to help you turn your idea into a reality.

YC is a unicorn factory, a unicorn is a privately held startup company with a valuation of over $1 billion. YC has seen over 60 unicorns go through their doors, so they know a thing or two about what success looks like and how to scale things. YC also knows a lot about failure because the majority of their investments, unfortunately, don’t pay off but it is in their best interest to set every startup on the road to success and this is what I love about the YC Startup School, they talk about the good and the bad.

Startups School has been refreshed this year with a much better layout and much more content that was available on Youtube but now it has been organised in a much more searchable fashion. There are over 400 bits of content including over 200 videos and over 100 blog articles all categorised into different categories so if you want to learn about growth or product market fit everything is here. There are great interviews with hundreds of successful founders from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg. If you want to get inspired or school up on a topic this is the place to be.

But it’s not just a resource for education, it is also a place to track your progress, there is a great weekly tracker to help you track your progress. The weekly tracker serves as that simple self-motivator to keep on track and update not only yourself but also others. The weekly updates track the customers you have been talking to, tracks your morel, and your own primary metric. Michael Seibel from YC is always recommending that companies just launch and get their product out there ASAP regardless of how rough around the edges it is. They also have a weekly updater that is a constant reminder to launch your product, if you haven’t already done so, this way you are pushed towards getting something tangible out into the world.

But one thing you will find there that isn’t on any other website is the co-founder matchmaking. It is a phenomenal tool and I can’t recommend it enough to find your co-founder or even your first few hires. It is a great tool and I could easily write an entire article on this one feature.

So I would encourage you to go to www.startupschool.org and have a look around, you won’t be disappointed.