YC Open Office Hours

[staunch]

Most great startups would not exist if not for the work of some critical helper in a position to help.

Apple had Mike Markkula, Facebook had Sean Parker, Airbnb had Michael Siebel, and Viaweb had Julian Weber. The list endless.

The ingredients are: great founders + great products + great helpers.

It's easy to say that great founders with great products will attract great helpers, but that ignores how few great helpers there are and how inefficient the "market" is.

YC is the greatest helper of startups in the history of startups, and expanding that help to a wider group is a great thing for the world.

[mwseibel]

Hey folks - Kat and I so excited to announce this new program - happy to answer any questions

[natmaster]

Thanks for having a general session. It's really hard for me coming from a poor white family with no history of entrepreneurship to enter this space.

[danieljoonlee]

Thank you for this opportunity. I've noticed ycombinator has been trying a lot of new things, and trying their best to reach out to as many people as possible. You guys are great!

[khamoud]

Hi! Thank you for posting and doing this! I was wondering if I could still apply even though what I'm working at the moment is still just a side project that I work on on nights and weekends. It's generating revenue and I'm hoping to pursue it full time in January/February. The problem is that I only qualify for the general office hours. Would you suggest that I apply or wait until June for the next general office hours?

[icpmacdo]

Thanks for this awesome opportunity, you should set up a system with the other companies blessing to release to remote office hours online. I am going to apply!

[sharemywin]

Please try to have a Midwest office hours. We all have the same problems/opportunities: 1. mediocre startup scenes/investment options. 2. lots of technical talent. plenty of enterprise companies with experienced IT. So, what if we use C#/java. 3. Better test market. SV is great for early adopters but if you want a really big company it needs to work here too.

[hbhakhra]

Thanks for offering this service.

What determines which founders you meet with? Since you had 650 founders apply the first time around and met with 50 teams there must be some filter and I assume its not random.

[kartikkumar]

Awesome! Since the first round is for all founders and subsequent rounds are targeted at specific groups, are people encouraged/allowed to apply for multiple? Or should we pick?

[probdist]

How'd you decide what groups you wanted to focus on? Vets, Women, URM, International.

Any other demographic categories you think are important to especially reach out to?

[smeyer]

How much time do you anticipate going into sorting through applications versus the actual sessions?

[mtviewdave]

Thanks for doing this! Any plans for an open office hours session focused on LGBT founders?

[gok2]

the program is 2 months later, is anyone available for some coffee today :)

[kevindeasis]

Any chance of opening: How about Other Person of Colour who are of First Generation Immigrants Status of a Country, which isn't the US in the future? That would really be electrifying ;P

[forrestthewoods]

Can any focus be given to rural communities? For example the coal miners of Kentucky. https://medium.com/backchannel/canary-in-the-code-mine-90388...

As someone who grew up in the rural South I'm saddened by how overlooked it's communities are. Poverty is wide spread but services and activist groups are lacking. No one cares about rednecks.

[matheweis]

I put down Skype on my application because Mountain View is a 12 hour drive from here... but now I'm wondering; does Skype vs in-person have an effect on whether you'd be accepted?

... 'cause I'm pretty sure I'd make that drive for the chance to meet with the YC partners if it made any difference :)

[katm]

Choosing Skype vs. in-person won't have any effect on whether you're accepted.

[Smirnoff]

You should go and meet with them in-person even if you do get accepted for Skype interview. You can only ask so little in 20 minutes, so why waste this opportunity?

[UshZilla]

Just applied for the veteran opening and very excited about the prospect! It's encouraging and helpful to see a few initiatives like this spring up.

TechStars has been running a sort of primer on entrepreneurship for veterans (http://patriotbootcamp.org/) for a few years now, but that's aimed at people just trying to figure out what's going on.

The YC opportunity seems more appropriate for those of us who are all-in and already building great companies. A nice evolution, and an important gap filled- thanks YC!

[cperciva]

Additionally, Amazon is generously offering $5,000 in AWS credit for all participating teams.

This seems really dangerous -- it creates a huge incentive for companies to waste YC's time. There aren't many things early startup founders can do which are worth more than $15000/hour. Sure, you can probably filter out many AWS-credit-seekers via the application process, but that adds more work for the people who read through all the applications.

Have you considered either (a) refusing the credits, or (b) taking a small number and handing them out to the most "deserving" startups at the end of the day?

[nodesocket]

Most good founders realize $5,000 in hosting credits in terms of their time and effort is not a compelling reason to do office hours. Office hours provides way more insightful and long term value than some free server hours.

Developers who think in terms of over-optimizing costs probably wouldn't even be picked anyway.

[mwseibel]

We feel comfortable with this

[karambahh]

All major hosting companies have a sponsoring programme for startups in incubators/accelerators.

Unfortunately I cannot disclose the numbers and the companies, but they are way larger than $5k

$5k in credit for hosting probably has a marginal cost of $0.

On the other end, if you take AWS offer and start using their services, you'll probably won't leave them anytime soon, particularly if you rely on provider-specific systems (SNS for instance).

Startups get a nice discount, hosting providers get an opportunity to supply a future successful startup and very quickly win back the $5k...

[powera]

Pretty much every cloud platform offers a deal like this to pretty much every tech incubator so the actual value of the deal isn't that high, certainly not $5000.

[fragsworth]

At the risk of sounding too cynical, have you considered that Amazon is likely paying YC as much or more for the opportunity to offer this credit? And that maybe this whole deal is at least partially because Amazon wants to acquire new customers?

[matheweis]

Startup Weekend regularly hands out $100 AWS credits to all attendees. I don't think I've ever seen anyone (or groups of people) go to SW just for that credit. $5000 is a bit more, but that -that- much more.

[mosquito242]

generally speaking as a startup, I'm not hyper-worried about spending 5K in hosting costs and unless you're an entirely social/pre-revenue startup, by the time you're spending 5K in hosting, your business is starting to make some decent revenue.

I'm much more focused on getting and having enough users that I get to worry about spending 5k on hosting.

[miiiiiike]

Kat's great! Easily one of the most competent people I've met and she went out of her way to sit down with me in New York.

Bonus: For some reason Twitter now sends me a notification every time she tweets about Rick and Morty.. I'm mostly ok with it!

[pcmaffey]

This is an excellent strategic move to improve YC's pattern recognition of alternative signals coming from "diverse" marginalized groups.

Continually impressed.

[vishalzone2002]

I work in USA on a visa. Can I apply under international category?

[iMuzz]

If our founding team includes an Army vet AND an international founder.. which one should we apply for?

[glxc]

what will YC Research address?

[mwseibel]

We are attempting to make YC more accessible to everyone. Looking at the people who have historically applied to YC - we feel the need to do extra work to reach out to specific communities that are historically under represented in the valley. But this work is on top of (not replacing) the general work we want to do to reach out to all potential founders.

[dang]

Downvoting without responding is fine on HN. There are many more downvotes (and upvotes) than comments, which is as it should be.

I imagine these downvotes were because your comment gave what has become the #1 stock response to any such story without showing any awareness thereof or adding anything new; because the edge in it made it sound polemical rather than a sincere request for information; and because polemical stock responses turn into flamewars, which most of us aren't interested in and which break the HN guidelines. To downvote such comments is to be a good citizen, the way putting out small fires would be.

Note that one can make all of the above observations without disagreeing with the position you're implicitly advocating (that resources should target disadvantaged individuals rather than categories like race and gender). It's generally better to assume that downvotes are procedural rather than ideological. It yields better feedback about how your comments could be improved.

[babl-yc]

I had similar thoughts when seeing the following section (but didn't comment under fear of immediate downvote).

"April - Female Founders, June - General, July - Black and Latino Founders"

I find it somewhat unusual that the open office hours are segregated. Why not just reach out to those groups but have general open office hours?

[matheweis]

I didn't downvote. But I'd suspect that a part of the reason is that not all of the sessions will be divided/limited to specific groups. YC will "also open some months to anyone in the startup community."