YC Startup School: Advisor Edition(blog.ycombinator.com)
blog.ycombinator.com
YC Startup School: Advisor Edition
https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-advisor-edition/
7 comments
As much as I admire YC, I have serious doubts about the effectiveness of what they can do here. Let me explain.
I mentored/advised literally hundreds of startups over the last 10 years, in most cases just out of pure altruism (in a few numbered cases these were startups where I had invested, so the help was not altruistic). You hear "hundreds" and might think it's exaggerated - reason why I interacted with so many startups and they seeked advice was because of the brand I represented (AWS), and the fact that everybody wanted technical help to start with. Let me add: perhaps also because I really love teaching and helping, and it probably showed.
I've seen many other mentors/advisors during these interactions, and most of the time the truly helpful ones were the ones with real experience and a real desire to help; their ability to help came mostly from their experience (sometimes successful; but surely painful and full of great life and professional lessons).
They say you can't teach experience, and in this particular case I see this as the biggest problem that not even YC might be able to solve or mitigate.
If you think that an initiative like this can "do no harm", I think you're mistaken: when too many want to advise/help, but don't realize they lack the true experience to know what they're talking about, the risk is that they'll simply damage these startups.
To be clear: I am in favor of what YC is doing here; I am simply sharing my views on what the biggest hurdle can be.
I mentored/advised literally hundreds of startups over the last 10 years, in most cases just out of pure altruism (in a few numbered cases these were startups where I had invested, so the help was not altruistic). You hear "hundreds" and might think it's exaggerated - reason why I interacted with so many startups and they seeked advice was because of the brand I represented (AWS), and the fact that everybody wanted technical help to start with. Let me add: perhaps also because I really love teaching and helping, and it probably showed.
I've seen many other mentors/advisors during these interactions, and most of the time the truly helpful ones were the ones with real experience and a real desire to help; their ability to help came mostly from their experience (sometimes successful; but surely painful and full of great life and professional lessons).
They say you can't teach experience, and in this particular case I see this as the biggest problem that not even YC might be able to solve or mitigate.
If you think that an initiative like this can "do no harm", I think you're mistaken: when too many want to advise/help, but don't realize they lack the true experience to know what they're talking about, the risk is that they'll simply damage these startups.
To be clear: I am in favor of what YC is doing here; I am simply sharing my views on what the biggest hurdle can be.
From what I understand the reason why YC is offering this Advisor Edition classes is to get these non-YC alum advisers ready for the regular version of the YC Startup school.
Last year YC accepted everyone into YC startup school (due to a Boolean error) and a lot of groups ended up participating without an adviser. And you get the best experience when someone actually guides you every week.
This year YC will again open the YC Startup School for everyone and YC can't scale it without having trained advisers.
Finally, I wouldn't worry too much about "advisers without experience." YC is smart enough to filter out bad apples from the bag.
Last year YC accepted everyone into YC startup school (due to a Boolean error) and a lot of groups ended up participating without an adviser. And you get the best experience when someone actually guides you every week.
This year YC will again open the YC Startup School for everyone and YC can't scale it without having trained advisers.
Finally, I wouldn't worry too much about "advisers without experience." YC is smart enough to filter out bad apples from the bag.
I agree, but also it seems like this program is mainly for peopke who’ve already been advising startups (to help them do it better) as opposed to somebody who has no relevant experience yet and wants to get into it from scratch..
Thanks to YC for continuing to support the entire startup community.
Good move, in Europe/Switzerland we have more incubators, co-working spaces and other "helpers" than actual startups.
About time that someone teaches them at least what to do; maybe some will realize they are not needed or even detrimental.
About time that someone teaches them at least what to do; maybe some will realize they are not needed or even detrimental.
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They're the people I owe the most to and also those who genuinely care the most. There's hope that the favour will be passed on some day, potentially to them, but they mostly do it simply as they want to help you and those you can help.
There has traditionally been less of a formal community around these figures but for each generation of entrepreneurs and business people we can all quickly come up with names who fit this exact mold - those who stepped in to help simply as they thought that was the best thing for everyone, even if it didn't help themselves much in that moment.
I'll stop rambling but I now feel the sense I need to go write a few thank you messages =]