One of America’s top seed accelerator, Y-Combinator is on a mission to encourage more and more people to take the startup route. In order to do so, the accelerator, which has already backed over 900 startups, has come with a massively open online course (MOOC) called the Startup School. The best part is, the ten-week class is available to everyone absolutely free of cost.
Launched earlier this week, the course allows anyone who is interested in learning the basics of starting a startup to register themselves a spot to access information from a variety of industry leaders and entrepreneurs that Y-Combinator has especially arranged to guest lecture during the duration of the 10-week long course.
The ten-week class is a composite of lectures, class office hours and group office hours. At the end of the course, the students will be required to share their learnings at an informal demo day.
Y-Combinator's Startup School is actually an annual event which sees entrepreneurs and students coming together for a one-day affair and receiving insightful lessons from many of the top industry leaders, including those that have graduated from the accelerator program with flying colours. Some of the most famous names that have graced the event as speakers in the past includes Facebook's cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, former Evernote CEO Phil Libin, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, venture capitalist Ron Conway, and Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann.
This year, the accelerator decided to expand the reach of the program by coming up with an online course. According to YC's president Sam Altman, the aim of the course is to replicate the experiences the accelerator has had in the entrepreneurship and startup world till date.
For the inaugural course, YC has been successful in getting onboard big names like WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, Facebook’s vice president of growth Alex Schultz, Vinod Khosla, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Stripe CEO Patrick Collision, SaaStr Jason Lemkin, and an assortment of partners from Y-Combinator.
Almost forty percent of the program's classes will be recorded advice sessions with startups which will be recorded from Stanford University. These classes will cover topics right from idea generation to product development to growth, fundraising, and more.
During those ten weeks, participants will also have access to a Slack-powered community that will allow them to actively converse with their diverse classmates. A few thousand of the participating students will also be able to get feedback about their startup each week during online advice sections, called as the Office Hours. These advisory meetings will be led by Y-Combinator program alumni including Boosted Boards’ Sanjay Dastoor, Cruise’ Daniel Kann and Experiment’s Cindy Wu.
This isn't YC's first MOOC to entrepreneurs. Three year ago, in 2014, it's President Altman has taken a course about startups at Stanford. The course was such a phenomenal success that the organisation decided to launch an in-house produced, lightweight version of it in a bootcamp-format.
The registrations for the online Startup School are now open and the course is scheduled to begin on April 5th.
Apply for the course here.
Launched earlier this week, the course allows anyone who is interested in learning the basics of starting a startup to register themselves a spot to access information from a variety of industry leaders and entrepreneurs that Y-Combinator has especially arranged to guest lecture during the duration of the 10-week long course.
The ten-week class is a composite of lectures, class office hours and group office hours. At the end of the course, the students will be required to share their learnings at an informal demo day.
Y-Combinator's Startup School is actually an annual event which sees entrepreneurs and students coming together for a one-day affair and receiving insightful lessons from many of the top industry leaders, including those that have graduated from the accelerator program with flying colours. Some of the most famous names that have graced the event as speakers in the past includes Facebook's cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, former Evernote CEO Phil Libin, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, venture capitalist Ron Conway, and Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann.
This year, the accelerator decided to expand the reach of the program by coming up with an online course. According to YC's president Sam Altman, the aim of the course is to replicate the experiences the accelerator has had in the entrepreneurship and startup world till date.
For the inaugural course, YC has been successful in getting onboard big names like WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, Facebook’s vice president of growth Alex Schultz, Vinod Khosla, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, Stripe CEO Patrick Collision, SaaStr Jason Lemkin, and an assortment of partners from Y-Combinator.
Almost forty percent of the program's classes will be recorded advice sessions with startups which will be recorded from Stanford University. These classes will cover topics right from idea generation to product development to growth, fundraising, and more.
During those ten weeks, participants will also have access to a Slack-powered community that will allow them to actively converse with their diverse classmates. A few thousand of the participating students will also be able to get feedback about their startup each week during online advice sections, called as the Office Hours. These advisory meetings will be led by Y-Combinator program alumni including Boosted Boards’ Sanjay Dastoor, Cruise’ Daniel Kann and Experiment’s Cindy Wu.
This isn't YC's first MOOC to entrepreneurs. Three year ago, in 2014, it's President Altman has taken a course about startups at Stanford. The course was such a phenomenal success that the organisation decided to launch an in-house produced, lightweight version of it in a bootcamp-format.
The registrations for the online Startup School are now open and the course is scheduled to begin on April 5th.
Apply for the course here.
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