YCombinator Startup School

[Delmania]

I haven't been on in a while, but I wanted to share this with people. Paul Graham's incubator, Y Combinator, is running a free 10-week course on the pragmatics of running a start up. It's called Start Up School, and it's located at Startup School. One of thing I found interesting in the first week's lesson was the financial breakdown of creating a startup versus becoming a late stage employee. The takeaway is that if you're looking to get rich and have control over your life, creating your own business is actually less efficient than joining a late stage startup and 10X'ing it. The key reason to create your own company is because it's something you have to do, something you'll regret not doing later in life.

This is aimed at tech startups, but it's definitely food for thought.

 

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[inputchip]

Thanks @Delmania this looks like a great resource. I will be taking advantage of this for sure!

However, everyone keep in mind: GOLD - How many action fakes can the fastlane come up with??

 

[The-J]

One of thing I found interesting in the first week's lesson was the financial breakdown of creating a startup versus becoming a late stage employee. The takeaway is that if you're looking to get rich and have control over your life, creating your own business is actually less efficient than joining a late stage startup and 10X'ing it.

I'm curious: how many millionaires have been created through this? What is actually required to join a late stage startup? Do you need an Ivy League education, or connections to recruiters that most people don't have? Do you need specialized skills or experience? Can a 22 year old just go into a late stage startup (which I assume is something like Facebook circa 2010, 2 years before IPO) and start working as a programmer or whatever?

I don't disagree with that statement because I simply don't know shit about the startup world. I'm just curious about how many people that statement actually applies to.

As for the course... it sounds F*cking cool. I may check it out if I have time.

 

[Scot]

I mean, are we talking a probability game here? You're more likely to make x $'s as late stage vs founder?

If that's the case, sure.

But I think we all know that starting a business has a stupid high failure rate. If we wanted jobs, we'd stay at our jobs.

So while it may make financial sense through probability to get a job...

Tell Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates they should have worked for a late stage startup instead.

 

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[Anon1351z]

I listened to Dustin's presentation, here are my thoughts:

Everything he says is through the lens of trying to build a huge company ($100M+ Valuation), hold onto some equity, then cash out via a liquidation event (acquisition or IPO) and take home $10M. I don't think that anyone would argue this is an efficient way of making money, or that it has a high likelihood of success.

He then compares this to joining a $500M company with 0.05% in equity (250K at current value) which from brief research, it looks like you would have to be at least senior manager level to command. Any senior manager position at a healthy startup with that sort of valuation is going to have an impressive background, to say the least.

So assuming you can get the senior manager position, simply take this company from $500M to $20B and you've got your $10M! (The exact example he uses) Though for some reason, he doesn't remotely mention the probability of this happening. From a quick look, it seems that there are less than 10 startups currently valued over $20B, which means your chances probably aren't much better than the first example anyway.

All in all, it sounds like an interesting track. Y Combinator puts out really great content. That said, A LOT of their content is only really relevant to tech startups.