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Y Combinator

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20 Jul, 2015

YC Fellowship launch

Announcement8 Comments

Altman announces the launch of YC Fellowship, a program aimed at prep-seed ventures that have not received any prior funding. The eight-week program will give out advice to participating startups and $12,000 in grants — although regular venture investments could become the standard in the future. Companies will not have to move to the Bay Area. Applications open July 27. Altman writes in a blog post:

Ten years ago, Paul Graham said there could be ten times as many startups if more people realized they could try. Thanks to the work he, Jessica, Trevor and Robert helped do, that’s become true. We think there is still room for another ten-fold increase in the number of (good) startups. But even now, a lot of good founders never get started because they can’t scrape together a relatively small sum of money at the idea stage. So we’re going to try a new experiment, which we’re calling the YC Fellowship. This is targeted at teams that are very, very early…Although this is an experiment, if it seems promising we’ll iterate quickly just like any good startup. Our goal at YC is to enable as much innovation as we can. Someday if it works, we’d love to fund 1,000 companies per year like this.

16 Sep, 2014

Stanford online course

Announcement0 Comments

Altman announces Y Combinator will hold an online course through a partnership with Stanford University, where the class will be called CS183B, or How to Start a Startup. This opens up access to people who don’t make it into the program, and anyone else, including people in other countries:

At Y Combinator we are limited by class size, and in the people we can fund

22 Apr, 2014

Raises funding terms

Announcement0 Comments

Altman announces the company is increasing the amount it provides to approved startups. In return, it will take a slightly larger equity stake of 7%.

$97k was about right at the time, but the cost of living in the Bay Area has gone up substantially. So we’re increasing the total to $120k, which we hope is enough for the founders to run their business and pay their living expenses for at least six months, and sometimes longer.