#133 - Updates for Startup School 2019 and Office Hours with Kevin Hale

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Kevin Hale. Kevin is a partner at YC. Before working at YC, he co-founded Wufoo. Kevin's on the podcast today to do some Office Hours and talk about this year's edition of Startup School. If you'd like to learn more or sign up, check out startupschool.org. I'll also link it up in the description.
All right, here we go.
Kevin Hale, welcome to the podcast.

**Kevin Hale** (0:28)
Hi, Craig.

**Craig Cannon** (0:29)
You are running Startup School this year.

**Kevin Hale** (0:32)
Me and Adora are hosting and the main instructors for Startup School.

**Craig Cannon** (0:37)
So many people know about Startup School. We've talked about it on the podcast before.
What's different in 2019?

**Kevin Hale** (0:44)
2019 is a reaction to all the stuff that we learned from 2018 And so I'm going to talk about some stats. So last year we had over 15,000 people register and participate in Startup School. And we had about 5,000 graduate.
From that graduating class, we had about 391 of them end up getting interviewed for the last batch. And then we accepted over 60 companies. It represented 30% of the batch. So Startup School now represents the single largest source of companies that are accepted into a YC batch, which is super exciting. Because the founders in Startup School are so different than what I think a lot of people think a YC company is. So more numbers to throw at you. 83% of people who started doing Startup School, they were pre-launch. So no traction whatsoever. 52% were working full time. So the other 48% was only part time. 63% were single founders, which was very surprising to us. It was not so many teams. And then 59% were international.
And so for us, I wanted to make a new version of Startup School that was going to be a better fit for all those different groups of people. Because I felt like the last one probably wasn't a perfect fit. And so we shifted the content so it's more focused on helping you understand ideas, evaluating them the way an investor would sort of think about them. So that way, if you are spending time on a startup part time, or you're by yourself, or you're trying to figure out like how to, what to build an MVP for, you have the tools necessary and you have the things that we help our companies do to evaluate, for example, a pivot.
Or evaluate like which of the ideas is worth spending time on. The other thing we did was, for all these single founders, we realized it's like, holy crap, it's like over 6,000 people who were like all trying to do a startup. And we constantly tell people like finding a co-founder is the best thing you can do for a startup. And so we're like, why don't we just help them do that?
And this is super important for us because like we're finding increasingly teams are being created and other people are asking for equity to help them find co-founders.

**Craig Cannon** (3:12)
Other people meaning other investors, other programs.

**Kevin Hale** (3:14)
Other investors, incubators, programs, et cetera. And for us, we actually feel like the only people you should be giving equity to for a co-founder is two other co-founders. So we're gonna make that free. We're building a directory. We're allowing you to state that you are looking for a co-founder. And then the group sessions that you'll do during startup school, you'll be matched up with other single founders in a meeting. So you'll get to meet, talk.
And again, we don't expect that you're going to solidify a team during startup school, but you at least will start introductions and start building that relationship, which is needed to figure out if you're going to be a good fit or not. And we're really, really excited about that because we think that's one of the best things we can do to help all these single founders. And the last one is for all these international people, last year we did the tapings weekly at our office and we invited people to come and attend the live tapings. People were flying from all over the world. It was incredibly popular, but we felt really guilty because that's always money and time we think for people to come for a one hour session with partners.
We are humbled that people think that that's worth it and valuable.
Part of what we're gonna do is we looked at the data for what are the top 18 cities that people attended or participated in startup school and we're gonna go out there. So we're gonna record some lectures and we're gonna host startup school meetups. Partners are gonna be in attendance. You can ask and meet with them one on one.