#89 - Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung Discuss Startup School

**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 Geoff Ralston and Adora Cheung. Geoff and Adora are both partners at YC. And this episode is about Startup School. Startup School is a free online course we're offering that starts on August 28th. We're also offering equity-free grants of $10,000 to 100 companies that participate in the course. Anyone can sign up for the course at startupschool.org.
All right, here we go.
All right, Geoff and Adora, thanks for coming in.

**Geoff Ralston** (0:31)
Thanks for having us, Craig.

**Craig Cannon** (0:35)
We're here to talk about Startup School. So, Geoff, could you break down what's happening this year with Startup School?

**Geoff Ralston** (0:42)
Sure, well, Startup School began a couple of years ago with a course Sam taught online called How to Start a Startup. And last year we evolved it into a course we taught with Stanford called Startup School, and we're continuing that this year. It's an open online course that is a way for us to reach as many companies as possible throughout the entire world to help maximize really the amount of innovation and the amount of value created by startups everywhere in the world.

**Craig Cannon** (1:13)
And Adora, how is the coursework differing this year from any previous version?

**Adora Cheung** (1:19)
Well, there are a lot of similarities.
So it's a 10-week course and you can either audit the course or you can actually be part of the, you can apply to be part of the course. And to be part of the course, you get obviously access to the materials and lectures. You're put into a group. You get an advisor who you will meet once a week to go over the obstacles that you're having. But more importantly, to talk with other founders as well who are in dealing with similar challenges. And then also you have access to a community, which will be a forum in which you can talk to everybody else who is taking Startup School. So it's really great because at the end of the day, what we wanna do is reduce the barriers to starting a startup. And I come from the middle of nowhere personally. And so it's near and dear to me because I didn't learn about startups until very late. Like I would consider like a late bloomer compared to people who are from here.
And so I think that what's important is to give people out there who are not in Telecom Valley access to community, access to mentorship, and access to really great knowledge to build a startup.

**Geoff Ralston** (2:34)
So the amazing thing about Startup School is it's not just the content, this is really unique.
It is about the community and the mentorship that every single one of the founders in this advisor track, where you get assigned an advisor and you meet with them on a weekly basis. Now it's also true that the content this year is going to be different than the content last year.
All of the content from the last two years is available online, will remain available online, and is relevant and useful.
But it turns out also that the content relevant to starting a startup is both broad and deep. There's a ton of things to cover. So we're going to cover everything a little bit differently. We're going to go over similar areas of a startup, how to get going, what the mechanics are, how to think about product, how to think about growth, how to think about fundraising. But we'll do them all in new and different ways that I think will be valuable additions to the set of content that we've already actually made available in a public library that you can get at at startupschool.org/library.

**Craig Cannon** (3:42)
And the speakers for this year, is that list public yet?

**Geoff Ralston** (3:47)
Well, the list is about to be public, I think simultaneously with the publication of this podcast, so we can start to talk about it. One of my favorite speakers is going to be Adora.
And we're really focusing on YC Partners and YC Founders for this Startup School. So a number of YC Partners are going to be participating. I'm really excited to say that Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston will be taking part in the course and giving some of their wisdom, which is also broad need to founders everywhere in the world. But we're also going to have other YC Partners.
Sam Altman, who's the president of Y Combinator, will be giving a talk. Michael Seibel, the CEO of Y Combinator, will be giving a talk. So we have an amazing lineup of folks who are going to be out there talking.