Y Combinator StartUp School is great!

Tomasz Piotrowski
Aug 31, 2018 · 4 min read

In life you sometimes need to push your luck forwards. Nothing good really happens without you giving it a small or big push. So the more you do the bigger the chance you’ll make it.

Well 1–2 months ago I’ve enrolled GargeStore — the motorcycle marketplace we’re doing for the last 3 years — to the Y Combinator StartUp School. To tell you the truth I was really skeptical to even spend the time on the process as “who in Silicon Valley will even look at a company from Poland”. I was pessimistic and doing it as one more of those things I do to make myself sure I’ve tried.

On the 20th of August I get this e-mail:

Hi Tomasz,

Thank you for applying to Startup School Online. Your application looked promising and we would like to invite you to the Advisor track!

As part of the Advisor track, you will be a member of a group of about 25 companies with an expert advisor with whom you will meet regularly during the course. You will have access to the software to:

- Watch the lectures
- Update your company profile
- Find your group information and directory
- Join the Startup School community chat
- Keep up with course announcements
- Submit your progress reports
- Access deals

If you haven’t already, please make sure your profile is up to date and upload a picture!

Get Started

The class will launch in front of a small, live audience on Tuesday, August 28th at YC’s offices in Mountain View. The classes will run until October 25th and there will be two lectures each Tuesday and each will be posted to the online at our site within 24 hours. If you are interested in attending any of the classes live, fill out this form. (Note: Attending lectures in person is optional — you are not required to attend in person to complete the course.)

Later this week we will be sending more information about the software you will be using as well as who your advisor is and which group you are part of.

Lastly, on the first day of Startup School next week we will review some of the mechanics necessary to get your startup off the ground. We will also convene a panel of startupexperts who can answer your mechanics and legal questions. If you have questions whose answers you believe will be helpful to the community of startup school founders, please submit them here, and we’ll answer as many as possible.

Y Combinator Team

Well who cares about the e-mail itself? The title of the e-mail made me jump from my seat! It said

“ Startup School Advisor Track: You are in!”

I was overwhelmed! I went to my wife and said “Darling! I’m going back to school AGAIN!”. She looked at me as if I’ve gone crazy (I have to be careful with that as she is a psychiatrist…).

Anyway I was totally surprised and just couldn’t believe what I’m reading.

But my happiness didn’t last too long… I received another e-mail 1,5h later with this title:

“Apologies — Startup School Acceptance Error”

Now imagine what I felt… I had to read the full e-mail.

Hello,

We are deeply sorry to have to send this email, but unfortunately an error occurred in the software that triggers acceptance emails. The acceptance email was sent to you even though we are unfortunately not able to include you in the Startup School Advisor Track.

Although you are not in the Advisor Track, you have, in fact, been accepted to audit StartupSchool and will have access to all of the content just as soon as it is made available.

Again, we regret having made this error and raised your expectations unnecessarily. We hope you continue working on your startup and that Startup School is a huge help.

You can sign into your profile…

Y Combinator
Mountain View, CA

So the title was worse than the e-mail body. Still I know we lost kind of. There is this 1500 group of startups that have qualified, but we were not among them.

Sad? Hell no! Thanks to a mistake a totally lost cause gave us the chance to enter a world of knowledge, a world full of people that have the same dreams, that know that it’s really hard work to have a startup and then make it succeed. I know that we probably won’t win any prize, but the experience and knowledge we’ll take with us — priceless!!!

Thanks YC team for this mistake (if it was a mistake of course) and just watch us make our dreams come true. Maybe you’ll get a piece of the action some day as well :-).

Here’s a link for more information about Y Combinator’s StartUp School

And here is a link to our unfinished site: www.garagestore.pl

Tomasz Piotrowski

Written by

CEO & co-fdr @GarageStore. CCO @VineaLink. Ex-marketing&sales director. Worked 4 companies as RedBull, Betsson. Optimist. Bookworm. Husband & dad of 4 boys.

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