A review of Y Combinator’s Startup School & my course notes

5 min readAug 13, 2023

YC’s Startup School is a free online course on how to start a startup. It’s open to all and you can sign up here.

If you plan on doing the course, you might benefit from my course notes on the videos. Leave a clap if you found them helpful!

YC Startup School Notes

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A couple of weeks back I enrolled into YC startup school. I definitely learned a lot and would recommend to any builder or founder. Here’s why.

Review

It’s very obvious that the startup school program was mainly built for current or potential startup founders. However, there’s an additional audience that the content targets well, and that’s builders. What’s the difference?

Startup founder — someone who has built conviction regarding starting a company (has spoken to potential users or is solving a problem for themselves). These people may know how they’ll be making money — they’ve potentially decided on a business model.
Builders — someone who’s not sure of an idea but is willing to put in the effort to find out if it works. Such people usually work on things that they’re passionate about. There’s usually no clear way how money could be made from the idea.

Marc Zuckerberg worked on his own projects before founding Facebook and each project solved some specific problem for users [1]. This is what I mean by being a builder — someone who jumps into a project because it seems interesting or solves a problem for others.

A valid evolution would be where a builder evolves into a startup founder. And this is exactly the sort of evolution that the Startup School attempts to catalyze.

If in your heart you’re a builder, you’ve come to the right place.

Why Startup School is great for builders

Content by YC Startup School that targets builders well:

“Live in the future and build what seems interesting”
Remove the “can this be a big company?” filter (at least initially)
Business models to use

1. Live in the future and build what seems interesting

This is a method for generating good startup ideas. Here’s an example. If you’d asked most 40 year olds in 2004 whether they’d like to publish their lives semi-publicly on the Internet, they would have been horrified at the idea. But Mark Zuckerberg at the time already lived online; to him it seemed natural [2]. Marc was already living in the future.

When living in the future you’ll automatically notice things that seem cool — things that don’t currently exist, but would be cool if they did. This is the same type of experimental thinking that encouraged Mark to solve user problems through different projects and the same thinking that gave rise to Facebook.

If you think about it — this is what builders do. They find things they’re passionate about / interested in and give it a try.

2. Remove the “can this be a big company?” filter (at least initially)

When you’re living in the future, you’ll notice startup ideas that are obviously missing in reality. But what won’t be obvious is that these ideas are startup ideas. By turning off the “can this be a big company?” filter you’re avoiding the possibility of ignoring good ideas.

Example: Coinbase experienced difficulty in raising money from investors. That’s because investors didn’t believe that Coinbase could become a big company. These are the reasons they gave:

Bitcoin is a tiny market that’s going to crash
Bitcoin is synonymous with actual fraud — it doesn’t have a great reputation
US exchanges are incredibly hard to start due to regulations

Before the current mainstream crypto exchanges entered the market, buying crypto was sketchy in the US. You had to send a money order through Western Union to a foreign country in order to buy it. Additionally, it was common for exchanges to get hacked and for users to loose their money.

The founder of Coinbase applied to YC with the idea of using crypto for P2P transfers. Even he didn’t believe that simply buying (with a debit card) and holding bitcoin at an exchange that doesn’t get hacked could be the basis of a multi billion dollar company. Imagine if the founder got swayed by the “can this be a big company?” responses from others. That would be an enormous lost opportunity [3].

This is what builders do — they’re not preoccupied with whether a particular idea could be converted into a big company (at least initially). They pursue it because the idea in itself has potential and value.

3. Business models to use

Initially, builders aren’t too concerned with what sort of business model to use for their startup. Initially, the main objective is to see how people react to the product. That’s why the Startup School has great in-depth content about the different business models available and how to implement them for your startup. Interestingly, the Startup School goes into good detail regarding why some business models are more beneficial than others and why they don’t recruit startups that belong to certain business model categories (due to their disadvantages).

Why Startup School is a MUST for founders

I would strongly argue that every current or potential founder must take this course. The program has a lot of content on what sort of mistakes founders commit, how to avoid them and why avoid them. By following the advice, founders can save themselves from a lot of unnecessary waste and frustration. I’ve been a part of multiple companies creating products, and I’ve experienced first hand that startup founders would greatly benefit from the content.

Largest benefit of taking the course — convincing users to use your product

One of the biggest benefits of this course was understanding how you can incentivize users to use your product when it’s in the MVP stage or when it’s not as polished compared to other products in the market.

The first step is to build in a space where people have a burning need that must be satisfied. Example: Before Stripe it was exceptionally difficult to integrate payments on your app. Payment providers in the market ran manual checks to verify each business that applied for payment integration — this could possibly take weeks. Additionally, the developer documentation provided wasn’t the best. The entire process was frustrating. And hence users had a burning need to make payment integration simpler.

At this stage if a startup approached any company looking to integrate payments and claimed to reduce the integration process time from a couple of weeks to a few hours, there’s a high chance the company would respond positively. Some of these companies would even be willing to deal with bugs and subpar usability in order to solve their problem.

Secondly, you’ll need to reach out to thousands of people to see who’d be willing to try out your application. The reason behind that is most people are just not interested in trying out new products. And to reach that tiny minority of people who would be interested, you’ll need to increase your outreach — it’s a purely numbers game.