Let's talk about YC startup school controversy that they had last weekend in the conference. They just had last weekend in the conference and it raised a lot of controversy online. I did YC in summer 22, so let's talk about it. Startup School in a stadium feels antithetical to the YC brand and to what makes startups work. The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers. Show more. YC startup school is a program that you don't have to be accepted into YC to do it. It's a way of just learning more about startups. They just had this past weekend, they held it at the Chase Center, you can see it's pretty big. Someone on Twitter actually said it's giving like mega church vibes, which I thought was pretty funny. A lot of the controversy has been centered around two things. Number one is that the average age of the attendees was pretty young. I saw this myself because I went for a rundown here when I got back this past weekend. I didn't realize it was a startup school conference. Just a ton of like 18 and 19 and 20 year olds in the streets. I saw one of their lanyards at the startup school conference. Oh, that makes sense. And this is a trend that's been going on for probably the last 10 years, that founders have started to skew younger. When I was in the batch in summer of 22, the average age is probably like 26 or 27. Now I think it's closer to like 24, 25. Not that big of a difference. But it's more the way that they handled themselves. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think just the startup environment has changed, especially now with LLMs. It's almost like anybody can build anything. And so a lot of the competition is around, uh, it's attention, how many eyeballs you can get on you. And the reality is that the younger generation is just better at doing that than the older generation. I think the other part of this is that starting a startup now is seen as, to college. I think there are a lot of kids who are getting an acceptance into some great school and then within the first year dropping out to start some startup. Coming in from Stanford, Harvard, whatever, will almost always accept you. That is just, that's the way it's probably always gonna be that. And that leads me to point number two. Back when YC started in 2008, the idea was that you got these, like, misfits, these hackers who just didn't belong for whatever reason, least the branding of YC back in the day. And for a long time, that was the way that it was in the startup environment, even before YC in the early 2000s, and maybe even the early 2010s. But now starting a startup is seen as, like, mainstream that, like, anybody can do it. There's so much attention on starting a startup now that it's like, like, cool. I think this is all that counter YC, meaning they're just as many people as possible. But I think they have also some negative impacts on the overall ecosystem. I'll make another video about that.
