附近上门

For future founders, 鈥檚 Startup School curriculum wasn鈥檛 quite right for them. It was intended for founders who are already working on building their companies.

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Now, the prestigious startup accelerator is expanding its reach to people who want to start a company in the future with its new course: Startup School for Future Founders.

YC was always about opening up to founders who weren鈥檛 part of the traditional startup ecosystem, and Startup School was built on the same idea, according to the school鈥檚 director Kyle Corbitt.

鈥淚t鈥檚 really about bringing this content, curriculum and our knowledge to an even wider group of people,鈥� Corbitt said. 鈥淚t was an obvious next step as we鈥檙e trying to move further upstream and make this opportunity available to more people.鈥�

Startup School is designed for active, early-stage founders who are working on building their companies. More than 140,000 founders have gone through the program to date, and it鈥檚 also helped many of their startups make it to Y Combinator鈥檚 accelerator program–just over 50 percent of the companies in YC鈥檚 batch that just finished came from Startup School, according to Corbitt.

But the Startup School鈥檚 curriculum wasn鈥檛 tailored for people who want to start a company in the future, but just hadn鈥檛 decided what to work on first.聽

Each week the school has several hundred future founders try to sign up for the program, only to be redirected to the program鈥檚 mailing list, Corbitt said, acknowledging that the current experience isn鈥檛 great for future founders. There have been requests for something like Startup School for those who want to one day start a company, he added.

The six-week Startup School for Future Founders course includes lessons in how future founders can find an outstanding startup idea as well as exercises for future founders such as聽 how to vet a co-founder and validate an idea with potential customers, according to a blog post by Y Combinator.聽

Startup School went through the top 100 YC companies that went on to be the most successful from its core batch program, then went back and looked at their applications to find out how those companies found their ideas and co-founders. The program created content around those topics using real examples.

鈥淲e kind of try to use our community to solve those key early issues a lot of founders face,鈥� Corbitt said.

When participants are ready to start their company, they can switch to an active founder profile. Y Combinator will be rolling out a co-founder matching service in the near future as well, according to the startup accelerator.聽

鈥淲e鈥檙e really trying to move off the existing demographic or the existing people who already know about YC or are already in Silicon Valley, we want to widen the funnel,鈥� Corbitt said.

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