Early Decision

Early Decision(blog.ycombinator.com)

96 points by katm 7 years ago | 31 comments

will_brown 7 years ago |

Interestingly enough I got a YC email yesterday asking me to apply for the current batch.

I’d never received that type of email from YC in the past, and immediately thought their application numbers must be dropping. After all YC historically seemed to market and advertise the fact that statistically it’s more difficult to get in than Harvard.

This announcement the very next day seems to support YC is looking for more applications. Then again maybe the total application numbers and acceptance rate are public info and I’m way off.

dalton 7 years ago | |

Yes, you are off. Our apps submitted metric is growing.

The reason we started sending out emails to remind people of the deadlines is the sheer # of founders we talk to in person and over email that complain that they missed the application deadline and they didnt know when the date would be.

Questions about when the app deadline is, if you can submit late, when the deadline is for the following batch, etc is the #1 most common type of question in our support queue, and sending out reminders seemed like the best solution.

frisco 7 years ago |

"Early Decision" implies that if a student is accepted they are bound to attend that school. It's offered by colleges primarily because it greatly simplifies their yield planning. (Colleges admit many more than they actually can accommodate since they know many won't matriculate.)

This program should really be called Early Action, which is non-binding!

lutorm 7 years ago | |

You actually go into a legally binding contract to attend the school? I've never heard of such a thing. Do they sue you for breach if you don't show up?

joncalhoun 7 years ago | | |

If you don't show with "good" reason (finances, health issue, etc) they usually do nothing.

If you don't show with a "bad" reason then what they do varies, but I've never heard of someone being sued. Instead it seems to be things like, "we will tell your high school and it may be mentioned if you try to apply to another university."

josephpmay 7 years ago | | |

Often the college will blacklist the high school the student went to and nobody will be able to get in early decision for the next few years

pkill17 7 years ago |

Seems like a great idea. I would be interested to hear about the indicators used to show that students sometimes didn't bother applying in these cases. It seems intuitive that college students, having to plan in Fall of N for full-time employment or even internships in Summer of N+1, would have been adversely affected by the normal application schedule. Were there a large number of potential founders that raised the alarm about this?

davemp 7 years ago |

Odd. This seems to go against one of PG's essays.

> School

> That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by doing it. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup — becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas — by spending time learning about the easy part. Especially since you won't even really learn about it, any more than you'd learn about sex in a class. All you'll learn is the words for things.

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

klinskyc 7 years ago |

When I read the title, I assumed it worked like college early decision, where admission is binding. This is not the case, so this sounds like a great thing for YC to be doing

cperciva 7 years ago | |

Things are different where I'm from (Canada) so please forgive me if this is a dumb question, but... in what way is early college admission binding on students? Even if a student accepts an offer, can't they just not turn up?

sethhochberg 7 years ago | | |

Its binding in the sense that the university and the high school generally agree that, in exchange for the preferential treatment that often comes with early decision (first dibs on financial aid, etc), the student's high school will only send final transcripts to the early-decision university as long as the student is accepted there and will not honor official transcript requests from other institutions.

Its not as though the college will sue you or anything like that for backing out of an early-decision agreement, but, the student will have a difficult time applying to other schools for the upcoming academic year.

(If the student isn't accepted into the early-decision school, the high school will supply transcripts to whatever other regular-decision institutions the student applied for... but the idea is that if a student wants to apply early-decision, they either attend the early-decision school for the upcoming year or none of its competitors. If you want to take multiple offers from multiple competing schools and compare them, you need to apply regular-decision or early-action)

pkaye 7 years ago | | |

Early admissions are not binding (compared to early action which is less common.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_admission Many colleges also have a waitlist for admissions to backfill from.

gist 7 years ago |

The down side of this is that someone accepted then will focus on the startup instead of finishing up their studies. You could argue that would happen either way but I think 'having it in the can' means more chance of doing so. And perhaps also not uncovering and turning down other opportunities or overlooking them. (Similar to when you buy a house you are not going to any other open houses..ditto for buying a car and many other things).

How are you supposed to focus on learning and school work if you already known that you are getting in YC to do a startup? Which more often than not is going to fail instead of focusing on your studies which you are paying big dollars for (potentially at least).

Also to a smaller degree you are giving up info to YC which in theory would also allow them to identify a trend to fund someone else ahead of you. (Relevant if they turn you down).

codingdave 7 years ago |

Early decision plans for colleges are not without their disadvantages, the biggest being that it forces a decision before the student has the time to know what all of their options and offers may be. This is frequently mitigated by financial aid packages that compensate for the loss of choice, but even so, such plans have the downside of not knowing what other packages might have come to fruition.

YC seems to be walking that same path - seeking a commitment before the student knows all the choices that may be available post-graduation. Is there an intent to also give some incentive to compensate for that? Or is YC not asking for a commitment, and instead just making it an invitation that can be taken or not?

sadface 7 years ago | |

Despite the name, it's probably less about mirroring college applications and more about competing for top undergrad/grad students who would otherwise be recruiting for companies like FB, Google, Bain, etc. When I was in grad school, the top tier firms started recruiting in the fall and their incoming graduates had all accepted their full-time offers before winter break. I believe this is the same for undergrad.

In a lot of ways, you could think about this as giving students more optionality as they will have the opportunity to consider YC alongside other extremely compelling opportunities. It's smart for YC to try and get in front of students when they're in a better mindset to evaluate that tradeoff.

I'm sure there are a lot of students who would have be great YC candidates but end up signing a Google offer in the fall and just stay there for years because the pay is so good it doesn't make sense to leave...

dcole2929 7 years ago | |

It doesn't appear to be binding so there really isn't any downside I can see.

stefanpie 7 years ago | | |

Then isn't that more analogous to Early Action which is nonbinding yet still being able to apply and hear your decision earlier.

sokoloff 7 years ago | |

I think admission to the summer batch early is compensation enough (and if an applicant doesn't agree, they simply elect to not apply early decision, right?)

Having the plan nailed down that early may allow you to think and develop the idea differently than if you're not sure whether you're doing YC or working a job, what city you'll live in, etc.

Since it's optional for the applicant, I don't see any significant downside that would require an extraordinary amount of additional incentive.

sachin18590 7 years ago |

Kudos to YC for taking this approach. A lot of founders want to quit status-quo and pursue startup full time but are not able to due to a number of reasons including college, immigration, teams being risk averse etc. With this, they get the validation that they have a good investor backing them and also get the time to test out their PM fit before getting into the batch, giving them enough time to learn and iterate on their mistakes.

ronilan 7 years ago |

Can you also get early rejection? Asking for a friend ;)

apandhi 7 years ago | |

  If you’re accepted, you will be early accepted into the Summer 2019 batch which begins in June. If you’re not accepted, you can apply again during the regular Summer 2019 application cycle which begins in March.

I assume that means you'll find out at the same time as everyone else - so yes, "Early Rejection"

ronilan 7 years ago | | |

They should add:

Early Rejection will make it even easier for students to abandon the idea of building their startup after graduation.

Then It’ll be perfectly balanced, as all thing should be.

EGreg 7 years ago |

Interesting, YCombinator is now working hard to attract recent college grads out of school!

pithic 7 years ago |

I'm surprised to hear YC courting would-be founders who are more interested in finishing college (grad school, even!). Affinity to the norms of academic institutions (not unlike large corporations) and to converging on their pre-formulated problems would seem incompatible with the traits of successful startup founders.

It's even more surprising given research correlating founder age and industry experience to the likelihood of big exits. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/younger-vs-...

This solidifies the view that YC is modeled as a "founder college" for the young and cash-starved, weened as they are on ready-made social support systems, institutional authority, and formal rewards.

If you’re accepted, you will be early accepted into the Summer 2019 batch which begins in June. If you’re not accepted, you can apply again during the regular Summer 2019 application cycle which begins in March.