Why being sort-of-accepted to YC Startup School is the best thing ever for us and for many more
We’ve decided to use this error as an opportunity to try something new: we’re going to let in every company that applied to Startup School.
We are one of the ~15,000 startups which were involved in YC’s “technical glitch” yesterday.
Last night was high fives and fist bumps, followed by WTF’s for us. After we slept on the whole situation and thought about it again in the morning, we reached to nothing but positive take aways.
We are indeed in. We wanted to be in to start with, that’s why we applied, and now we are in. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from the best and to be associated with YC. This is awesome. It’s true that the original plan was not to accept 15,000 startups to the program and YC will have to make some adjustments to how it runs it, but we are sure that YC will pull it off and provide kick-ass content and value to us.
Reading further into the email, now it’s clearer what we should expect from being in the program. Maybe we will not get the direct access to an advisor/mentor during the 10 weeks. But YC will find a way to connect us with other startups (~14,999) in a much more effective way. So in stead of having 1 advisor, now we will potentially have 14,999. That’s even better, right?
Hold on, this exactly what we have been pitching with Workinlot in the past 2.5 years and what we are effectively doing in the 9 months since our launch. So is YC implementing the Workinlot way?
We have been toying around with phrases like “p2p mentoring”, “micro mentoring” and “massively online collaboration (MOC)” since Workinlot’s inception. Our hypothesis is that, when you bring a large community with a common goal together, the total gain from actively collaborating within the platform will be exponentially larger than gains from 1 very experienced and knowledgeable mentor/advisor. We built the platform around this idea, there are no mentors, there are platform members. Each platform member is both a mentor and mentee and switches hats according to the topic/issue at hand. A Workinlot dreamer can be working on her own project and when stuck somewhere, raise her question on the platform for anyone with the experience to answer. Vice versa, she can respond to questions raised by other dreamers.
We are validated by YC, high five!
Indeed, YC is taking the Workinlot approach. Furthermore we are currently figuring out ways to how we can plug in any accelerator’s, investor’s or startup school’s content into our platform as a digital incubation path. This means that, soon anyone with content and community will be able to launch their own version of a digital accelerator, extremely fast, on Workinlot.
Timing also couldn’t be more perfect, because Workinlot co-founders are coming over to Silicon Valley to attend Disrupt SF and more. If you have content and desire to launch a digital accelerator, maybe you will be willing to be the first to do so on Workinlot. Just send an email to hello(at)workinlot(dot)com and let’s set up a time to share coffee or beers.
