Post Startup School- 2018

In early August of 2018, I received an email from Startupschool.org with the subject line: Startup School Advisor Track: You are in! As you can imagine, I was shocked to get into the exclusive incubator- even if it was just an online version of their famous curriculum. I was so excited to start interacting with my new peers that I went out and bought a high-resolution webcam.

The next day I received another email from them, this time the subject line was comically tragic: Apologies — Startup School Acceptance Error. As it turns out- I did not get accepted into Y-combinator’s program. I had been one of the many people to receive an invite by accident. I remember thinking that it was a far fetched goal and I probably didn’t have the time to devote to it anyway. I went on with my summer… until another email came. In true Y-combinator fashion, the subject line read: Startup School: All Applicants are Now Accepted.

The copy from the email is so startup-esque that I couldn’t do it justice by trying to recap it. Here is what the email said verbatim: As most of you already know, we screwed up and sent acceptances to companies that were not actually accepted to Startup School. 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.