Last year, over 15,000 people registered for Startup School, with about 5,000 graduating, and 391 of those interviewed for the last YC batch, resulting in over 60 accepted companies.

Investor School is a four-day course teaching the basics of startup investing, held for the first time at Y Combinator in Mountain View.

I co-founded Y Combinator, the first startup accelerator, which began with a hypothesis about what people wanted, and it turned out they did want it, leading us to fund over 1,800 startups valued at over a hundred billion dollars.

The first Startup School was designed to be free and accessible, attracting serious builders and avoiding the pretentiousness of other startup events.

The first batch of Y Combinator was magical, filled with people who genuinely wanted to start startups, making it one of the most enjoyable times of my life.

The first Startup School took place in Boston, and I was fortunate to participate in it with my co-founder, Steve Huffman, when we started Reddit.

During Y Combinator, partners meet individually with startups to provide advice on their challenges.

The early days of Y Combinator were marked by a lack of distractions, allowing founders to work hard and focus on their startups without the pressures of social media.

Despite starting Y Combinator with the goal of helping a few entrepreneurs, we never anticipated funding a thousand startups, many of which have become very successful.