(Bloomberg) -- Y Combinator, the startup-building school that has launched businesses ranging from Airbnb Inc. to Stripe Inc., is expanding to four cohorts a year from two — meaning that the accelerator will be in session almost the entire year.
Spring and fall cohorts are joining the traditional winter and summer cohorts, President Garry Tan confirmed in a message. The program lasts about 11 weeks, each capped with an investor “Demo Day” when the startups pitch top venture capital firms.
The stepped-up schedule is the brainchild of Tan, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who became president of Y Combinator, or YC, early last year. Under the new schedule, a season that traditionally was a break between the June-September summer session and January-April winter session will fill up with a new batch of founders and the attendant talks, meetups and office hours.
Starting in 2025, a spring session will follow the winter one. The size of each batch will be smaller, Tan said, roughly half the size of the most recent cohort of 256.
“The great thing for everyone is we will be more responsive to founders and fund them right when they start,” Tan said in a text exchange. “We will also have 4X in-person demo days,” which will give investors “twice as much time to meet half the number of companies.”
Even the smallest moves of YC are closely scrutinized in Silicon Valley. Earlier this year, Tan made a different controversial change, shuttering its $700 million Continuity Fund, which invested selectively in YC startups judged to hold the greatest potential.
The latest scheduling shift could address criticism that YC cohorts have gotten too large to retain the program’s exclusivity. In late 2021 and early 2022, cohorts hovered around 400. Now, having closer to 100 startups in a batch will bring YC back to levels from about a decade ago.
Still, the total number of startups going through the program each year will hold steady at about 500, a far cry from the days when Stripe attended, when just 26 startups participated in its 2009 cohort. And there will be more Demo Days, potentially eroding each one’s importance, even as it allow for more individualized attention.
Tan, himself a 2008 graduate of YC when he was building his blog platform Posterous, has consistently said expanding the program would create more meaningful startups and thus add to the allure of YC, not detract from it, in part because the strength of YC is the contacts it offers.
“The value of any network is the square of its nodes,” he told Bloomberg News when he was named head of YC in 2022. “If you hold quality constant while increasing the size, that creates a situation where the value of the network multiplies.”
Demo Day for the summer 2024 batch is slated for Sept. 25-26, days before the fall 2024 batch will start.
One other significant change: The traditional retreat founders attend at the start of each session will take place at YC’s San Francisco offices, rather than the more glitzy surroundings of the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa in wine country, the retreat’s location for the past few years. A person familiar with the situation said Tan believed a simpler environment made a better match. The person asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.
All YC companies receive a $500,000 investment, including $125,000 for a 7% stake in the startup, and $375,000 on terms to be determined at the company’s next funding round.
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