YC W21 batch will be remote. Amid the global pandemic, the safety of our founders and staff is our top priority.

S20 was our first remote batch. I’ve personally experienced 16 of the last 18 batches as a YC startup founder and then YC partner, and I’m very confident S20 was a transformative experience for our companies.

Going remote gave us the opportunity to build a lot of software over the past six months. We’ve improved YC founder onboarding, alumni directories, our internal wiki, our catalogue of startup advice, and the Demo Day website. We also integrated Slack and Zoom for chat and video conferencing. At its heart, YC is a software company and going remote has given us the opportunity to double down on what we do best.

As a result of these improvements, YC partners were able to work with companies in over 15 time zones, complete 50% more individual and group office hours than in previous batches (3600 hours in total), and chat with all of the teams in realtime (over 250,000 Slack messages were sent during the batch). Finally, YC Virtual Demo Day was extremely successful and out performed many in person Demo Days from years past (over 28,000 introductions were made between investors and founders). We expect W21 to be just as successful.

The deadline for applying to the W21 batch is September 23 at 8:00pm PT. We look forward to reading your application.