TL;DR:

*Michael Seibel will be the new CEO of YC Core, which we are now just going to call “YC”.

*Ali Rowghani is now the CEO of the YC Continuity Fund.

*I’m going to be the President of YC Group, which includes YC, YC Continuity, YC Research, and our new online class. We’ll add more organizational units over time.

*We’re going to replace the Fellowship with a much larger MOOC launching next year.

YC continues to expand and we have several changes to announce:

YC

Michael Seibel is going to become CEO of what we called YC Core and are now again going to refer to as just “YC”. Making a distinction between YC Core and the Fellowship was simply too confusing for everyone. Michael will be responsible for the administration and success of the program.

Michael has been an informal leader within the organization for a long time, as well as a close advisor to many, many startups we’ve funded. He began his relationship with YC as co-founder of Justin.tv (which became Twitch) along with Emmett Shear, Justin Kan, and Kyle Vogt in the W2007 batch. He was also the CEO of Socialcam (YC W12, sold to Autodesk) and an early advisor to Airbnb.

Paul Buchheit (known to everyone in YC as PB) is going to take on a role similar to the provost of a university. He will drive improvement of the program and help advise startups on their hardest problems and biggest opportunities (which, again, he’s been doing for a long time). PB is one of the most consistently brilliant out-of-the-box thinkers I’ve met.

YC Continuity Fund

Ali Rowghani is now the CEO of the YC Continuity Fund, which has already become a thriving unit within the YC Group. The Continuity Fund has grown from just Ali 18 months ago to a team of 6, and has already led a number of investments in growth stage YC companies.

In addition to becoming the first phone call of the founders he’s worked with, Ali has become an invaluable part of the YC partnership as we operate and scale our own organization.

My role; other groups

I’m going to change my title from “President of YC” to “President of YC Group”. In addition to the 4 we already have, I expect that we will add another two large units to YC in the next couple of years, although that number could easily be 1 or 3. I’ll be responsible for getting new units started.

Fellowship

We’ve run the Fellowship 3 times. We’ve learned a lot about how to help remote startups (and found a few things that didn’t work).

The goal of the Fellowship was to make YC more inclusive and increase the number and range of companies we can help get started. Now, we’re taking the lessons we learned from Fellowship and we’re expanding it into a MOOC, so that anyone can participate. The online course will teach content similar to that of the Fellowship, and it will follow a similar structure.

We’re going to call the MOOC “Startup School” as an homage to YC’s Startup School (the conference YC has hosted since 2005). We plan to offer it in 2017 and we’ll share more information on it soon.

I’m going to teach the class.

YC Research

We’re currently supporting 4 groups—OpenAI, Basic Income, HARC, and Cities. This is a little ahead of our planned pace, and we expect to add just a couple more over the next couple of years.

We’ve also mostly figured out what our unifying theme for YC Research is and will share more soon.