How important is my alma mater to Ycombinator?
3rd February 2012
My answer to How important is my alma mater to Ycombinator? on Quora
It’s really not that important—it might help a tiny bit to get to the interview, but if you look at the questions on the application form they are much more heavily skewed towards stuff that you have achieved and problems you have solved. The interview itself is almost all about your idea and your team.
Plenty of people who go through YC come from non-ivy-league schools—some haven’t been to university at all.
More recent articles
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 - 16th April 2026
- Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - 8th April 2026
- Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - 7th April 2026