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
- Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and WASM - 6th June 2026
- Claude Opus 4.8: "a modest but tangible improvement" - 28th May 2026
- I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit - 27th May 2026