When Sam Altman from Y Combinator announced a new online Startup School, Ankeri decided to apply for entrance. Out of roughly 13 thousand companies that applied, Ankeri turned out to be one the close to 3 thousand that was actually on-boarded to the school’s Founder Track – and the only one from Iceland (see picture).
The Startup School is a 10-week massively open online course (MOOC) where new start-ups are assisted with guidance from people who’ve started there own companies in the past. The Startup School had guest speakers covering a wide variety of topics, including Alan Kay, Dustin Moskovitz, Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Adam D’Angelo (Quora), Aaron Levie (Box) and Jan Koum (WhatsApp).
In the school, we where assigned to group called Area 51, along with roughly 30 other companies. Each group had it’s own mentor, usually it’s a founder of a well-known company or YC alumni. We were lucky to get Hamilton Chan, the CEO of Coaching for Startups.
The Startup School was a very interesting experience for Ankeri where the major take-aways included the importance of good product-market fit along with interesting notes from the sessions on how to build a product.
For the Presentation Day at the end of the Startup School, Ankeri made the following presentation to introduce the company and its product.