Now You Can Take a Free Y Combinator Startup Course Online

Tech accelerator Y Combinator has given birth to so many of the country’s most successful startups---reddit, Dropbox, and Airbnb, to name a few---that it’s sometimes tough to remember that Y Combinator is a business in its own right. On Tuesday, Y Combinator president Sam Altman announced that the Mountain View-based accelerator is launching a free online course on how to start a startup, which will feature lessons from the likes of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, big-name venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham himself. That mission was apparent at Y Combinator’s most recent demo day, where, among the usual consumer web and mobile apps, were audacious companies like Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup, Gingko Bioworks, a genetic engineering company, and Immunity Project, a nonprofit working on a free vaccine for HIV/AIDS. This new direction reflects a larger trend in the tech industry, in which many critics have grown tired of these ubiquitous accelerators and the somewhat homogenous companies they tend to accept. Though Altman rejects that idea, in expanding Y Combinator's horizons, he certainly seems to be using his time as president to rewrite the definition of the typical tech startup.