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VY
Venture Years
The Experience
Selecting The Best
Hypotheses
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Selecting The Best

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First Year

Fellows are hand picked from Twitter and Hackathons. We may allow for some of these individuals to refer up to 2 friends who they think would be great for the program.
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While Scaling

First we get our candidate pool through an application process that selects for individuals based on potential not privilege. See
Our Criteria
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for more info.
After the application process, we select 120 candidates to participate in a trial period where they are put on teams of 3 and given $15k to spend over 2 months. We track how much they are able to accomplish in that time in order to see who performs the best.
The top 20% from the trial period are selected for the 5 year program.
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Future Possibilities

We will collect data about applicants beginning day 1, we will use this data in our selection process if we notice patterns emerge that indicate a given metric determines if this applicant is more or less likely to go on and build a valuable startup.
During the trial period, students self evaluate each other. Some pattern is likely to emerge from their responses to structured questions that shows which individuals we should accept into the program, based on how well individuals work with others and how well they perceive the abilities of others.
Before the trial period, students are asked to meet with 10+ other applicants. We record what percentage of meetings they show up on time to and which percentage of meetings they need to reschedule. Let’s see if this gives us a sense of how well they can manage their time.
Personality tests that might indicate great founders.
DNA testing to see if there are any genetic signs that might indicate who would be a great founder.
Video recording of applicant introducing themself. AI might be able to determine their communication ability.
Determining a minimum threshold and then selecting randomly anyone who meets that minimum. (proposed by Tyler Cowen, author of “Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Winners, and Creatives Around the World”)
Allowing previous fellows to interview and select the next set of founders.
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