Billy
Zach: the connector who referred 22 companies into one YC batch
Shaan describes Zach, a young ex-YC founder who joined the rolling fund and became arguably YC's number-one referrer, knowing a huge swath of the young-founder community and seeing deals earlier than almost anyone.
“And so because of that, he's like referred a huge number of people into YC and into On Deck. And so he's got this really great network and he's like able to like see things earlier than most. And so I brought him into the fund and gave him a chance to, hey, now you can have some upside in this thing.”
Number
On Deck doing $1M/year at ~$1,000 per founder
Shaan reports On Deck founder Eric Thornberg tweeted the program is on track to do $1 million in revenue this year, charging roughly $1,000 per person to join a cohort of founders figuring out what's next.
$1M
Annual revenue · USD/year
“And he's like, so we're doing $1 million this year. We think we're building the Stanford MBA program for founders.”
Idea
MBA as a service: unbundle the one part of business school that matters
Shaan argues On Deck is smart because it unbundled the real value of business school, a career-pivot mixing pot where you meet people and figure out what's next, and sells it as a service for one-tenth to one-twentieth the price of an MBA.
“So what he's done is he's basically just built, he's unbundled that part of business school and just built that as a service. And I think that's actually really fucking smart. So now I'm looking at On Deck like, oh, he's unbundled one of the core values of business school and he's offering it as a service for 1/10 of the price of business school or 1/20 of the price of business school.”
Steal thisUnbundle the single most valuable part of an expensive institution (the network, not the curriculum) and sell it standalone at a fraction of the price.