What YC’s Startup School taught me, and the gap it made impossible to ignore

I just finished Y Combinator’s Startup School. Not the in-person batch in San Francisco – the online curriculum, the one anyone in the world can take, for free. I went in half-expecting a polished funnel for YC applications. I came out thinking it’s the most useful foundational course for founders I’ve seen – and, separately, convinced that the most important thing missing isn’t in the content. It’s that almost none of it is taught on the ground in our part of the world.

This is a short account of three things: what’s actually in it, the handful of ideas worth carrying around long after the last video, and the harder question it left me with – why Europe, and Ukraine specifically, still operate at a fraction of the distance from the American startup ecosystem, and what those of us building here can do about it.

What it actually is

Startup School is a self-paced online programme built around eight modules: deciding whether to start at all, getting and evaluating ideas, building a founding team, planning an MVP, launching, growing and monetising, fundraising, and a closing set of founder stories. It’s roughly two dozen talks and essays, taught not by career educators but by the people who run YC and the founders who’ve been through it – Dalton Caldwell, Jared Friedman, Michael Seibel, Gustaf Alstromer, Kevin Hale, and others, with essays from Paul Graham woven throughout.

The format matters less than the posture. There’s no upsell, no certificate-as-product, no motivational theatre. The recurring message is almost uncomfortable: most startups fail, ideas are cheap, talking to users is everything, and resilience beats brilliance. That honesty is the reason it’s worth your time, and it’s the opposite of what most “founder content” sells.

The ideas worth carrying around

Not a summary – the lessons that actually change how you work.

On choosing an idea: you don’t think them up, you notice them. This is the core of Jared Friedman’s talk and Paul Graham’s essay of nearly the same name, and it reframed how I look at our entire pipeline. The best ideas aren’t clever concepts invented in a brainstorm; they’re problems the founder already lives with. Microsoft started with software for a couple thousand Altair owners. Facebook started with a single campus. The tell is counterintuitive: you want a small group of people who need something badly, not a large group who’d find it mildly nice. Narrow and deep beats broad and shallow, every time.

On the founding team: split the equity equally. Michael Seibel’s four-minute argument on this is worth more than most hour-long lectures. Founders instinctively want to haggle over who deserves what based on who had the idea or who joined first. It’s almost always a mistake. The people building the company together, taking the same risk over the same years, should own it together. Uneven splits look fair on day one and corrode the team by year two.

On building the product: ship something small, then do things that don’t scale. The MVP isn’t a smaller version of your vision – it’s the fastest honest test of whether anyone wants it. And the early growth that founders dream will be elegant and automated is, at the start, manual and unglamorous. Airbnb’s founders went door to door and photographed listings themselves. The Stripe founders onboarded their first users by hand. Paul Graham’s “do things that don’t scale” is the permission slip to stop optimising and start talking to the ten people who might actually use what you built.

On fundraising: it’s a means, not a milestone. The programme is refreshingly unromantic here. Raising money is a tool for a specific job, not proof you’ve succeeded, and not something to optimise for its own sake. The work is the company; the round is fuel.

None of these are complicated. That’s the point. The hard part of entrepreneurship isn’t learning the words – it’s becoming the kind of person and team that can execute on them under pressure. A course can hand you the map. It can’t walk the road for you.

The harder overlay: our reality

Everything above is universal. The environment a founder operates in is not – and this is where the course quietly raised a question it never set out to answer.

The content assumes an ecosystem. It assumes that once you’ve found the idea and built the thing, there’s capital within reach, a dense network of people who’ve done it before, and infrastructure that compounds. In Silicon Valley, that assumption holds. In our region, it mostly doesn’t – and the gap is not small.

Consider one data point. In May 2026, Anthropic – a single American company – raised $65 billion in one round. That one round is larger than all the venture capital raised by European startups in 2024, which totalled roughly $51 billion. Not Anthropic’s category. Not American AI. One company, one round, outweighing an entire continent’s startup funding for a year.

The structural picture behind that number is just as stark. The United States accounts for around two-thirds of global venture capital. There are more than fifty VC funds in America with over $5 billion in assets; in Europe, there are effectively none at that scale. And capital follows capital: a meaningful share of the strongest Central and Eastern European startups eventually reincorporate in the US simply to access deeper pools – which then counts as “American” funding and widens the gap on paper as well as in practice.

It would be easy, and wrong, to read this as a talent problem. It isn’t. The talent here is exceptional. What Silicon Valley has that we don’t is concentration – of capital, of people who’ve built and exited and now invest, of infrastructure, and of the dense, high-velocity network effects that come from all of it sitting in one place. An idea in the Valley is three coffees away from its first check. The same idea here is often three flights and a relocation away. That density is the moat, and neither Europe nor Ukraine has built anything close to it yet.

What we’re trying to do about it

At Sigma Software Labs, this is not an abstract policy debate – it’s the work. As the corporate venture arm of the group, we invest in, integrate, and scale B2B products through an enterprise network, which means we spend our days on exactly the part our ecosystem is thinnest on: turning capable builders into companies that can reach real markets.

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A lot of that is internal, by design. We run intrapreneurship programs and a community we call Labs Galaxy, built to push product thinking through the organisation rather than wait for it to appear. Recently, under the CEO’s sponsorship, we ran an internal AI product ideas contest – over thirty submissions, a real demo day, an “invest board,” and prizes for the strongest pitches. The point wasn’t the prizes. It was the muscle: noticing problems, framing them, defending an idea in front of people who can fund it. That muscle is precisely what the local ecosystem under-develops, and it’s something an organisation can build deliberately, now, without waiting for the capital landscape to change.

None of this closes the gap with the Valley on its own. But the gap doesn’t close through one heroic act. It closes through density built one program, one community, one funded idea at a time.

The case I keep coming back to

Which brings me back to where this started. The content of a course like Startup School travels anywhere. The ecosystem that makes it actionable does not – and that’s the thing worth fixing in our region.

There’s a serious, specific case for bringing this kind of programming to Eastern Europe in person. The founder community across Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics is dense and technical, and it is badly underserved by hands-on, partner-led startup education. A neutral host city – Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk – could pull builders from the whole region into one room.

And there’s one angle the rest of the world is only now waking up to: this region is becoming a centre of gravity for dual-use and defence technology. Ukraine in particular is running one of the largest live, battlefield-tested innovation cycles in that space anywhere in the world right now – under constraints most startups will never face. What those founders are missing isn’t urgency or ingenuity. It’s the structured playbook for turning that into venture-scale companies. That’s exactly the thing world-class startup education teaches best.

I took the online course, and I’d recommend it to anyone building anything. But the bigger opportunity isn’t more people watching the videos. It’s building the density – the capital, the networks, the in-person infrastructure – that turns what those videos teach into companies that stay, scale, and compound right here. That’s the work. We’re in it. The more of us who are, the faster the gap closes.