1. A non-volatile storage system, comprising: a plurality of non-volatile storage elements; and one or more managing circuits in communication with said plurality of non-volatile storage elements, said one or more managing circuits perform a multi-pass programming process that programs all of said plurality of non-volatile storage elements from an erased threshold voltage distribution to a set valid data threshold voltage distributions, each programming pass of said multi-pass programming process has one or more starting threshold voltage distributions and programs non-volatile storage elements to at least two ending threshold voltage distributions.