From ICPC World Finals to competitive programming clubs to building generalist audio models as the first engineer at a YC startup.
Visit blog.ycombinator.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2013 – Jan 2022
Tech Industry & Business 168Startups 139Society, Policy & Culture 28Career & Management 28Life, Learning & Writing 14Science & Space 5
A lot of people ask themselves this question. They often mull over one or more of the following facts: 1. The vast majority of startups are not successful 2. For talented technical people, it’s relatively easy to get a job and make a large salary 3. Large companies offer opportunities to work on very difficult…
Earlier this year we funded Callisto [https://www.projectcallisto.org/], a non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment. During their time at YC, we helped Callisto send a survey to 125 of the 384 female founders who have participated in YC.1 They were asked if they’d ever been…
Ali Rowghani, head of YC Continuity, talks to GitLab [https://about.gitlab.com/] CEO Sid Sijbrandij (W15) about how GitLab has built a completely distributed company with 160 people (and growing). We filmed this conversation at GitLab’s SF headquarters, where Sid is the only local employee. Sid’s biggest tip for…
Paul Graham YC partner (and lawyer) Carolynn Levy has created a new alternative to convertible notes, called a safe, that has the advantages of convertible debt without some of the disadvantages. We’re publishing a standard safe document for all startups to use, and we expect most future YC startups will use this when…
TL;DR: *Michael Seibel will be the new CEO of YC Core, which we are now just going to call “YC”. *Ali Rowghani is now the CEO of the YC Continuity Fund. *I’m going to be the President of YC Group, which includes YC, YC Continuity, YC Research, and our new online class. We’ll add more organizational units over time…
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation [https://www.amazon.com/Idea-Factory-Great-American-Innovation/dp/0143122797] “It’s amazing how prolific Bell Labs was — the transistor, information theory, Unix, amongst other creations — but it’s fascinating to understand it as an organization…
There has probably been more capital looking to invest in private technology companies in the past five years than any five-year period before. An obvious consequence of this increased supply is that company valuations (i.e. prices) have gone up, and so has the amount of capital raised by most companies. A non-obvious…
If you’re here, we assume that you’re a developer/hacker who’s intrigued by the blockchain. You’re convinced that you understand how it works and now you’re itching to figure out what the blockchain means for you and your developer skill set.
The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Times-Greenspan/dp/0143111094] [https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Times-Greenspan/dp/0143111094] “I thought Greenspan was bad but this book paints a positive image. Seb Mallaby is an awesome author so makes for an easy read.”…
As YC has grown, we’ve funded more and more hardware companies. Hardware companies have very different needs from pure software companies, and we’re delighted to announce a number of new resources for YC hardware companies. First, there are a number of new deals for our hardware startups–across-the-board discounts &…
If you’re working on a startup or non-profit that addresses any of the challenges discussed below, we’d love to see you apply. News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. The business model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That…
Jeff Dean is a Google Senior Fellow in the Research Group, where he leads the Google Brain project. He spoke to the YC AI [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-ai/] group this summer. Here are his slides:
Our website got a facelift [http://www.ycombinator.com]. [http://www.ycombinator.com] The content is pretty much the same. Since the old site was mostly text, I did my best to just make that text easier to digest and hopefully entice people to get through more of it. A lot of the best content on the site like What…
[https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSYC_Logo.png] We’re excited to announce our new online Startup School, with classes beginning on April 5. Anyone can sign up at StartupSchool.org [http://startupschool.org/] for the 10-week massively open online course (MOOC), starting today. We want to…
We’re excited to share a list of Y Combinator’s top companies [http://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies]. The top 100 YC companies are listed by valuation1 (including the top 12 exits), as of October 16, 2018. We put this list together to help people get to know some of the fastest growing alumni in the YC community…
Startups are defined by growth [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html], but growth isn’t step one in building a great company. If you focus on trying to grow before you make a product people love, you are unlikely to succeed. We’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating–many founders hurt their companies by…
We’re excited to announce YC Research’s newest project: the Human Advancement Research Community (HARC). This came out of a conversation that started between Alan Kay and me more than a year ago about how to invent future computing technologies; I’m delighted to finally be officially working with him and his group. He…
Exploding offers suck. Founders should be able to choose the investor they want to work with, not have to make a decision based on time pressure. As the world of accelerators gets more and more competitive, we’re seeing more and more exploding offers where an accelerator tries to force a company to make a decision…
Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from August to November. If you see something cool like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com [mailto:hn@ycombinator.com] so we can add it to the next list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Listening to The Shipping…
We’re excited to launch Female Founder Stories [http://www.femalefounderstories.com/], a collection of interviews with 40 of Y Combinator’s female alumnae. We asked them about things like how they got started, their experience at Y Combinator, their experience as female founders, and what they wish they’d known when…
I’m delighted to announce that Geoff Ralston is taking over for me as President of YC. I’ve known Geoff for almost ten years, he’s been a YC partner for eight, and I think he’s one of the most thoughtful, helpful, and kind investors in Silicon Valley. One of my earliest memories of Geoff is him laying on the floor of…
In the summer of 2018, Qi Lu joined [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/] Y Combinator to help create YC China, a localized version of our U.S. program. As we worked to establish YC China, we had a change in leadership [https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-for-president/]. With this, our strategy…
We operate a platform called Bookface for YC founders to connect with each other, ask questions, find intros, and share advice. Recently on Bookface Zach Dixon [https://twitter.com/zachdixongg], cofounder of the gaming company Players’ Lounge [https://playerslounge.co/] (W18), asked a great question: 1. What are some…
A post about summer reading [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513576] on Hacker News inspired us to put a list together for 2018. Here’s what we’ve been reading. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Years of Lyndon Johnson…
Last fall, YC ran an 8 week experiment calledThe Fellowship [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-fellowship]to fund and work with startups at the idea or prototype stage. The goal was to see if we could create a program that could help more early-stage startups at scale. The experiment went well and I have a few…