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
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We have a few updates about YC to share. Things are going well — in the past two years, we launched Startup School [https://www.startupschool.org/], the Series A program [https://blog.ycombinator.com/introducing-yc-series-a-batches/], the YC Growth program [https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-stage-program/], Work at…
Edit: Read this update [https://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-yc-china/] on YC China. I am delighted to announce that Qi Lu [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSydk0XzxEE] is joining YC to launch and run YC China. I have been trying to recruit Qi for many years—he is one of the most impressive technologists I know…
Two weeks ago we announced Startup School 2018 [https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-startup-school-2018/]. Our free, online course will kick off in just three weeks, on August 28th. We also let founders know that 100 of the companies that complete the course will receive $10,000 in equity-free funding from YC…
We launched Startup School as an online program in 2017 to support founders actively working on building their companies. On November 9th, we’re also opening Startup School to potential founders who are interested in starting a company in the future. You can register [https://www.startupschool.org/future-founders] for…
We’re excited to announce that Startup School (SUS) is relaunching today as a continuous program. This change will allow us to serve many more founders than the traditional annual course we’ve been running since 2017 and better support startup founders year-round. In addition to this change to continuous admissions…
YC will fund its 1,000th company this year, and many of these companies are now scaling their organizations, revenue, and operations. Though years removed from our program, these founders continue to come to YC for advice and support, and we would like to do more to help them. To that end, I’m delighted to share that…
Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel [https://twitter.com/mwseibel] on how to cold email investors. Topics 00:00 [https://youtu.be/A3MmYbH1hbs?t=0s] – Intro 00:17 [https://youtu.be/A3MmYbH1hbs?t=17s] – Make it short, i.e. 60 seconds or less to read 00:58 [https://youtu.be/A3MmYbH1hbs?t=58s] – Interested in: the…
This month, YC will be participating in Quora’s most recent investment round and Quora will be joining this summer’s YC batch. This is a new experiment for us; we’ve funded later-stage companies before, but none close to Quora’s stage. Our hope is that both the company and the YC community will get a lot of value out…
Some people think YC only funds straightforward software startups. That’s definitely not the case — YC’s largest exit to date is a self-driving car company, Cruise Automation [http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-startup-for-more-than-1-billion/] , and we’ve funded many other hard technology…
Jasper Kuria of Capital & Growth [https://capitalandgrowth.org/index.html] interviewed YC Partner Paul Buchheit about his experience as employee #23 at Google and his key investing insights. Jasper : You came up with Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto in 2000. Sixteen years later, do you feel they have stayed true? Paul …
Sam wrote about this in his recent blog post [https://ycombinator.com/blog/diversity-and-startups], but I’ve found that important and seemingly obvious things often bear repeating. So with Demo Day approaching, I’d like to make the following point explicit: Y Combinator has a zero tolerance policy for inappropriate…
[https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2019/01/yc120-v1.png] The world is shaped by people with intelligence, drive and vision. At YC, we’ve learned a lot about cultivating a network of such people — and we believe that having a strong network is such a force multiplier that it is one of the most…
DoorDash is the first company that I’ve had the opportunity to follow all the way from YC application to IPO, so to celebrate I thought it would be fun and interesting to share what a great company like DoorDash looks like at the earliest stages. Meeting startups at the very start of their journey is one of my…
We’ve just open-sourced a sales agreement [http://www.ycombinator.com/documents/#sales]any company can use. Though obviously you should use this at your own risk, we’ve had a lot of experience with what makes good and bad sales agreements. Special thanks to Tyler Bosmeny, James Riley, and Carolynn and Jon Levy for all…
Kwindla Hultman Kramer [https://twitter.com/kwindla] is the founder of Daily.co [http://Daily.co] (W16). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When we started Daily.co [http://Daily.co], we thought we were only targeting the US market. Our plan was to get traction at home and…
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be holding interviews for the Summer 2019 batch in Bangalore for founders based in India. This will take place from May 7 to 9. We’ve received an increasing number of applications from India and this will allow us to interview more Indian founders. So far, we’ve funded over 40…
Below is a copy of an email I sent to investors who attend YC’s Demo Day. It discusses some of the changes we’re making and how they will impact Demo Day. > YC Demo Day Investors,We’re making some changes to Y Combinator’s Demo Days – please take a minute to read below because they are material. As with previous…
One of the most common questions I hear is: “why has YC continued to grow our batch size?”. For each twice-yearly batch, we receive thousands of applicants through our online application [https://www.ycombinator.com/apply]. We have always wanted to fund as many great founders as possible and are convinced that in the…
In the past few years, we’ve seen more founders from around the world coming to Silicon Valley to start startups. In YC’s W14 batch alone, we had founders from 22 different countries, and every year we see an increasing number of international applicants. We want to help founders from all over learn about startups, so…
The application deadline for YC Summer 2018 is on March 24, and in honor of the deadline, we published an update to our Request for Startups [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/] (RFS). While many of the best ideas we’ve funded were ones that surprised us, there are always a collection of ideas we wish more founders would…
Edit: YC W20 Demo Day is now on March 16. See here [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w20-online-demo-day-now-on-march-16/] for more info. On March 23, YC will host our 30th Demo Day online. With the growing concern over COVID-19, we believe this is the right thing to do for the safety of all attendees, including our…
Today, we’re opening up registration for Startup School 2019, our free online course for founders looking to get help turning an idea into a startup. The 10 week course will begin July 22, 2019 and is free for everyone to participate. You can register at Startup School [https://startupschool.org]. We will again be…
We’ve modified our fundraising strategy advice to YC founders. In the interest of everyone having the same information, here is the email I sent to the current batch this morning. Founders, As Y Combinator’s prominence has grown in recent years, we’ve seen a flood of new investors who are very focused on investing in…
Sam is a cofounder of PocketSuite (YC W16). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We still hear it all the time: “I’m building the Uber for X.” That idea – an app that lets consumers get a specific service when they need it, while giving service professionals (“pros”)…