Y Combinator Blog

How Do You Measure Leadership?

Updates from YC

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…

YC China and Qi Lu

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…

Pro Rata

How to Get into Natural Language Processing

We’re excited to introduce a new series we’re calling Paths [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/category/paths/]. Each post will outline an emerging technology and give you clear steps on how to get started in that field. This series was designed with makers and aspiring entrepreneurs in mind. We talked to college…

Startup School 2018 – Curriculum

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…

YC Bio

What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?

An Update on Hacker News

I frequently get asked about the changes we’ve made and are making to Hacker News, so I wanted to share some updates. A lot of people feel strongly about HN. It’s an important part of the startup community and we want it to be both the best source of news and discussion about technology and startups and also welcoming…

YC Startup School for future founders who aren't quite ready to start yet

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…

YC's Startup School Relaunching as Continuous Program

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's Series A Diligence Checklist

YC Continuity

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…

We Make Mistakes

We’ve just finished reviewing applications for the Winter 2015 batch and have sent out invitations for interviews. In this cycle we saw a +40% increase in the number of companies applying over the Summer 2014 batch. Reviewing this many companies is a humbling experience and one we take very seriously. Most of us who…

How to Cold Email Investors [video]

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…

Quora in the next YC batch

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…

On Shutting Down

How to Get into VR

This is the second edition of Paths [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/category/paths/], a series outlining emerging technologies with clear steps on how to get started in each field. This series was designed with makers and aspiring entrepreneurs in mind. We talked to college students interested in engineering…

Hard Tech Startups

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…

Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 Startups

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 …

How Adversarial Attacks Work

Emil Mikhailov is the founder of XIX.ai [http://XIX.ai] (YC W17). Roman Trusov is a researcher at XIX.ai. Recent studies by Google Brain have shown that any machine learning classifier can be tricked to give incorrect predictions, and with a little bit of skill, you can get them to give pretty much any result you…

YC Portfolio Stats

We get asked a lot for statistics on the YC portfolio. Even though some of these aren’t that helpful [1], here is the latest update on the numbers we get asked about the most. As always, all the credit goes to the founders. Total market cap of all YC companies: >$30 billion Total money raised by all YC companies: >$3…

A Reminder To Investors

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…

Ask a Female Engineer: How Can Managers Help Retain Technical Women?

I’m the moderator for our Ask A Female Engineer series, and a female engineer on the software team at YC. In the ongoing conversation about women in tech, we hear a lot about women leaving companies and even the industry as a whole, so we decided to ask a group of female engineers…

YC 120

[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 from Application to IPO

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…

YC Open-Source Sales Agreement

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…

$250k of DigitalOcean credits for YC startups

Going Global with Your Startup

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…

YC Interviews in India

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…