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Y Combinator Blog

blog.ycombinator.com

From ICPC World Finals to competitive programming clubs to building generalist audio models as the first engineer at a YC startup.

Popular posts
203
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#8 company

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

92

New Standard Deal

We are changing the standard deal at YC and increasing our investment from $120K to $150K. The $150K investment for 7% will be made on a post-money cap safe. We believe the post-money safe is simpler, making ownership and dilution easier to understand. This new deal will start with our Winter 2019 batch, and replaces…

93

YC S20 Remote Batch

We have decided to run the S20 batch remotely, because amid the COVID-19 crises, the safety of founders and YC staff is our top priority. Interviews for the batch will be remote, and office hours, evening talks, and meetups throughout the batch will all take place over video conferencing, as well as on our online…

94

Welcome, Ali

Edit: Ali is now the CEO of YC Continuity [http://ycombinator.com/continuity] I’m delighted to announce that Ali Rowghani is joining YC as a part-time partner. He will mostly focus on helping our alumni that are a few years out of YC scale their companies, but I’m sure the current batch will enjoy getting to know him…

96

Joining a Different YC

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining Y Combinator full-time. My job is to help our companies make hardware people want faster and better than ever before. Fortunately, our alumni are the best resource in the world for this: they’ve built some of the most innovative startups of the last decade. Coupled with our…

97

YC Open Office Hours

Earlier this fall, we announced our first Open Office Hours [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-open-office-hours-for-black-and-hispanic-founders] where founders got to meet one-on-one with YC partners. We piloted the program with Black and Latino founders, over 650 founders applied in under a week, and we were able…

98

Welcome new YC team members

We have a bunch of new additions to the YC team to announce. Scott Bell is joining the YC software team. He was a co-founder of Skysheet from YC W09. He’s coming to YC from Houston where he was doing consulting and Lisp hacking. Dalton Caldwell is becoming a partner. He was the cofounder and CEO of imeem (acquired by…

99

The Decentralized Future

A good method for discovering startup ideas is to look into technological breakthroughs and think about what they unlock that wasn't possible before. In this introductory post, we are going to use this framework to examine Bitcoin.

100

YC Updates and Additions

Y Combinator now has 5 major groups—YC Fellowship, YC Core, YC Continuity, YC Research, and Hacker News—and we’re putting one person in charge of each group. Paul Buchheit is taking over for me as managing partner of the core YC program. We’re going to continue doing YC Fellowship (!), and Kevin Hale is going to be…

101

Applications for YC W15 are open

We are now accepting applications for the Winter 2015 batch. You can apply as a startup or as a non-profit [http://www.ycombinator.com/nonprofits/]. If you want to apply, submit your applicationhere [http://www.ycombinator.com/apply/]by 8pm PT on October 14. For more information on the process, readHow to Successfully…

102

Interview with Sam Altman from the High Growth Handbook

Elad Gil [https://twitter.com/eladgil] is a serial entrepreneur (Mixer Labs – acquired by Twitter, and Color Genomics [https://www.color.com/]), operator (Google, Twitter) and an investor in a number of YC companies including Airbnb (W09), Checkr (S14), Coinbase (S12), Front (S14), Gusto (W12), Instacart (S12), Stripe…

106

Founder Ethics

One of the most valuable parts of Y Combinator is our community. As of Summer 2014, we have funded over 1,400 founders, and as the YC family grows, the continued strength of our network depends on founders behaving well. Starting with this batch (YC S14), we’ll be asking founders to review YC’s statement of founder…

107

How YC Has Changed

As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time. This is a valid line of questioning – clearly much has changed about YC over 13 years. We have new leadership [http://www.ycombinator.com/people/], much larger batch sizes [https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/batch-stats/], we invest more money…

108

YC Startup School: Build Sprint and Equity-Free Grants

We’re excited to announce our first-ever YC Build Sprint. This is a 4-week period to work intensively towards a defined goal alongside a community of thousands of other founders. The sprint will kick off on August 24 and be administered through our free Startup School platform. Also, we’ll be awarding 20 grants of…

109

Request for Education Startups

At YC, we’re deeply interested in education because of its power to transform lives and societies and to maximize human potential. On a micro level, we believe technology can help reverse the trend in K-12 of spending more and more money to achieve the same learning outcomes. We believe tech can also create…

111

YC Hacks – August 2-3

We’re hosting a hackathon this summer at YC in Mountain View. Our goal is to give smart hackers an excuse to get together and spend time building something they find interesting. We don’t have a theme—we want to leave it open to any good ideas. The hackathon will start Saturday, August 2 at noon, and end August 3 in…

113

Why Does Your Company Deserve More Money?

The hardest conversation I have to have with a founder is when they’ve spent their 1-2 million dollar angel round but haven’t found product market fit [https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-real-product-market-fit/]. Unfortunately, I have to ask them a very unforgiving question: why does your company deserve more money?…

114

Requests for Startups Refreshed

We’ve refreshed the Requests for Startups [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/]. Here are the additions: Food and Farming An estimated 40% of the world’s workforce works in agriculture. Better food and farming could increase the world’s health, unlock the potential of numerous workers, and improve living conditions for…

116

Notes for the New Year

Happy 2017! As a kid, I just sort of took for granted that stuff got better every year—TVs got bigger and then thinner, cars got a little faster, and computers got unbelievably better on an exponential curve. As an adult, I realized that the future is not guaranteed to be better. The default is that things stay the…

118

A New Standard Deal

We are making two changes to our standard deal in conjunction with a recent fundraise. Starting with the Winter 2021 batch, our deal will be $125,000 for 7% equity on a post-money safe, and we will reduce the amount of our pro rata [https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/] right to 4% of subsequent rounds. In the…

120

Justin Time

Justin Kan is going to be the new spokesman for YC and handle the PR requests we get. You should probably follow him on Snapchat (username: justinkan).On a more serious note, I’m always impressed with how well-spoken Justin is, and how well he is able to connect with both reporters and founders.