Y Combinator Blog

Why VCs sometimes push companies to burn too fast

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.

Diversity and Startups

Sexism in tech is real. One of the most insidious things happening in the debate is people claiming versions of “other industries may have problems with sexism, but our industry doesn’t.” Both men and women claim this, even though it keeps getting harder to do in the face of shocks like the Tinder texts. We know there…

Things we've learned about Series As

New RFS: One Million Jobs

We want to fund companies that have the potential to create a million jobs. There are a lot of areas where it makes sense to divide labor between humans and computers—we are very good at some things computers are terrible at and vice versa—and some of these require huge amounts of human resources. This is both good…

SAFEs are not bad for entrepreneurs

Pascal Levensohn and Andrew Krowne recently published an article: “Why Safe Notes are not safe for entrepreneurs [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/why-safe-notes-are-not-safe-for-entrepreneurs/] .” The authors were critical of the safe, describing it (as the click-bait title suggests), as bad for entrepreneurs. But…

YC Interviews in NYC

We’re excited to announce that we’ll be holding a small number of interviews for the Summer 2019 batch of YC in New York City on February 23. This will be the first in a series of interviews we do in cities outside the Bay Area. We’ll start with New York and will soon announce interview dates for other cities…

Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) is going public today

Ginkgo Bioworks [https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ginkgo-bioworks] is the first biotech company YC funded, and today they are going public. To celebrate their IPO, here’s the story of how Ginkgo Bioworks ended up in YC, and what their journey was like as YC’s first biotech startup. In 2014, YC had been funding…

Fundraising Rounds Are Not Milestones

When meeting with founders for the first time I sometimes hear, “We’re a Series A company.” Meanwhile, YC alumni I talk to tell me that their angel investors regularly ask them, “When are you going to raise a Series A?”. I’d like to make the point that success isn’t the same as raising a round of financing. Quite the…

Make Things and Show Them

We’ve often been asked to make a section of Hacker News that’s just for Show HNs, so we did. We’rereleasing it today [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7984826], along with a new set ofShow HN guidelines [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html]. In late 2008 and early 2009, users submitting their work to Hacker…

When to Shut Down a Startup [video]

IK12 and YC

We are excited to announce that Imagine K12, the original edtech accelerator, is joining Y Combinator to form an edtech vertical within YC. We founded Imagine K12 in 2011 to help companies innovate in education technology in order to improve outcomes for children in the United States and around the world. YC founder…

Apply to YC on Your Schedule

How to Start a Biotech Company on a Budget

Running a biotech company is capital intensive, and this can make it intimidating to get started. Founders sometimes face a chicken and egg problem: how do you make progress without millions of dollars in funding, and how do you raise millions of dollars in funding without having made progress? However, it is quite…

What do people want in a co-founder?

YC launched a co-founder matching platform about 3 months ago. There are now 16,000 co-founder profiles on the platform. Potential co-founders have sent 130,000 matching invites through the platform, and, with a 25% acceptance rate, we’ve seen a total of 33,000 matches.

Employee #1: Reddit (2016)

Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies. Chris Slowe was the first employee at Reddit. He worked at Reddit for five years, then Hipmunk for five years, and now he’s back at Reddit, writing code. Discussed: YC’s First Batch, Meeting The…

YC W17 Launch: Wifi.com.ng – Uncapped ISP for Africa

We’re in the middle of YC’s W17 batch. As companies launch they’ll be doing a Q&A on Hacker News – aka Launch HN – in addition to being included in a roundup on the blog. Here are the companies that have recently launched. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wifi.com.ng…

Leap: An Online Community for Women

I’m excited to share an experimental project I’ve been working on at YC over the last 10 months. It’s called Elpha [https://elpha.com] and it’s an online community for women in tech to talk about whatever we want. Elpha has ~1,500+ members who are founders, designers, marketers, software engineers, VCs, women in sales…

Vinod Khosla with Sam Altman on How to Build the Future [video]

Vinod Khosla [https://twitter.com/vkhosla] is the founder of Khosla Ventures [https://www.khoslaventures.com/], a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. Previously he was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC…

YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders

Startups are often best at solving the personal problems of their founders. The more diverse the founders, the more types of problems can be solved — and the more people who will be positively impacted by technology. As a result, we’re piloting a program called “Open Office Hours”. We are reaching out to…

Intern at a YC Company

Would you like to intern at a YC company this summer? We’re helping place paid interns at YC-backed companies like Dropbox, Stripe, Optimizely and others. You’ll get: * A chance to work with one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting companies * An invitation to YC’s intern conference Please fill outour application…

YC Investment Policy and Email List

We’re making a change to the rule for YC partners making follow-on investments. Previously, partners could invest in companies after they had either raised $500k or 3 weeks after Demo Day. This reduced a lot of the conflict and signaling issues, but not enough—partners investing during the batch still caused issues…

Frequently Asked Questions from YC Applicants

Intern at a YC Company

If you’re an ambitious undergrad or graduate student with an engineering background, YC can help you get an internship at a YC-backed company. You apply once, and your profile will be sent to over 50 YC startups that are looking for summer interns. The 50 companies participating in our Work at a Startup…

Transcriptic for YC biotech startups

Reducing cost and cycle time as much as possible is one of the highest-leverage things anyone can do to help startups. A few years ago, we rolled out deals with Amazon, Heroku, Microsoft, and Rackspace to make web hosting available for free to the startups we fund. As we expand into new areas, we’ll put similar…

Employee #1: Kickstarter – AMA and Interview

Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies. Cassie Marketos [https://twitter.com/cassmarketos] was the first employee at Kickstarter [http://kickstarter.com]. Discussed: Meeting Yancey, Setting Kickstarter’s Tone Through Community Management…

Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch

At YC, founders decide when they want to announce that they’re part of the program. Meet 16 of the companies who recently announced that they’re part of the YC Summer 2018 batch. See more companies from the S18 batch here [https://blog.ycombinator.com/15-companies-s2018/], here…

Introducing YC Series A Batches

A conversation with Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee (2016)

A conversation with Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee. Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies. Shel Kaphan was the first employee at Amazon. He is currently pursuing personal interests and still living in Seattle. Discussed: Getting…

YC Office Hours for Startups Tackling Climate Issues

We’re delighted to announce that YC is hosting online office hours for founders of startups and nonprofits that are solving climate issues on Tuesday, September 24. If you’re in the early stages of building a company we’d love to meet you — anyone from idea stage through Series A and any sized nonprofit is welcome to…