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 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…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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Sam Altman [https://twitter.com/sama], President of Y Combinator, shares his thoughts on how you can succeed with a startup. Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/
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…
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…
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…
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…
YC has a bunch of announcements about people coming and going so I thought I’d do them all at once. Wufoo (YC W06) cofounder Kevin Hale is joining us as a partner. He was the force behind Wufoo’s much-admired design, and speaks widely about UX. Between Kevin and Garry Tan, we’ll now have two partners who are…
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…
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?…
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…
Wade Foster [https://twitter.com/wadefoster] is the CEO of Zapier [https://zapier.com/] (YC S12). Read Zapier’s de-location post here [https://zapier.com/blog/move-away-from-sf-get-remote-job/]. If you are interested in remote work, you can also check out our interview with Gitlab…
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…
Today's episode is with Dalton Caldwell, who's a partner at YC, and Juan Benet, who's the founder of Protocol Labs, a YC company that's working on IPFS, Filecoin, and CoinList.
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…
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.
We’ve collected advice from the founders of a few YC companies that can help you with some common New Year’s resolutions. > Land a new job HackerRank [https://www.hackerrank.com/]: A community of programmers who solve interesting problems for fun, prizes and jobs. > “Companies are beginning to place more importance on…
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…
Here are some of our favorite recent posts on Hacker News. Quantum computers ready to leap out of the lab in 2017 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317716] A handful of quantum computing researchers bump into each other. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13317716] A large slab of ice is breaking off an…
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…
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…