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
Tech Industry & Business 168Startups 139Society, Policy & Culture 28Career & Management 28Life, Learning & Writing 14Science & Space 5
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…
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…
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 [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…
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…
Back when YC was getting started about 10 years ago, Paul Graham wrote some [http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html] essays [http://www.paulgraham.com/future.html] that predicted the way startup fundraising would change in the next decade – accurately, it turns out. Paul Graham predicted that there would be way…
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…
Many of our founders ask us about how they can donate part of their equity or post exit proceeds, and now we have an answer:Founders Pledge [https://founderspledge.com/]. With Founders Pledge, founders can sign a pledge to donate some portion of their personal equity and then figure out the recipients for the donation…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Today is Y Combinator’s 25th Demo Day. With 124 companies presenting over the next two days, this is the largest Demo Day in YC’s 12.5 year history. We wanted to share some stats about YC and about the batch. For the more visually inclined, see the graphic below created by YC alum SketchDeck…
Here is what YC looks like in Winter 2015 Number of startups in the W15 batch: 114 Number of companies funded by YC overall: 842 Total market cap of all YC companies: Over $30B Total money raised by YC companies: Over $3B Number of YC companies worth more than $1B: 4 Number of YC companies worth more than $100…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
Bitcoin has already undergone several forks. A fork defines a moment in time when a specific digital currency gets split into two different currencies. A couple months ago, a Bitcoin fork created Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Another fork just created Bitcoin Gold last week. Segwit 2x will follow next month.
When people discuss startups they tend to talk about inspiration and creativity. This leads founders to believe they can imagineer a solution to any problem they’re trying to solve. In reality, executing a startup is a balance between creativity/intuition/instinct and the scientific method: hypothesize > a/b test >…