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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I’m the moderator for our Ask A Female Engineer series, and a female engineer on the software team at YC. This is the sixth installment in a series where we ask female engineers questions and share their candid, anonymous responses. In this post, we did something a bit different: we asked engineers to answer questions…
When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I’m leaving out investor because the best path to being an investor that I’ve seen starts with being successful (or failing) at one of these three first. Below…
We’re hosting Startup School again this year. Startup School is a free, 10-week, online course. It’s designed for any startup founder who would like to get help through the earliest, most difficult challenges of starting a company. The course will begin on August 27, 2018 and applications are now open at…
Edit: Peter Thiel is no longer affiliated with Y Combinator. I’m delighted to announce Peter Thiel is joining YC as one of the (now 10!) part-time partners. In addition to founding PayPal and Palantir and being the first investor in Facebook, Peter has been involved with many of the most important technology companies…
Ali Rowghani, head of YC Continuity, talks to GitLab [https://about.gitlab.com/] CEO Sid Sijbrandij (W15) about how GitLab has built a completely distributed company with 160 people (and growing). We filmed this conversation at GitLab’s SF headquarters, where Sid is the only local employee. Sid’s biggest tip for…
Exploding offers suck. Founders should be able to choose the investor they want to work with, not have to make a decision based on time pressure. As the world of accelerators gets more and more competitive, we’re seeing more and more exploding offers where an accelerator tries to force a company to make a decision…
I’m delighted to announce that Geoff Ralston is taking over for me as President of YC. I’ve known Geoff for almost ten years, he’s been a YC partner for eight, and I think he’s one of the most thoughtful, helpful, and kind investors in Silicon Valley. One of my earliest memories of Geoff is him laying on the floor of…
We operate a platform called Bookface for YC founders to connect with each other, ask questions, find intros, and share advice. Recently on Bookface Zach Dixon [https://twitter.com/zachdixongg], cofounder of the gaming company Players’ Lounge [https://playerslounge.co/] (W18), asked a great question: 1. What are some…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Today, we’re opening up registration for Startup School 2019, our free online course for founders looking to get help turning an idea into a startup. The 10 week course will begin July 22, 2019 and is free for everyone to participate. You can register at Startup School [https://startupschool.org]. We will again be…
I’m delighted to announce a promotion and three additions to the YC team. Kat Manalac has been our director of outreach since 2013. She’s done an incredible job, and we’re making her a partner. In addition to regular partner responsibilities, she’ll continue to be responsible for outreach to prospective founders and…
Harj Taggar [https://twitter.com/Harjeet] is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte [https://triplebyte.com/] (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC…
When you start a startup, you get pushed off the side of a cliff with a bag of aerospace parts.1 You hope they are the parts for a spaceship, and they look like they might be, but it’s impossible to tell when they’re all in a bag. So you start figuring out how the parts fit together as you fall. Every once in a while…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Note: Anne, Ben and Joe are no longer part-time partners. I’m delighted to announce three new part-time partners. Anne Wojcicki is the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe. Anne is one of the world experts on biotechnology and healthcare companies; her guidance will be invaluable to the increasing numbers of these companies…
Diane Greene is SVP of Google Cloud and she was also the CEO and cofounder of VMware. This is her talk from the 2017 Female Founders Conference. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Transcript Jessica Livingston – I’m here to introduce our next speaker, who’s one of my just…
We have a lot of new additions to the team to announce. Tim Brady is joining YC as a Partner. Previously, he was a Partner at ImagineK12. Tim was Yahoo’s first employee and spent 8 years as the company’s Chief Product Officer. Tim was also the CEO of QuestBridge, an educational startup that helps bright low-income…
I’m delighted to share that Jared Friedman is joining YC as a full-time partner. Jared co-founded Scribd, the world’s online library, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2006. He was the CTO there. Jared has also been an investor in more than 30 YC companies. Before Scribd, he studied computer science at Harvard…