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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Updated on 6/5/20 YC Research, now OpenResearch [http://openresearchlab.org/], and its portfolio of research projects are no longer affiliated with Y Combinator. YCR generated important ideas and organizations, and we are proud to have helped them get up and running. They have, in fact, been operating independently…
I wrote Dropbox their first investment check on June 26, 2007. What strikes me as I look at a copy of the check is that Drew and Arash must have been fairly effective at getting all their incorporation paperwork completed. I often had to chase startups well into July. Little did I know back then what a momentous check…
Ten years ago, Paul Graham said there could be ten times as many startups if more people realized they could try. Thanks to the work he, Jessica, Trevor and Robert helped do, that’s become true. We think there is still room for another ten-fold increase in the number of (good) startups. But even now, a lot of good…
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…
A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups. Whether common sense or counter-intuitive, the guidance below will…
Today, Coinbase has gone public. We are proud to say that Coinbase is a Y Combinator company and a member of the Summer 2012 batch.
To celebrate Airbnb’s IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a startup we’d be…
We’ve noticed a common problem: founders don’t know what “good” looks like in a term sheet. This makes sense, because it is often, literally, the first time in their careers that they’ve seen one. This puts founders at a significant disadvantage because VCs see term sheets all the time and know what to expect. Because…
Hey, my name is Kyle Corbitt and I’m a software developer at Y Combinator. I spend most of my time creating software to support our founders as they build their businesses. Before joining YC I ran my own startup. When I was in high school, I sometimes got the frustrating feeling that all of the good startup ideas had…
A lot of people ask themselves this question. They often mull over one or more of the following facts: 1. The vast majority of startups are not successful 2. For talented technical people, it’s relatively easy to get a job and make a large salary 3. Large companies offer opportunities to work on very difficult…
Paul Graham YC partner (and lawyer) Carolynn Levy has created a new alternative to convertible notes, called a safe, that has the advantages of convertible debt without some of the disadvantages. We’re publishing a standard safe document for all startups to use, and we expect most future YC startups will use this when…
TL;DR: *Michael Seibel will be the new CEO of YC Core, which we are now just going to call “YC”. *Ali Rowghani is now the CEO of the YC Continuity Fund. *I’m going to be the President of YC Group, which includes YC, YC Continuity, YC Research, and our new online class. We’ll add more organizational units over time…
There has probably been more capital looking to invest in private technology companies in the past five years than any five-year period before. An obvious consequence of this increased supply is that company valuations (i.e. prices) have gone up, and so has the amount of capital raised by most companies. A non-obvious…
If you’re here, we assume that you’re a developer/hacker who’s intrigued by the blockchain. You’re convinced that you understand how it works and now you’re itching to figure out what the blockchain means for you and your developer skill set.
If you’re working on a startup or non-profit that addresses any of the challenges discussed below, we’d love to see you apply. News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. The business model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That…
Our website got a facelift [http://www.ycombinator.com]. [http://www.ycombinator.com] The content is pretty much the same. Since the old site was mostly text, I did my best to just make that text easier to digest and hopefully entice people to get through more of it. A lot of the best content on the site like What…
[https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSYC_Logo.png] We’re excited to announce our new online Startup School, with classes beginning on April 5. Anyone can sign up at StartupSchool.org [http://startupschool.org/] for the 10-week massively open online course (MOOC), starting today. We want to…
We’re excited to share a list of Y Combinator’s top companies [http://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies]. The top 100 YC companies are listed by valuation1 (including the top 12 exits), as of October 16, 2018. We put this list together to help people get to know some of the fastest growing alumni in the YC community…
Startups are defined by growth [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html], but growth isn’t step one in building a great company. If you focus on trying to grow before you make a product people love, you are unlikely to succeed. We’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating–many founders hurt their companies by…
In the summer of 2018, Qi Lu joined [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/] Y Combinator to help create YC China, a localized version of our U.S. program. As we worked to establish YC China, we had a change in leadership [https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-for-president/]. With this, our strategy…
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…
Last fall, YC ran an 8 week experiment calledThe Fellowship [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-fellowship]to fund and work with startups at the idea or prototype stage. The goal was to see if we could create a program that could help more early-stage startups at scale. The experiment went well and I have a few…