Born in a Garage
We started a computer company!!! The Oxide Computer Company started in my garage, this is a story about its origins.
YC S20 Remote Batch
We have decided to run the S20 batch remotely, because amid the COVID-19 crises, the safety of founders and YC staff is our top priority. Interviews for the batch will be remote, and office hours, evening talks, and meetups throughout the batch will all take place over video conferencing, as well as on our online…
Navigating Mid-Success
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…
Joining a Different YC
I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining Y Combinator full-time. My job is to help our companies make hardware people want faster and better than ever before. Fortunately, our alumni are the best resource in the world for this: they’ve built some of the most innovative startups of the last decade. Coupled with our…
A Guide to Employee Equity
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
37signals invests in The Starter League
Today we’d like to announce that we’ve bought a stake in The Starter League. This is the only investment that 37signals has ever made in another company. What is The Starter League? The Starter League (formerly known as Code Academy) is a small school in Chicago that teaches Rai…
YC Open Office Hours
Earlier this fall, we announced our first Open Office Hours [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-open-office-hours-for-black-and-hispanic-founders] where founders got to meet one-on-one with YC partners. We piloted the program with Black and Latino founders, over 650 founders applied in under a week, and we were able…
Our Stock Option pledge
The latest news, feature releases, and how to grow with data. Get tactical growth tips once per week.
The Growth Stacks of 2019
Explore the latest trends, best practices, and expert tips shaping the future of customer engagement.
Compelling Startup Pitch Archetypes (with examples from YC companies)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve helped a handful of startups work on their YC applications and interviews. I spent much of the time brainstorming with the founders on the best way to explain their business in the most clear and compelling way possible. These founders knew a lot
A vote for me is a vote for dipshit businesses everywhere
Vote for my SxSW panel! VCs are increasingly unnecessary to get companies started, and I haven't heard cogent arguments for why a founder should elect to go with them for an early round. Until that changes, they'll continue to be useful for growth-stage but less and less useful for early-stage companies.
Black Swan Seed Rounds
I started seed investing in 2010 (and much more actively in 2012) before becoming a full-time YC partner. In this period, I invested in about 40 companies. So far, five of them are in the “really...
Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016
I have been doing angel investing since 2012 after the Facebook IPO. Since then I have invested in more than 150+ startups. 50+ of them…
How to price your SaaS product
Guest post by Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell
Shopify Raises $100 Million
Shopify has raised $100 million in Series C funding from OMERS Ventures and Insight Venture Partners to ou
Reid Hoffman's $30M bet: Send partners, not cash, to startups
Search through thousands of startup jobs, across any location or remote, hiring for software engineers, product managers, designers, marketing, sales, and more.
The golden era of being an open startup is gone
To me, the golden era of being an open startup is gone. Some founders and early adopters are shutting down their open pages and changing their transparency practices. I don’t think they are doing it just because things change and we need to cope.
I’m a Female Y Combinator Founder and You Can Be Too
Sometimes when talking to people about YC I get this reaction: “hey, I’d love to apply but I am sorely unqualified and don’t even know where to begin.” As the summer has officially ended and I’m back in NYC I just wanted to put it out there that every single YC founder, at some point in time, was totally unqualified…
Docker Acquires Tutum
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
How I launched a profitable minimally viable product in 3 hours
Today, Keynotopia is two months old. What started as a single blog post in June of 2010 became a product that got over 1,500 customers in the first 60 days. Before jumping into the story and lessons learned, here are some quick stats: