What Happens At Y Combinator
ycombinator.com
What Happens At Y Combinator
1–10 of 144 posts
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#2How much larger can Y Combinator get? 36 start ups is already a huge number.
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#3This was an attempt to describe everything we do, so if there's anything I didn't cover, please let me know.
(Sorry it's so long. I was surprised myself how long it turned out, but we do a lot.)
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#4How much larger can Y Combinator get? 36 start ups is already a huge number.
I don't know. One of our general principles with YC is to apply software techniques to startup funding. So we approach scaling YC the way you'd approach scaling software: we scale up till we hit a bottleneck, then we remove that bottleneck and keep going.
Funding 36 startups at a time would have seemed impossible back when we were doing 8. And in fact it would have been impossible to do 36 the way we operated then. So how many will we be able to fund at once, after we've taken advantage of whatever new techniques we discover for scaling? We can't say, because we haven't discovered them yet.
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#5Typo: "We make a point of introducing speakers to those who particularly want to them."
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#6Very impressive. I hope to someday apply, but being a very novice technical founder, that day may be much farther down the road.
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#7Typo: "We make a point of introducing speakers to those who particularly want to them."
Thanks; fixed.
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#8This is very interesting, but the topics covered make it seem like YC is only focused on advising companies how to raise more money.
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#9Some of my favorite (unintentionally?) humorous bits:
We have to recruit the largest founders in each batch to act like Tokyo subway pushers and herd all the investors back to their seats.
The founders of Cloudkick are sysadmin gods who within the alumni network play the same role for servers that The Wolf in Pulp Fiction played for the back seats of cars.
Re: What Happens At Y Combinator
#10This is very interesting, but the topics covered make it seem like YC is only focused on advising companies how to raise more money.
Hrm, that's not good. Most of the convos are actually about the product. We only switch to talking about investors towards the end of the 3 months, and even then we talk more about the product.
Maybe it seems that way because this talks about all the stuff that's common to all the startups, and the things to do with the product are usually more startup-specific than those to do with investors.