Hurrah! War is Over! Upvote to the Googolth degree! To be brutally honest, it concerns me that dissent on HN is not welcome.
How Y Combinator Started
11–20 of 105 posts
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#12pg: thank you for sharing this.
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#13Amazing insight. This will extend my runway by ~10%.
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#14Happy birthday YC! It's awesome that YC is as scrappy and as startup-minded as the hackers they fund. They stick to their roots. They talk the talk and walk the walk.
now pg, please put some left and right padding on those static pages =]
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#15One of the things that I noticed is how YC's opinion regarding patents has evolved since its founding. >" If you're accepted, we'll deal with the paperwork for you. We'll incorporate you, get you a corporate bank account, supply simple, generic employment agreements for you to use, and so on. We can give some advice about patents, though you don't have to deal with that in the earliest stages; you have a year after m…
To be fair, patents were a far less ugly beast back then. They were still stupid, but not the existential threat they pose today.
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#16"But the founders in the first batch turned out to be surprisingly good. And great people too. "
I'd love to read a "where are they now" post on the first couple batches of founders, along with some quotes from them.
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#17So doing the winter batch in California seemed like one of those rare cases where the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious one were the same. There is nothing more heavenly, more sublime than that rare situation in life in which the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious choice align. There's a keen insight to be had there. Unfortunately, those moments are very rare. For instance, at least, in terms of my persona…
That's the reason I actually moved in NYC. For a French 20 something, it's a great city to live in, it's not too far from Europe and the tech scene is booming.
My next stop will probably be Brazil. I've travelled over 45 countries and Brazil seems to have that unique combination of "human" perspective, a work culture and a growing tech ecosystem. You should give it a try :)
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#18'Cambridge Seed' sounds like a reality TV show about a sperm bank that only accepts donors from elite universities ;)
Congrats to everyone who has ever applied and the YC team! You have changed the rules of the game for the better...
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#19It's amazing to see the humble roots of YC and what it has grown into now. As a person who made it through 2/3 of the previous batch I can honestly say there is no other experience like it and solely the intelligence of the people you are placed in the same room as week in and week out is enough for you to be at least as ambitious as the founders of YC were. Quit your job, make the leap, build something great.
Re: How Y Combinator Started
#20>If we'd had enough time to do what we wanted, Y Combinator would have been in Berkeley. That was our favorite part of the Bay Area. But we didn't have time to get a building in Berkeley.
I'm in Berkeley and quite like it here but that's also because I mostly avoid networking events. Berkeley's startup culture is a bit weird because the city is in some ways anti-software business. If YC were here, it would have been enough of a political force by now to have actually shifted the epicenter of Silicon Valley around enough for Berkeley to be taken more seriously as a place for startups.