Should we try to communicate culture and values in the application? Are those things that YC filters for?
I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
111–120 of 757 posts
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#112How much does it hurt our application to not have a developer as a founder? We have an Engineer and a Business MGMT background.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#113Do international founders have a better chance of getting in because of the fact that they are willing to sacrifice something greater, or lower chances due to immigration issues?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#114Do you think if Zuck applied to YC today with Facebook as it was in 2005 he'd make it in? (Assuming the 'social network' landscape still looked like it had in 2005).
Yes. There are certain people that you cannot sit across from and let yourself not invest. He is one of them, for sure. He also had great growth. (Zuck comes to speak to the YC batch every year or so. PG used to say that when he talked to Zuck he'd find himself saying "whoa, we should really fund this guy". I had the same experience last time he came to YC.)
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#115Do you anticipate that putting together a structure for companies looking to perform long-term technology development ( i.e. three years, five years) is something YC would have on the board?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#116Does YC have any initiatives planned for a Founders Conference that revolves around founders from URM groups, I'd love to see a conference for URM Founders, similar to the Female Founders Conference.
One of my partners is planning to do something here, but I'm not sure exactly what it's going to look like. (We run an extremely decentralized partnership.)
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#117Funds need a 10x return from one company to cover the entire fund. Is that a philosophy YC subscribes to, and if so, how long until it becomes evident which (if any) company in a given class will be the 10x ?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#118Do you anticipate that putting together a structure for companies looking to perform long-term technology development ( i.e. three years, five years) is something YC would have on the board?
We fund a lot of 3-5 year horizon companies.
10-20 years is harder. This does not work for startups. I have a few ideas I want to try, though.
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#119I frequently see the stat that YC companies are worth 30 billion in total. While this is very impressive, it's still less than say Uber at 40 billion for a single company that's about the median age of the group--so it seems like a fair comparison, though an obvious outlier.
For the Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. outlier startups, how much pure luck do you think plays into their success? AirBnB and Dropbox are YC's biggest outliers. Have you found any actionable patterns in the way the founders of these outliers work/think/operate compared with the more moderately successfully and unsuccessful founders?
Re: I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA
#120Would it be possible to do a remote program mentored by alumni?