The Story of YC
- 3 ins.ide
- Oct 10, 2020
- 2 min read
- by Tanya
Y Combinator was founded in 2005 by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Tappan Morris. Y Combinator (YC) is an American seed money startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch over 2,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise Automation, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit.
The combined valuation of the top YC companies was over US$155 billion as of October 2019. The company's accelerator program is held in Mountain View, California.
Some Facts about YC
Y Combinator interviews and selects two or more batches of companies per year. The companies receive seed money, advice, and connections in exchange for 7% equity of the company. The program includes "office hours", where startup founders meet individually and group meetings. Founders also participate in weekly dinners where guests from the Silicon Valley ecosystem (successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, etc.) speak to the founders.
In September 2013, Paul Graham announced Y Combinator would fund nonprofit organizations that were accepted into the program after having tested the concept with Watsi (while continuing to fund mostly for-profit startups).
Y Combinator's motto is "Make Something People Want." The program teaches founders to market their product, team, and market, refining their business model, achieving product/market fit, and scaling the startup into a high growth business, etc.
Y Combinator has been blamed for its encouragement of the ageism culture in Silicon Valley. Paul Graham said in 2005 that people over 38 lacked the energy to launch startups. It was also at a Y Combinator event, the 2007 Startup School, that Mark Zuckerberg said, "Young people are just smarter".
The YC Fellowship Program was announced in July 2015, with the goal of funding companies at the idea or prototype stage. The first batch of YC Fellowship included 32 companies that received an equity-free grant instead of an investment.
The Human Advancement Research Community (HARC) project was set up with the "mission to ensure human wisdom exceeds human power".The project was inspired by a conversation between Sam Altman and Alan Kay. Its projects include modeling, visualizing, and teaching software, as well as programming languages. Members include Alan Kay and Bret Victor. Other people who have worked for HARC include Vi Hart. Patrick Scaglia was chair of HARC and was listed as an advisor in 2017.
In 2017, Y Combinator announced Startup School, an online course that released public videos and also coached individual startups on a larger scale to replace the fellowship. 1584 startups graduated from the program in its first year.
On 20 April 2020, Michael Seibel announced that summer 2020 ("S20") will be fully remote, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes interviews for the batch, office hours, evening talks, and meetups throughout the batch.
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