The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross · 4 Sep 2013 · 332pp · 97,325 words
eBoys, Planet Google, and The Wizard of Menlo Park. He has a PhD in history from Stanford University. Visit randallstross.com THE LAUNCH PAD Inside Y Combinator RANDALL STROSS PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 USA |
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its operations—such as the absence of hierarchy and titles among partners—and who gave the fund the curious name, borrowed from computer science, of Y Combinator. It is a mischievously obscure choice. It refers to a particular kind of function, for receiving data, performing a calculation, and sending a result
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own startup about fifteen years ago, the other cofounder was also a hacker. Graham personally wrote the code for Hacker News, an area on the Y Combinator Web site that aggregates links to news stories from around the Web suggested by users who are most interested in programming and software startups and
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network, always an important resource to startups that receive investments, is like none other; and investors show the highest regard for YC graduates, informally voting Y Combinator’s companies, collectively, as Most Likely to Succeed. YC’s principal supplier of capital is Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm whose roster of successful
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s largest success that remains unknown to the general public. It handles the software that runs in the cloud and its customers are exclusively developers. Y Combinator’s reputation for picking the best prospects received validation in early 2011 from two other Silicon Valley funds that joined together to create a fund
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(the batch ended with sixty-three after one company decided early in the session to withdraw). This represented a great enlargement from modest beginnings. When Y Combinator had begun six years earlier, Graham’s invitation to what he initially called the Summer Founders Program had attracted 227 applications—and only 8 were
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fully as capable as most graduate students. As the minimum age that was generally deemed acceptable to start a startup was pushed downward, he viewed Y Combinator as a means of finding out just how low that minimum age could go. Graham addressed prospective applicants who were still undergraduates: If you start
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table, allowing O’Doherty to be heard via a Skype voice call. Graham does not regard this to be a satisfactory substitute for physical presence. Y Combinator, through its investments, has made online communication services more robust and varied. But in its own operations, face-to-face communication, without electronic mediation,
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. In Graham’s view, there is no way of achieving high fidelity without being physically present. The finalist teams have been directed to come to Y Combinator in person, with all team members present and accounted for. The finalists who are streaming in from around the world, including Iceland, the UK,
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to MIT seniors who were considering whether to go to graduate school, get a job, or, Graham hoped, eventually start a startup. At that point, Y Combinator had funded three batches of startups. Graham had seen that the youngest founders, who were still in college, had a convenient fallback position if the
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those expenses were minimal. Graham personally knew what startup life was like, from a three-year period, 1995 to 1998, a decade before he founded Y Combinator. The experience ended happily for him: he sold his company, Viaweb, to Yahoo, achieving sufficient wealth that he would never need to work again.
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a startup of his own in California: Anybots, a robot manufacturer. Seven years after the sale to Yahoo, Graham got the idea of setting up Y Combinator, which would make investments but would also allow the original trio to work together again. Graham invested $100,000 and would be full-time;
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Graham were a romantic pair and later married; with YC, they combined their professional lives, too. In April 2005, when Graham announced the establishment of Y Combinator and the plans to select the first batch, the Summer Founders, he referred back to his early unhappy experience at Artix, banging his head against
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gold”—or they can sell the software tools that other developers would use to create the consumer product—that is, “selling pickaxes.” Dixon mentioned that Y Combinator’s most successful “exit” to date was Heroku, the company that sold cloud-related services to other software companies, the digital era’s equivalent of
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day is wholly up to the individual. That’s how YC founders work, too, during their three-month residency. Journalists are fond of referring to Y Combinator as a “boot camp.” But it is nothing of the sort. Founders are not stripped of their individual identities. There is no ritualistic equivalent
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, and he didn’t want to leave open an opportunity for someone to come along and say, “We’re the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley.” He wanted Y Combinator to be the Y Combinator of Silicon Valley. He and Livingston planned to move out to the Bay Area for the next batch, in winter 2006,
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batches.4 Two years after YC’s founding, a seed fund named TechStars sprang up in Boulder, Colorado. It presented the first real competition to Y Combinator. Founded by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis, TechStars made its first investments in summer 2007. It shared many characteristics of
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nine other companies in one room as a benefit. “Definitely intense,” said a TechStars alumnus about the summer 2011 session in Boulder.8 By design, Y Combinator did not provide work space for its companies. Graham had a strongly negative opinion of incubators. He recalled that when he and Robert Morris had
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did not have room for their own offices at YC. They commandeered a tabletop in the main hall when they needed to use their laptops. Y Combinator fit the definition of accelerator, but Graham was fussily averse to calling YC anything other than plain “seed fund.” TechStars played up its own
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openness, contrasting it with Y Combinator, which did not disclose information about whom it funded and how they were doing. “At TechStars, we believe in full transparency,” said the challenger,
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listing every company in every batch, how much capital each had raised, and whether the company remains active, has been acquired, or has failed. Y Combinator adopted the position that it could not give a full accounting of each batch because doing so would entail the release of information that at
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TechStars ran its application process for its summer session early, and applicants who were accepted had to commit to TechStars before they would hear from Y Combinator. Having been accepted into TechStars and been given forty-eight hours to accept or decline the offer, Dwan and Ren were in a quandary. They
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In an August 2010 post titled “Too Few Women in Tech? Stop Blaming the Men,” Arrington addressed the Wall Street Journal’s recent criticism of Y Combinator for having funded only fourteen female founders to date.3 Arrington suggested that the problem was not the acceptance rate but the paucity of women
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in” and learn programming in a serious way, which reminded him of cramming for final exams.12 It helped to be a member of the Y Combinator family. A neighbor, Srini Panguluri, who was a true hacker—Stanford computer science graduate, former Oracle employee, and YC alumnus working on a startup,
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because of the novelty of young founders starting a startup. They’d received the attention before they had actually accomplished anything of note. At Y Combinator, they were just one of many young teams of founders.15 Among the highlights of the experience was the exposure at the weekly dinners to
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younger brother John, who still had two years of high school to finish, also joined Auctomatic, quickly learning how to code on the job. Y Combinator’s motto was “Make Something People Want,” and the four Auctomatic cofounders did so. EBay’s power sellers were quite taken with Auctomatic’s inventory
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right under our noses.”29 The opportunity was available because others were limited by their aversion to extreme difficulties: Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking ‘Should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?’ and chose the recipe site. Though
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productivity. Now Kulveer was back at YC, surrounded once again by ambitious, optimistic, and hardworking peers. Harj was right: surroundings matter.31 6 UNSEXY In Y Combinator’s main hall, the distinctive all-orange wall with spiky soundproofing panels, a YC signature from its beginning, is in place at the far end
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twice as much. Unfortunately, there is not currently any space in the business world where you can get the first deal.8 15 MARRIED When Y Combinator began, Paul Graham set down a formal rule: no funding of startups with only one founder. He later relented a bit, allowing occasional exceptions
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that AnyAsq was connected to YC founders, Taggar liked what he saw and clicked to add his own AMA: “I’m a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything.”13 The site got more contributors: a PhD candidate researching suicide who interviewed subjects within twenty-four hours of their attempting to
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a large software company, like Microsoft or Oracle, before they earn sufficient standing to pay a visit to a venture capital office. It is Y Combinator, more than any other institution, that has spread acceptance in tech circles of the idea that age or years of work experience are not necessarily
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correlated with coding skill. Some of the founders at Y Combinator–backed startups taught themselves how to code while they were working on their startups. Their examples offer hope to others who would like to
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broad yearning to be a participant in, and not remain a passive bystander to, the spread of software everywhere. All beginnings embody hope, and Y Combinator gives birth to beginnings by the dozens—with the propulsive power of Software is eating the world at their backs. This gives the group portrait
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to the number of exits among startup graduates, he discovered that his investigation was pointless. “The only two accelerators that had any meaningful exits were Y Combinator and TechStars,” he said.7 In March 2013, Bloomberg Businessweek cast a disapproving look at the wild expansion of incubators and accelerators and predicted an
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Referly announced it was abandoning its idea and pivoting toward an entirely new direction.10 Morrill wrote: With just the $150,000 each of my Y Combinator batchmates received last summer, many can continue to work on their company or change direction several times. It has been 6 months since Demo Day
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just as most teams don’t win championships and most authors don’t become best-sellers) and this is an acceptable outcome.” By winter 2013, Y Combinator’s mass-production approach to investing in startups was slightly different than it had been. Instead of funding sixty-four startups, as it had in
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portfolio remained as unknowable as that of any conventional venture capital fund. Speaking strictly from the point of view of investors, Paul Graham says that Y Combinator’s returns come from only a handful of investments, principally its two outsized successes, Dropbox and Airbnb. In a 2012 essay titled “Black Swan
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Randall Stross April 29, 2013 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To begin, I thank Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston. Their willingness to let me observe unimpeded the workings of Y Combinator is what made this book possible. I expanded their workload with uncountable requests for information, and I also imposed upon the other YC partners and
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the notes: HN Hacker News HT Harj Taggar PG Paul Graham (all sources cited are found at PaulGraham.com unless otherwise noted) TC TechCrunch YC Y Combinator INTRODUCTION 1. Independent tour operators have come and gone, trying to eke out an existence driving tourists by the headquarters of the iconic companies in
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Economist: Ben Horowitz, “Against the Motion,” The Economist, June 14, 2011, www.economist.com/debate/days/view/710. 3. PG described his reaction to the Y Combinator function when he first encountered it: “You wouldn’t necessarily have expected such a thing to be possible. We named the company after it partly
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of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public.” YC Web site, http://ycombinator.com/people.html. 9. PG, “How Y Combinator Started,” YC Web site, March 15, 2012, http://ycombinator.com/start.html. 10. PG, “How to Start a Startup,” March 2005, http://paulgraham.com/
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of four days, he went from impecunious grad student to millionaire Ph.D.” PG, “Snapshot: Viaweb.” 12. Livingston, Founders at Work, 217. 13. PG, “How Y Combinator Started.” 14. PG, “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas,” April 2005, www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html. 15. Perhaps I, a Silicon Valley resident, am inclined
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observer of startups and seed funds; this was three years before he became a YC partner. Paul Buchheit, “Did Anyone Else Notice That TechStars and Y Combinator Have the Same Application?” Paul Buchheit blog, March 26, 2007, http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/anyone-else-notice-that-techstars-and-y.html; discussion
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ycombinator.com/item?id=6505. 7. The list of accelerators comes from Frank Gruber, “Top 15 U.S. Startup Accelerators and Incubators Ranked; TechStars and Y Combinator Top Rankings,” Tech Cocktail, May 2, 2011, http://techcocktail.com/top-15-us-startup-accelerators-ranked-2011-05. 8. Comment about TechStars was made by
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were female. Aileen Lee, “Why Women Rule the Internet,” TC, March 12, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet/. 11. “Y Combinator’s Graham Discusses Start-Up Industry,” Bloomberg, videotaped interview with Emily Chang, December 20, 2011, www.bloomberg.com/video/83135286/. CHAPTER 5: CRAZY BUT NORMAL
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YC founder himself. See Christopher Steiner, “The Disruptor in the Valley,” Forbes, November 8, 2010, www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1108/best-small-companies-10-y-combinator-paul-graham-disruptor.html. CHAPTER 18: GROWTH 1. Jason Kincaid, “Interview Street Streamlines the Search for Great Programmers,” TC, August 6, 2011, http://techcrunch.
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2011/05/02/startups-are-hard.html. 4. “Notifo Will Be Shutting Down,” Notifo blog, September 8, 2011, http://blog.notifo.com/notifo. 5. PG, “Y Combinator Numbers,” June 2011, http://ycombinator.com/nums.html. 6. James Middleton, “Founding Father,” Telecoms.com, November 30, 2011, www.telecoms.com/37300/founding-father/. 7
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128 and Livingston, Jessica, 27 Microsoft, 11, 68–69 MIT, talk at, 22, 203 MongoHQ, 32–33, 96–97 motivation, supplying, 147, 150, 236 naming Y Combinator, 251–52n3 negotiating terms, 13, 252n4 office hours, 39, 62 Parse, 122, 185–86 on poverty, 23 presentation advice, 121–22, 128, 129, 183–93
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the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to,” Altman reportedly told colleagues at a party for Y Combinator, the influential startup accelerator he ran.3 Trae Stephens, the Anduril co-founder credited with helping launch the defense tech boom, said at a conference
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Memo; it folded about 14 months later, though Marc Andreessen, a future California Forever investor, praised the software on Twitter. Sramek got a fellowship at Y Combinator, a prestigious startup incubator that can allow founders to establish powerful connections, tinker with business plans, and pitch VCs for precious funding. Sramek blogged on
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-during-2025-super-bowl/ 2 https://x.com/naval/status/1852922757249704039 3 https://x.com/EpsilonTheory/status/1853072969171423337 4 https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/22/y-combinator-often-backs-startups-that-duplicate-other-yc-companies-data-shows-its-not-just-ai-code-editors/ 5 https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/14/24220658
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Vivek Ramaswamy on here and David Sacks on here Wolfe, Josh here World Liberty Financial here X see Twitter/X xAI here, here, here, here Y Combinator here, here, here Yarvin, Curtis here, here, here, here, here Yass, Jeffrey here Zelensky, Volodymyr here zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP) here, here, here, here
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, 162 Wikiproject Women Scientists, 111 women, online harassment of, 111 word of mouth, 167–70 World Wide Web, evolution of, 37. See also Internet Y Y Combinator, 166 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X
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