Jeremy Rossmann of Make School on Income Share Agreements and College

Jeremy Rossmann is the cofounder of Make School. Make School is a college for computer science headquartered in San Francisco. Make School students don't pay until they have a job after graduation. They were part of YC’s Winter 2012 batch. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

Announcing Startup School 2019

Today, we're opening up registration for Startup School 2019, our free online course for founders looking to get help turning an idea into a startup. The 10 week course will begin July 22, 2019 and is free for everyone to participate. You can register at StartupSchool.org. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

Investor Funnels for Series As

Our third batch of the YC Series A Program is wrapping up and the companies are kicking off fundraising. As we gear up for those raises, we wanted to share some things we’ve learned. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

Request for Startups: Government 2.0

We have refreshed the Request for Startups, which are concepts we believe are important in the coming decades, to reflect this newest addition: Government 2.0. If you are creating a startup with the goal of making America a better place, we want to talk to you. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

Geoff Ralston for President

I’m delighted to announce that Geoff Ralston is taking over for me as President of YC. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

Applications for YC China Fall 2019 Are Open

YC China is now accepting applications for their first batch, which will take place Fall 2019. The three-month program will be held in Beijing and tailored to the Chinese market. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

YC Partners with Atomwise to Fund More Bio Companies

We're going to work with Atomwise to give interested Artificial Intelligence Molecular Screen (AIMS) teams an expedited path to joining YC. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

A CS Education That’s Free Until You Get a Job – Austen Allred of Lambda School

Austen Allred is the CEO and cofounder of Lambda School. Lambda School provides a CS education that's free until you get a job. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 4 years ago

Jessica Livingston: How Not to Fail

Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator, spoke at our Female Founders Conference. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Marques Brownlee on Building an Audience and Other Advice for Creators

Marques Brownlee is a YouTuber. He has over 8 million subscribers to his channel MKBHD where he reviews electronics, drives electric vehicles, and interviews people such as Kobe Bryant and Bill Gates. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

A strategic guide to preemptive funding offers

Unprepared founders can get trapped by the dynamics of a preemptive offer and forced into suboptimal outcomes. If you find yourself in a situation where you think you are getting preempted, here’s what to do. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Transitioning to a career in data science

Jake Klamka founded Insight. Insight provides intensive 7 week professional training fellowships in fields such as data science and data engineering. Insight was in the YC Winter 2011 batch. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC in Atlanta

This month we’ll be meeting founders in Atlanta. We hope to see you there. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Leap Spins Out of YC

In 2017, Cadran Cowansage, a software engineer at YC, started building Leap, an online community for women in tech. Today, Cadran and her two co-founders, Abadesi Osunsade and Kuan Luo, are spinning Leap (now Elpha) out of Y Combinator and launching as an independent company. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC 120

We’d like to find more curious, creative people who are doing exciting work in emerging fields and give them an opportunity to start building their network. We’ll bring 120 of those people together for a weekend conference in Colorado from Friday, April 26 to Sunday, April 28. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

A standard and clean Series A term sheet

We wrote a standard Series A term sheet to create more transparency in the market. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Applications for YC Summer 2019 Are Open

Applications for YC Summer 2019 are now open. Here are some helpful resources if you’re thinking about applying. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Things we learned about Series As

One year ago, we announced the Series A program (YCA) to bring more transparency and consistency to fundraising. Six months ago, we announced the first Series A Batch. Here’s how it has been going, and a bit of what we learned. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

MVP Spec

Design doesn’t have to be complicated, intimidating, or expensive. In an early stage startup design serves one purpose: helping startup founders understand their users. To that end, design encompasses more than formal product execution, logos and layouts, it also means user obser … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC’s Essential Startup Advice

A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups. Whether common sense or count … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Tracking Political Manipulation Through Social Media

Samantha Bradshaw is a researcher at the Computational Propaganda Project and a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute. She’s been tracking the phenomenon of political manipulation through social media. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC at MIT and MIT xFair

This February we'll be visiting MIT xFair on Feb 4, and the Startup School team will be hosting a workshop at MIT on Feb 5. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC Series A Program Investor Access

Our second YCA batch is now in session. These companies are about to start fundraising and we want to give more investors the chance to invest in YC companies. We’ll be doing that through a new portal we built. If you’d like access to that system, or to be considered for it in th … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Cindy Mi and Qi Lu Share Advice for Entrepreneurs Building Global Companies

Cindy Mi is the founder and CEO of VIPKID. VIPKID is a 1-on-1 teaching platform where children in China learn english from North American teachers. Qi Lu is the CEO of YC China and Head of YC Research. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Vinod Khosla with Sam Altman on How to Build the Future [video]

Vinod Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a firm focused on assisting entrepreneurs to build impactful new energy and technology companies. Previously he was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Frank Lantz – Director of NYU’s Game Center and Creator of Universal Paperclips

Frank Lantz is a game designer and Director of the NYU Game Center. He cofounded Area/Code Games and most recently released a game called Universal Paperclips in which you’re an AI that makes paperclips. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

A Founder’s Guide to Understanding Investors

A guide to help answer the question, “How do investors evaluate startups?” | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Shutting Down

Founders lack a coherent way to think about when to shut down. Founders do not always get to choose to shut down. However, most of the time, it is the founder’s choice. It’s a personal decision. It’s a hard and painful decision. It’s an emotional, fraught decision. However, shutt … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Leonard Susskind on Richard Feynman and Unanswered Questions in Physics [video]

Leonard Susskind is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University and he’s regarded as one of the fathers of string theory. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Hacker News Highlights August to November 2018

Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from August to November: A thread on bad codebases ranging from war stories to horror stories, developing Crash Bandicoot for PS1, meeting Ricky Jay, Victorian culinary trading cards, and a TV meteorologist experiences tech envy. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Michael Seibel on Starting a Startup, Finding Product Market Fit,and Fundraising

Michael Seibel comments on five of his essays. The essays are: Why Should I Start a Startup?, One Order of Operations for Starting a Startup, The Real Product Market Fit, Users You Don’t Want, and Why Does Your Company Deserve More Money? | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Sam Altman on Choosing Projects, Creating Value, and Finding Purpose

In this episode of the podcast Sam Altman expands on ideas that have come up in several of his essays. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

How to Win by Daniel Gross

Daniel Gross, former YC Partner and founder shares his wisdom of how to survive and thrive as a startup founder. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Why You Should or Should Not Work at a Startup by Justin Kan

Justin Kan is the CEO of Atrium. He gave this talk at YC's Work at a Startup Expo. Learn more at WorkataStartup.com | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Hardware AMA with YC Partner Eric Migicovsky

YC Partner Eric Migicovsky recently did a Hardware AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Growth AMA with YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer

YC Partner Gustaf Alströmer recently did a Growth AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to share it here. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Growth Guide: How to Set Up, Staff and Scale a Growth Program

"Growth hacks" can be extremely helpful in driving viral growth early in a product's path to product market fit. However, sustaining long-term growth and reaching hundreds of millions of users requires a scientific approach to growth. In fact, growth experts resoundingly say that … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Angelcalc and Y Combinator’s New Deal

Recently we made an announcement of a significant change in how we finance companies and, indeed, how we recommend that any startup raise seed financing. We released a new kind of safe, or simple agreement for future equity - a type of convertible security - called a post-money s … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC Top Companies List

We're excited to share a list of Y Combinator's top 100 companies. The top 100 YC Companies are listed by valuation (including the top 12 exits), as of October 17, 2018.We put this list together to help people get to know some of the fastest growing alumni in the YC community. Mo … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC October 2018 Hackathon Recap

Last weekend we hosted a hackathon for 250 people who made over 80 projects. Two teams won YC interviews and office hours: Evergreen and SquadUp. Three teams won office hours: All_ebt, Dorhami, and Kalshi. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Earlier this year we funded Callisto, a non-profit dedicated to building tech to combat sexual assault and harassment. During their time at YC, we helped Callisto send a survey to YC female founders to ask if they’d ever been harassed by an angel or VC investor. We also created … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

YC Has Changed

As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time. Having done YC in 2007 with Justin.tv/Twitch, in 2012 with Socialcam, and joining as a partner in 2014, I thought it would be helpful to describe how YC has changed since I first took part in the program. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

New Standard Deal

We are changing the standard deal at YC and increasing our investment from $120K to $150K. The $150K investment for 7% will be made on a post-money cap safe. We believe the post-money safe is simpler, making ownership and dilution easier to understand. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

SEO Advice from SurveyMonkey

Eli Schwartz is the Director of SEO and Growth at SurveyMonkey. He came in to answer commonly asked questions about SEO. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Flexport is hiring – help more than 10k companies ship products worldwide

Ryan Petersen is the founder and CEO of Flexport. Flexport is a global freight forwarder powered by software and analytics. They are making international trade easier for over 10,000 companies in 70 countries. They were part of the YC Winter 2014 batch. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Early Decision

We’re excited to announce Early Decision for 2019. Similar to what many colleges allow, we’ll be offering undergrad and graduate students the chance to apply one batch early. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

How to Monetize a Freemium Business

For every successful freemium business, there are hundreds of companies that have tried freemium but failed. Here we’ll be sharing a step-by-step guide for monetizing your freemium business - covering user segmentation and targeting, monetization campaign set-up and best practice … | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago

Apply to the YC Fall Hackathon

This October we're hosting a hackathon at YC. You can find out more about the event and apply here. | Continue reading


@blog.ycombinator.com | 5 years ago