Y Combinator, every mention
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every year anyone Harry Stebbings 663Jason Lemkin 97Tom Blomfield 45Jason Calacanis 33Max Junestrand 29Garry Tan 24Sam Altman 18Justin Kan 16Rory O'Driscoll 14Fred Turner 12
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Y Combinator comes up
OpenAI Restructuring: Who Wins and Who Loses & Mercor Raises $350M at a $10BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:24:37 Jason Lemkin YC has that in a sliver as do others.
Sequoia Partner, David Cahn on Who Wins in AI, Defence & The New $0–$100M Playbook · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 32:42 David Cahn So it makes sense why everyone's talking about this right now, which is in June or July, Andre Karpathy at Y Combinator said, Hey, we're in for the decade of agents as opposed to AGI in 20, 27.
20Growth: How to Build a Paid Marketing Machine: ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) 101 | The Rise of User Generated Content and How to Use It | TikTok Ads: Expectations vs. Reality | Hiring for Growth: When and Who with Sandy Diao
- ▶ 1:04:36 Sandy Diao This is actually a trend I see already reflected in some of YC's latest cohort batches, where if you look at some of the roles they're hiring for, so many teams that are less than five or 10 people are already want a founding growth…
Why VC Today is Worse than 2021 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:21:51 Jason Calacanis So already, I don't know how many in the last YC demo day classes, their sites were, their marketing sites at least were vibe coded, but it might've been 20 or 30% were vibe coded.
Deel CEO, Alex Bouaziz on Raising $300M+ at a $17BN Valuation · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 4:43 Harry Stebbings And what I mean by that is, like, Rippling have the Silicon Valley Illuminati around them, and in the same way for me, like, there are some media companies, which I'm not going to name because they'll hate me for it, but, like, they just… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:01:17 Harry Stebbings If you look at YC, it's a very valuable source of getting in early. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:11:20 Alex Bouaziz Me and Shu met him in a coffee shop during, or right after YC, and I've just learned to know him over the years, and just like, I actually think he's one of the best investor in the world.
Thinking Machines Co-Founder Joins Meta for $3.5BN, Industry Venture's $665M Acquisition · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 2:34 unnamed speaker You know, Harry, you think it's funny, but I say, you know, when you, when you come out here and you go to YC Demo Day, you're going to feel old now.
- ▶ 13:52 unnamed speaker And yeah, I would argue, I would argue Y Combinator, for example, not saying it's because it's old, but it is the definition of a business.
- ▶ 54:30 unnamed speaker It was like the old days when you could work at YC and have your own fund at the side, at the side. 2 times in the scene
OpenAI's Multi-Billion Deal with AMD & Polymarket, Vercel and Supabase Raise Mega Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 29:52 Jason Lemkin It is nothing but, I mean, walk out of YC Demo Day, and as an investor, you feel gamed.
20VC: Why AI SDRs are BS and Do Not Work | How to Use AI in Your Sales Team and Process to Win Today | What Skills Do All New Reps Need to Have in an AI First World with Amit Bendov, CEO @ Gong
- ▶ 50:29 Amit Bendov Hey, like I'm a startup from, uh, YC.
ElevenLabs CEO/Co-Founder, Mati Staniszewski:The Untold Story of Europe’s Fastest Growing AI Startup · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 17:59 unnamed speaker Yeah, I was like, with between 30 to 50, and it was double, double, double hard at the time, because we, we, early twenty-twenty-two, we got an offer from one of the accelerators in US, not YC, and, uh, and we were thinking, like, should…
20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand
- ▶ 7:24 Max Junestrand And I asked them, why do you want to apply to this business accelerator and not YC? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:07 Harry Stebbings When do we decide to go to YC and why does that decision come about?
- ▶ 21:20 Max Junestrand But we get early accepted into YC. 14 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:56 unnamed speaker I mean, the YC advice is you raise some time, four or five weeks before demo day, because it's become so competitive. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 43:05 Max Junestrand Of course, ideally, I mean, you, you, you have this idea and, and I think YC said it first, like, you know, you gotta go sell
Figma's 250% Pop - The Greatest IPO Mispricing Ever? Meta & Microsoft Blowout Quarters: Broken Down · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:24:08 unnamed speaker It's YC, Sequoia, Andreessen.
Miles Dieffenbach: Inside Carnegie Mellon’s $4BN Endowment & The Math Behind DPI, TVPI, Illiquidity · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 22:58 Miles Dieffenbach You've got YC.
20Product: Should We Kill the PM Role Entirely | How Does Product Design Change Most in a World of AI | How Do Monzo Build Product Today: What Works, What Does Not | Why Most Product Sucks and What Makes Truly Great Product
- ▶ 14:15 Fernando Fanton So you use like either Lovable or Reblit or Off.zero, I think it's the latest one from Y Combinator.
How Do All Providers Deal with Anthropic Dependency Risk & Figma IPO Breakdown: Where Does it Price? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 44:22 Jason Lemkin If you're a normal founder who can barely raise around, you're like, I'm going to optimize around. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 44:58 Harry Stebbings And that led Rob go next for you to write a piece, which many people picked up on, which I'm summarizing very, very badly, but essentially saying that 90% of seed funds are cooked, fighting the mega platforms, YC, 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:00:58 Jason Lemkin Farming YC every quarter.
- ▶ 1:14:20 Jason Lemkin We can move on, but it's, there's a lot of things that, especially folks that have been in venture for a while want to say with a lot of thought and, and, and, you know, YC is overpriced and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Surge CEO & Co-Founder, Edwin Chen: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with NO Funding · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 18:40 Edwin Chen And at the same time, they can actually definitely pay their own salaries for a couple months, but the first thing they tell me is, yeah, they're, they're going to go out and raise some money, and so they might try talking to some users,…
Cognition CEO Scott Wu on Acquiring Windsurf: The Process, The Deal, The Rationale · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman: Acquired by Meta | Microsoft Layoff 9000 People | OpenAI's Bombshell · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 11:25 unnamed speaker Because Gary Tan left initialized to run YC two years ago. 2 times in the scene
Figma’s IPO: The Full Breakdown & Why Melio’s $2.5BN Acquisition is “Discouraging” · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:08:21 Rory O'Driscoll When you took 500 K from Y Combinator and said, this is a fun journey, you know, fast forward 10 years, you know, that's probably a third of your working life, and if you're still five years away from an exit, that's half your working life.
Is DPI The Only Thing That Matters? with Sam Lessin, Jason Lemkin & Rory O’Driscoll · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:09:59 Harry Stebbings You do YC very well. 10 times in the scene
OpenAI’s $6BN Jony Ive Deal & YC Is Both Chanel and Walmart, and Has Officially Won! · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 0:21 unnamed speaker I think your absolute assumption has to be YC has won. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:34 Harry Stebbings Does that mean YC's just won this game? 18 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:31 unnamed speaker That was right before YC, and I thought about a deal I did in the last batch, uh, that was probably the same risk profile at 30, ok? 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 58:03 Jason Lemkin I underestimated the power of sitting in dog patch, seeing every YC founder, seeing Sam Altman on the street, seeing everybody.
- ▶ 59:59 Jason Lemkin The YC company, it hasn't announced yet that I did, right?
- ▶ 1:01:20 unnamed speaker Because over here, it's almost like you go to Stanford, you drop out, you go to Y Combinator.
20VC: ElevenLabs Head of Growth on Why You Do Not Need PMs | The 7-Part Launch Playbook That Gets 700K+ Views Per Product | The Truth About CAC, Payback & Performance Marketing in AI with Luke Harries
- ▶ 6:48 Luke Harries And also Philip, the guy who organized it, he founded Wordware, which is the largest raise from YC ever.
- ▶ 7:45 Luke Harries So we applied to YC, we got into YC actually with an AI developer tool, and we quickly realized we were trying to do, like, browser-based automation, where you automate tasks on people's behalf. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 46:12 Luke Harries The YC one approach, which often works really well, is basically just kind of ignore them, put on your blinkers, speak to your customers, make an incredible product.
Benchmark vs a16z: Why Stage Specific Firms Win · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 16:56 Jason Lemkin The real Inception is finding the guy down the street from you, Harry, at the carriage house that didn't go to college, doesn't, didn't come out of Stripe, didn't go to YC, there's nothing in that guy, and spending months with him, getting…
- ▶ 54:59 Harry Stebbings And Neil Maitre bankrolling him, and then you want to go against the 50 others coming out of YC, all for individual verticalized solutions?
What Does it Take to Be Good at Series A and B Today? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 47:07 unnamed speaker And then there was the post LLM, you know, YC next generation company.
- ▶ 1:03:13 Harry Stebbings You're a YC company. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:19:59 unnamed speaker When I saw him at YC demo day, everyone, I mean, Nicholas is like everyone in every French startups, they've got to come now. 2 times in the scene
Dave CEO, Jason Wilk: The Best Performing Fund Would Only Back YC Founders on Their Second Time · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:45 Jason Wilk If you were to have a blank check VC fund, and you just wrote a check blank, not looking at the idea, uncapped convertible note into every successful exited YC founder for their second company, you'd have probably one of the best VC funds… 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:53 Harry Stebbings Why did you not do YC for Dave? 4 times in the scene
20VC: The Daily Deal: Coreweave IPO | Scale Hits $25BN on $2BN EOY Revenue | Sequoia's 25x Return on Wiz | Tech Stocks Tank with Tariffs | Cursor: Defensible or Dangerous Example of Lost Moats in Tech
- ▶ 19:32 Jason Lemkin And I love Y Combinator, but I think it's some of the worst advice Y Combinator gives their founders too, which is run a tight process, run a tight process. 2 times in the scene
Anton Osika, Co-Founder and CEO @ Lovable: Hitting 85% Day 30 Retention - Better than ChatGPT · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 15:56 Harry Stebbings Um, you rejected YC at some point. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 41:27 Anton Osika Yeah, so I'd love to build in a way for founders to get everything you get out of Y Combinator into Lavable. 3 times in the scene
Markus Villig, Founder @Bolt: The Most Insane Story in Startups & The Future of Self-Driving| E1225 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 4:16 Markus Villig So I went to this Y Combinator and other websites.
- ▶ 19:17 Harry Stebbings And what I mean by that is, with the globalization of venture startups content, would you just go global from day one and just go to YC, or hopefully through shows like ours, come to people like us, or do you think there are still…
Sam Altman: What Startups Will be Steamrolled by OpenAI & Where is Opportunity | E1223 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 23:13 Sam Altman About Y Combinator Four is inexperience does not inherently mean not valuable, and there are incredibly high potential people at the very beginning of their career that can create huge amounts of value, and, ah, we as a society should bet…
Eoghan McCabe, CEO @Intercom: Freedom of Speech, Censorship and Government Control | E1213 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 17:31 Harry Stebbings Something I find really challenging, Owen, is like, you know, you look at the latest YC batch, and all the companies are relatively interesting AI consumer application-led companies in large part.
Nicholas Chirls: Why Big VCs Ruin Startups, VC is a Ponzi Scheme Today & Most VCs are Bankers |E1198 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 26:53 Nicholas Chirls Now, why, why C does this?
Laela Sturdy: Life Inside Alphabet's $7BN Growth Fund | E1190 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 22:20 Harry Stebbings Because we had Matt Clifford from EF on the show, who's the entrepreneur first, the second largest, I guess, incubator compared to Y Combinator.
Alexis Ohanian: The Full P&L Breakdown of the World's Most Valuable Women's Sports Team | E1187 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 18:15 Alexis Ohanian I'm like, Tony was a YC founder while I was there as a partner.
Kevin Hartz: "How I Lost Airbnb at Seed Because of an Exploding Term Sheet" | E1180 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:06:02 Kevin Hartz Like, Y Combinator continues to have this, like, ideal venture model. 2 times in the scene
Pedro Franceschi: What Brex Needs to do to be a Public Company | E1178 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 46:54 Pedro Franceschi I think when we met the YC guys back in like, like, they were like, hey, we like you guys, but we hate your idea, because we were doing VR before. 2 times in the scene
Jason Lemkin: Why Pricing is Worse Than Ever and There is More Funding Than Ever | E1157 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 16:08 Jason Lemkin Um, you know, I didn't know, um, there, there's a guy named Chris Dean who now runs, uh, a banking as a service platform called Treasury Prime, a YC company that I invested in.
- ▶ 1:05:13 Jason Lemkin So now your typical YC deals at 25, right? 9 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:07:44 Jason Lemkin It was pre YC.
Dan Siroker: Second-Time Founders Are More Investable & Why Not To Hire People Out of College |E1153 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 5:15 Dan Siroker The other one was recently I saw Dalton Caldwell was asked this question of YC group partner, and, uh, he said, a good pivot feels like coming home, and that is something I've definitely resonated with.
- ▶ 7:43 Dan Siroker All of this great content out there and Y Combinator and all this trying to help first time founders, they all kind of make the same class of mistakes over and over again without really, you know, internalizing the, the, the learned… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:07:52 Harry Stebbings So why not do YC the second time? 5 times in the scene
Tom Blomfield: Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | E 1152 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 2:28 Tom Blomfield Um, getting onto Y Combinator in 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:47 Tom Blomfield We did a round at a billion led by General Catalyst, then a round at two billion valuation led by Y Combinator Continuity, and then found it really hard to fundraise.
- ▶ 10:15 Harry Stebbings Why did you decide to make the move with the YC role, and just talk me through that process, because you could have done anything. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:45 Harry Stebbings You built, you know, two incredible businesses in London, European through and through, living in the valley now, seeing the incredible exposure that you have with YC.
- ▶ 17:21 Harry Stebbings We then moved to, obviously, part of the move to SF, as you mentioned, was to be a partner at YC. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:56 Harry Stebbings Um, more than with YC partners, they might actually listen to you, which can be, could be great, but it could be dangerous. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:15 Tom Blomfield Yes, they, we more or less require everyone to relocate now, um, to San Francisco in the dog patch where we have our office, and spend three to four months there. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:19 Tom Blomfield By default, um, every week there is a, so YC spit into four groups, so it's not a whole YC, it's four separate mini YCs, it's sharded, and, uh, you'll get a very different experience in each one of them. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:42 Tom Blomfield I think we've got a, shutting down continuity, our growth fund, has enabled to have a, enabled WIC to have a much more collaborative relationship with multi-stage VCs. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:42 Tom Blomfield I think we've got a, shutting down continuity, our growth fund, has enabled to have a, enabled WIC to have a much more collaborative relationship with multi-stage VCs.
- ▶ 35:17 Tom Blomfield Yeah, this is an area where, um, I think it's way too easy to say YC's advice is X. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 38:23 Tom Blomfield Um, so YC has an investor database, which has 10,000 people in. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 41:13 Tom Blomfield Not really, like, sometimes, and then the vast, vast majority of YC companies end up raising their target anyway. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 42:55 Tom Blomfield And so this time round, we are doing way more of the curation where we're like, we'll literally tell you, turn up at six PM at this restaurant and you will meet seven random YC founders and you can chat about your startups. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 46:24 Tom Blomfield The best case for, for me, and for YC, probably, and for you, and like humanity, I'd argue, is that, um, roll forward 10 years, and there are like five or six foundational model companies, and they're probably attached to Google, and… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 51:15 Tom Blomfield It was a normal hot YC company.
- ▶ 52:21 Tom Blomfield I've seen companies go from zero to like half a million or a million of revenue within the YC batch.
- ▶ 57:46 Tom Blomfield And honestly, going to America where no one knew who I was, and joining YC as basically an intern, was incredibly humbling and really positive, because I had to, like, rebuild my entire self-image. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:03:06 Harry Stebbings When you see him as CEO of YC and what he's done, the excitement that he brings, especially around Demo Day, when you see him taking photos with the old school camera and just the joy that he, I didn't mean it horribly, has brought back it… 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:04:20 Harry Stebbings What is the single biggest threat to the YC model? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:04:52 Tom Blomfield Having a really high bar for the partners we hire and a really high bar for the companies we fund so that we're making YC stronger and stronger and stronger every batch and not risking this like decade-long decay. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:06:45 Tom Blomfield I don't want to run YC.
- ▶ 1:09:07 Tom Blomfield All of the funds I've seen have, like, pretty horrible politics, and I think YC has the least politics of all of them. 3 times in the scene
Tom Hulme: Lessons from a 24x Angel Track Record, 275x on Robinhood & Making Billions on Uber |E1150 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Keith Rabois & Eric Glyman: The Tools, Tips, Secrets and Process That Drive Efficiency | E1148 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 21:16 Keith Rabois It's actually in my YC lecture that Eric alluded to. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:58 Keith Rabois I mean, YC teaches that, you know, proverbial do things that don't scale.
Vickie Peng: Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product? | E1141 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 11:14 Harry Stebbings I think it's PG that commonly said that at YC.
Sam Altman & Brad Lightcap: Which Companies Will Be Steamrolled by OpenAI? | E1140 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 3:31 Brad Lightcap We actually, we spent a lot of time at YC looking at, um, this batch of companies that was starting to hit the growth stage that were these really deeply technical projects, nuclear fusion reactors, quantum computers, self-driving cars,… 3 times in the scene
Sam Blond: Why Startups are Doing Outbound Wrong and How to Fix It | E1139 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
Trae Stephens: Why No Company is Successful Because of their VC | E1135 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 26:31 Harry Stebbings I get in trouble for this when I see this, but I feel this when I see like two on 20 YC rounds and I'm like with two on 20, you're automatically excluding any top venture firm because really the 1.6 is going to be available for a lead,…
Sami Inkinen: "Why the Two Weeks Following Our IPO Were the Worst of my Life" | E1120 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 1:10:05 Sami Inkinen And this is sort of a silly example, but as an angel investor, I don't know, maybe Y Combinator or somebody teaches people this, like I get these emails like, oh, it's so loved to have you on a cap table.
David Tisch & Terrence Rohan: Biggest Misconceptions & Hardest Truths About Seed Investing | E1112 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 48:55 Terrence Rohan Founders are rarely chasing heat at YC Demo Day at some random thing, and you know, they're, they're not playing that game. 2 times in the scene
Ryan Akkina: How MIT Builds Their Venture Fund Portfolio & How MIT Approach Direct Investing | E1109 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 2:10 Ryan Akkina This was back before YC was so well known, for instance, and I remember one spring, I think we helped, uh, organize a YC startup school event on the Stanford campus. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:25 Ryan Akkina Um, and then, you know, there's some newer things as well that we've done in the past 10 or 15 years, like say, Green Oaks or Y Combinator initialized.
- ▶ 44:31 Ryan Akkina And probably the number one thing I think about right now is, uh, you know, I mentioned we're investors in YC, and when Sam left YC, around then we also had an opportunity to invest in OpenAI, and, uh, we didn't do it.
Crypto Roundtable with Nick Tomaino & Kyle Samani: US Elections, NFTs, and Trump | E1100 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 6:28 Kyle Samani Uh, I agree excessive speculation is bad, but I actually want to acknowledge one very important thing, which is, you know, the famous YC statement is build stuff people want.