Y Combinator, every mention
77 scenes (2018), the whole family · ← back to Y Combinator
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2018 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
20VC: A Framework For Approaching Risk and How It Affects Portfolio Construction | Lessons and Advice From Working with Dropbox's Drew Houston | Why Being A Learning Animal Is The Most Important Factor For Success with Ted Wang, Partner @ Cowboy Ventures
- ▶ 2:00 Harry Stebbings Brex founders, Henry, Gay, and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 31:57 Harry Stebbings Brex founders, Henrique and Pedro, built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Why Founders Should Not Always Be Raising, How To Build Relationships with VCs In A Condensed Timeframe, Why The Founder To VC Relationship Is Not Like A Marriage with Dave Vasen, Founder & CEO @ Brightwheel
- ▶ 2:02 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Henrique, Henry, Gay, and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 30:40 Harry Stebbings But found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Top 3 Considerations When Evaluating Consumer Businesses Today | 700 Meetings, 70 LPs, 2 Years, What It Takes To Raise a First Time Fund| The Power of The Female Network In Action Today with Anu Duggal, Founding Partner @ Female Founders Fund
- ▶ 1:53 Harry Stebbings Brex founders, Henry, Gay, and Pedro, built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 27:22 Harry Stebbings Brex founders, Henrique and Pedro, built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: CB Insights' Anand Sanwal on The Most Dangerous Myth Some Investors Have Promoted, Why Most B2B Content Is Crap and How To Make It Successful & Why Predigree Is Overrated and The Right Way To Scale Teams
- ▶ 2:02 Harry Stebbings Brex founders, Henry, Gay, and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 33:42 Harry Stebbings But found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Index's Danny Rimer on His Biggest Lessons On Price, Ownership, Board Dynamics & Building Consumer Businesses from Backing The Likes of King, Skype, Farfetch, Glossier and more...
- ▶ 2:16 Harry Stebbings Brex founders, Henrique and Pedro, built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 39:35 Harry Stebbings Brex founders, Henrique and Pedro, built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Monzo's Tom Blomfield on The 3 Phases of Startup Scaling, The Secret To Building a 1.2m Community with No Advertising & How To Use Boards As A Tool To Instil Operational Excellence
- ▶ 12:36 Tom Blomfield And we went to, I remember very vividly talking to Paul Graham at Y Combinator about this.
- ▶ 25:45 Tom Blomfield I think Y Combinates have a lesson on this.
- ▶ 30:25 Tom Blomfield It's on the t-shirt, the Y Combinator gives every new, uh,
20VC: Ryan Caldbeck on Why The Business Model of VC is Broken, Who is To Blame, How The Best Funds Will Use Data Intelligently Moving Forward & Whether We Are In A Consumer Bubble Or Not?
- ▶ 1:06 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 32:37 Harry Stebbings For startups, Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: The 2 Core Roles Played By The Best Seed Investors Today, What To Look For In Potential Co-Investors & Why Seed Funds Can Grow Ownership in Their Best Companies Across Rounds with Ron Bouganim, Founder @ Govtech Fund
- ▶ 0:58 Harry Stebbings But found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 8:06 Ron Bouganim You have these significant platforms, you know, the Y Combinators of the World and AngelLists, and I can go on and on, that have really, in their words, and I would agree with this, sort of democratized the very essence of angel investing…
- ▶ 43:30 Harry Stebbings For startups, Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
- ▶ 1:05 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 29:15 Harry Stebbings For startups, Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins
- ▶ 1:03 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 43:05 Harry Stebbings For startups, Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Why Too Many People Give Up Too Quickly, Why You Should Never Start A Venture Without Owning The Underlying Data & Why We Have Over-Estimated The Ability of Automation with Dennis Mortensen, Founder & CEO @ X.ai
- ▶ 1:06 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 33:12 Harry Stebbings For startups, Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: First Round's Phin Barnes on How The Best Founders Optimize for Learning Per Dollar Spent, What Makes A Truly Special Founder/VC Relationship and Why Pattern Recognition is Another Term For Intellectual Laziness
- ▶ 1:13 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 38:57 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: 7 Key Themes To Building A Great Company To IPO, The Right Way To Assess Market Timing & How To Balance Between Speed and Inspection When It Comes To Decision-Making with Patrick Morley, CEO @ Carbon Black
- ▶ 1:18 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Henrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 24:01 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Henrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Learnings From Backing The Likes of Spotify and Airbnb, The World of Growth Investing Today and The Right Way For Investors To Think About Liquidity with Woody Marshall, General Partner @ TCV
- ▶ 1:20 Harry Stebbings But found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 28:58 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: Why Entrepreneurs Should Let Everyone Rip Apart Their Business Idea, How To Construct Frameworks for Success & Why You Should Not Always Test Your MVP with Afton Vechery, Founder & CEO @ Modern Fertility
- ▶ 0:28 Harry Stebbings To date, they've raised over seven million dollars in funding from some of the leading players in venturing, including USV, First Round Capital, Mavron, SV Angel, and Y Combinator.
- ▶ 1:09 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Henrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 29:51 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Henrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: USV's Rebecca Kaden on Whether Venture Returns Can Be Made At Scale In Consumer Today & How To Navigate Consumer Investing In A World of Amazon
- ▶ 1:10 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
- ▶ 29:28 Harry Stebbings Brex founders Enrique and Pedro built a payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they were in Y Combinator.
20VC: The Commonalities In The Makings Of Truly Great People, How Silicon Valley Will Become The Home For Crypto and Frontier Tech Once Again & Why Games Are Such A Good Tool To Understand Human Motivation with Daniel Gross, Founder & Pioneer, Head of AI
- ▶ 0:27 Harry Stebbings Daniel is the founder of the very exciting and recently launched project, Pioneer, and head of AI at Y Combinator. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:29 Harry Stebbings Ah, it's a pleasure, but I'd love to start today, and maybe for those that didn't hear our first episode, how did you make your way into the world of startups and come to be a partner at YC and now founder of Pioneer? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:05 Daniel Gross If you do that, you should apply to YC.
20VC: The 2 Core Areas Value Will Accrue In Crypto, Why Crypto Will Drive The Re-Centralisation of Talent Back Into Silicon Valley & Why Regulation Is The Opposite of What We Should Be Concerned By in Crypto with Avichal Managing Partner @ Electric Capita
- ▶ 0:48 Harry Stebbings And as for Avichal, as well as Electric, he's a part-time partner at YC, and prior to YC, he was a Director of Product Management at Facebook, where he led the local product 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:40 Avichal Garg I'm an expert at Y Combinator, so I'm always spending time trying to figure out what people on the fringes of society and the fringes of technology are doing with their time.
20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown
- ▶ 4:33 Eddy Lu We joined Y Combinator, raised 7.6 million dollars for it afterwards.
- ▶ 11:14 Eddy Lu So this guy has seen some stuff and he invested in us in the very beginning at the tail end of YC. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:20 Eddy Lu So actually, when we were out of YC with Rob with us, we were a pretty hot deal, and we were raising our seed round, and we got money from anyone we wanted, from First Round Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Ashton Kutcher, SV Angel.
20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive
- ▶ 21:43 Fritz Lanman And I think it's continued to evolve tremendously and YC and other others have kind of changed the game even since when I started.
20VC: The Core Lessons From Building a 150 Startup Angel Portfolio, Why Founders Who Angel Invest Have Such Strong Advantages and Why The Lean Startup Makes Less and Less Sense Today with Adrian Aoun, Founder & CEO @ Forward
- ▶ 0:53 Harry Stebbings With the likes of WorkRamp, Atrium, Convoy, and many more in his incredible portfolio, and I do also have to say a huge thank you to Daniel Gross at YC and Daniel Lewis at Convoy for the intro to Adrian today.
20VC: Thumbtack's Marco Zappacosta on The 3 Core Elements To All Board Meetings, Raising $250m from Sequoia and Why You Have To Win Supply Side Acquisition First For Marketplace Success
- ▶ 23:18 Marco Zappacosta And that was also YC's first company to IPO again after 11 or maybe even 12 years.
20VC: Why Facebook Will Be The Company To Succeed in Crypto, Why Founders Should Be Actively Angel Investing & Commonalities of Great Leadership From Mark Zuckerberg to Mark Pincus with Darian Shirazi, Founder & CEO @ Radius
- ▶ 8:26 Darian Shirazi So, I can tell you that Adora Chung at Homejoy, who's now a partner at Y Combinator,
20VC: How To Strategically Build The Right Investor Base, Why Startup Timing is Like Surfing & How To Determine Whether Someone is Scaling with the Organisation or Not with Daniel Lewis, Founder & CEO @ Convoy
- ▶ 0:36 Harry Stebbings Check this out, they have the likes of Y Combinator Continuity Fund, Greylock, Jeff Bezos, Mark Benioff, Drew Houston, Kevin Systrom, and leading angels Ali and Hadi Partovi.
- ▶ 0:55 Harry Stebbings And I do also want to say a big thank you to Anu at YC and Hooman Radfart at Expa for the intro to Dan today, without which this episode would not have been possible.
- ▶ 2:36 Harry Stebbings I've heard so many great things from Hooman at Expert to Anu at YC, so thank you so much for joining me today.
- ▶ 9:18 Harry Stebbings From many friends and actually former guests on the show, we mentioned, uh, Anu at YC there.
- ▶ 16:38 Harry Stebbings Before we kind of discuss that kind of culture of experimentation, the final element on fundraising I do want to touch on, we had Anu and Ali from YC Continuity Fund on the show. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:47 Harry Stebbings I'm intrigued, why did you choose YC as the chosen kind of lead series B investor of choice? 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:47 Harry Stebbings Dan, as I said, I had so many great things from the team at YC, so thank you so much for joining me today.
20VC: Finding VC Partners That Look Beyond The Numbers, The Black Box of VC Secrets That Needs To Be Shared & The 1,000 Reasons A VC Won't Invest In You When It Has Nothing To Do With You with Leah Busque, General Partner @ Fuel Capital
- ▶ 27:38 Leah Busque I didn't know anything about Y Combinator or any of these incubators or any of these companies, but I read that book, and I so connected with the authenticity of these founders' stories, and their journeys really resonated with me, and…
20VC: 2 Levers To Fundraising: FOMO & Leverage and How To Use Them, How To Implement "A Sustainable Growth Mindset" & How To Put VCs To Work For You with Leore Avidar @ Lob
- ▶ 0:10 Harry Stebbings But to the show today, and on Monday we had the fantastic Anu Hariharan from YC's Continuity Fund, and I'm thrilled to feature today one of their latest investments in the form of Lobb, with founder and CEO Lior Avidar joining us in the… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:27 Harry Stebbings As I said, I heard so many great things from Alexis at Initialize to Ali at YC, so thank you so much for joining me today. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:33 Harry Stebbings And what an incredible rise in journey it's been, and we mentioned some of the backers there from Alexis that have initialized to Ali at YC, and I do want to start on that theme of fundraising, because we've spoken before, and you've said…
20VC: Why, How and When To Think About Growth Teams, The Right Way To Think About Network Effects & Scaling from Phase 1 To Phase 2 of Startup Life with Anu Hariharan, Partner @ YC Continuity Fund
- ▶ 0:18 Harry Stebbings Well, today, we're taking a deeper dive, as I'm thrilled to welcome Anu Hariharan, partner at Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, the growth stage investing arm of Y Combinator, that's made investments in the likes of 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:42 Harry Stebbings I would love, though, to get started today by discussing a little bit about you and how you made your way into what I always call the wonderful world of VC with Andreessen to now with YC.
- ▶ 8:00 Harry Stebbings I'm intrigued, when analyzing opportunities today with YC, are there certain forms that maybe get you more excited than others due to, it could be scalability, unit economics, whatever the reason, and why is that?
- ▶ 9:28 Anu Hariharan Having said that, most companies, you know, especially the ones that apply in the YC early stage program, don't have any form of network effect, because these are star
- ▶ 26:58 Anu Hariharan especially when life in any profession, and especially in the startup world, we see that consistently in YC because, you know, we have 150 companies per batch. 2 times in the scene
20VC: The Fundamentals Of Optimising The Fundraising Process, SAFE's vs Priced Equity Rounds & Why Hiring Is Really A Big Data Problem with Chris Hutchins, Founder @ Grove & Former Partner @ Google Ventures
- ▶ 13:30 Chris Hutchins It allows for this continual raising process that, you know, I know YC's talked a lot about that I think can be a huge distraction.
- ▶ 25:56 Harry Stebbings And cannot wait to bring you Monday's episode with Anu Hariharan from Y Combinator.
20VC: Sam Altman, Y Combinator President on What Makes Truly Great Leaders, Why We Will See A Compression of Seed Funding & The Future Scaling of YC
- ▶ 0:16 Harry Stebbings For those that have been living under a rock, Sam is the president at Y Combinator, the world's most successful accelerator, with alumni that includes the likes of Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit, 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:32 Harry Stebbings But enough from me, and I'm now just very, very proud to welcome Sam Altman, president at Y Combinator.
- ▶ 3:11 Sam Altman Hacking on a project, and I heard about this thing called Y Combinator, and I thought maybe then that it could become a startup. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:34 Sam Altman And when Y Combinator started itself, it was sort of regarded as this very dumb thing that was never going to yield big companies. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:15 Sam Altman Well, I think we just had a very similar vision for what YC could be. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:06 Harry Stebbings In terms of addressing leadership there from the YC partnership perspective, if we move it to a question from your brother, Jack, who asked, with regards to the founder perspective, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:29 Harry Stebbings You've probably seen a huge amount of very young founders who might be potentially naive entering their spaces with some YC companies. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:34 Sam Altman And, you know, many of the best YC companies turn down just absolutely silly priced offers, and will pick a reasonable price from a good investor. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:52 Harry Stebbings I do want to move into the final kind of quarter of the interview, though, being the future of YC, and YC is an organization, and it moving forward, and one of your other recent goals was figuring out how to scale another two X. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:35 Sam Altman You know, I'm not running a continuity fund.
- ▶ 22:56 Harry Stebbings But I do want to finish on one for you, and let's finish on what are the next five years hold for you and for YC? 2 times in the scene
20VC: Why VC Is A Game of Maximising Serendipity, How VCs Can Characterise Their Approach To Working & Product Lessons from Jack Dorsey & Sonos' John MacFarlane with Kevin Thau, General Partner @ Spark Capital
- ▶ 0:56 Harry Stebbings Where he helped ship the first mobile browser, mobile messaging services, and mobile websites, and I'd also want to give a big hat tip to previous guest Ali Raugani at Y Combinator.