Y Combinator, every mention
53 scenes (2020), the whole family · ← back to Y Combinator
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every year 2020 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: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
- ▶ 0:17 Harry Stebbings David has raised over sixty-nine million dollars with Retool from some of the very best in startups, including Sequoia, YC, Patrick and John from Stripe, Henrique and Pedro at Brex, Paul Graham, Nat at GitHub,
- ▶ 4:53 David Hsu It actually got a bunch of users, and we actually got into YC doing that. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:53 David Hsu John Collison from Stripe was offering some office hours to YC companies, and this must have been maybe March, maybe April, something like that, of 2017.
- ▶ 9:45 Harry Stebbings Having access to John, and having access to that kind of mentorship, I guess, in the early days, you know, came through the YC network, and when we chatted before, you said something that was really interesting to me, which was, you said,… 13 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:49 Harry Stebbings I mean, there's some points there which I just think are, like, too good for me to pass up on asking about, because, like, on the YC advice around the round, I would have honestly totally said the 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:36 David Hsu that the, I think the culture is quite insular, and to some extent, this is why YC works, because YC can sort of bring you into the fold, sort of get you connected very quickly into the tech scene, but I do wish as someone who, to some… 2 times in the scene
20VC: Reid Hoffman on Investing in Airbnb and Passing on Stripe, The Different Styles of Truly Great Leaders, How To Think Through Ownership and Price in Venture & How To Ensure Venture Partnerships Always Have Trust and a Learning Mindset
- ▶ 33:26 Reid Hoffman So Paul Graham, who is a founder of Y Combinator, dropped me an email saying there's two Irish brothers, Patrick and John Collison, who are literally spectacular, and they're going to be reinventing banking, and that you should meet with…
20VC: Alexis Ohanian on Why Now Was The Right Time To Start Seven Seven Six, The 2 Very Distinct Types of Deals In Venture & The Unbundling of Social in 2021
- ▶ 0:41 Harry Stebbings I'd also want to say a huge thank you to PG at YC and Gary Tan for some fantastic questions and suggestions today.
- ▶ 4:24 Alexis Ohanian Uh, which led me to Gary as we were partners at Y Combinator together.
- ▶ 22:57 Alexis Ohanian And this was, I mean, when we got the call back for YC, we had been rejected the first time. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Accel's Dan Levine on The Current State of Seed & Series A, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Solo Capitalists and Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed & Market, People and Product; What To Prioritise?
- ▶ 3:44 Daniel Levine Right before I joined Excel the first time around in, I had founded a company called Chartio and went through Y Combinator, and candidly, I was a terrible, terrible founder for a variety of reasons. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:09 Daniel Levine And the second one that I think is really critical, and maybe it's something that, like, YC really drilled in, is, like, do you have an efficient initial insertion?
20VC: Cyan Banister on Her Relationship To Money, Risk, Her Investment Decision-Making Process, Why We Will See A Reckoning in the Early Stage Market, Her Biggest Takeaways from HQ Trivia & The Future of Silicon Valley
- ▶ 4:42 Cyan Banister And so at some point around the time that Y Combinator kind of really hit its stride, some of the valuations of companies were out of whack.
- ▶ 18:11 Harry Stebbings I do want to ask one thing, and I wanted to ask you when you mentioned earlier, but you mentioned kind of pricing being incredibly high coming out of YC and that time when you went to AngelList.
20VC: Arlan Hamilton: "We Have Come For Cake, Not The Crumbs", Arlan's Plan To Return $1Bn in 10 Years, Why Arlan Plans To Giveaway or Invest 90% of Her Wealth & What The LP Class Can Do To Ensure More Under-Represented Managers Get Funded
- ▶ 12:39 Arlan Hamilton Taking the best from Y Combinator and Techstars and others and infusing our own take on it.
20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on How To Assess Your Relationship To Risk and Money, Why San Francisco Is A Case Study For The Greatest Squandering of Wealth in History & Why Complexity Increases Exponentially with Scale
20VC: Biggest Lessons from Working with John Doerr, How Founders Can Have Discussions of Vulnerability with Their Board and Investors & Marrying Another Founder; The Pros, Cons and Ways To Make it Succeed with Alyson Friedensohn, Co-Founder & CEO @ Modern
- ▶ 10:31 Alyson Friedensohn So we went through Y Combinator, the accelerator program, and typically when you're going through a Combinator, they're looking for strong technical founders. 2 times in the scene
20VC: SPACs. What Are They? Why Now? How Do They Change The Venture Landscape? Are They Better Than IPOs & Direct Listings? How Should Founders Think About Them? Kevin Hartz & Troy Steckenrider @ A*
- ▶ 4:45 Kevin Hartz Of Y Cominator is a vehicle that's really been a benefit to the formation stage businesses on the financial side. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:24 Kevin Hartz Changed and radically grew in the nineties and 2000, just as why Commodore had an impact on formation stage businesses.
20VC: Sahil Lavingia on Rolling Funds and Their Impact on The Future of Venture, How To Evaluate Market, Team and Product, The Value of Party Rounds & The Pros and Cons of Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed
- ▶ 15:47 Sahil Lavingia So you're seeing a few of these deals that get super hot, and these YC companies that raise at these 15, twenty million dollar caps.
20VC: Why The Unbundling of Fintech Will Continue, How VCs Are Propping Up The Neo-Banking Industry & Why We Need A New Framework To Value Businesses Today with Clay Wilkes, Founder & CEO @ Galileo
- ▶ 1:57 Harry Stebbings And check this out, they recently announced their 10 and a half million Series A, led by Valar Ventures, alongside Y Combinator and Kindred Ventures, and they're revolutionizing the way we spend.
- ▶ 29:10 Harry Stebbings Alongside Y Combinator and Kindred Ventures, and they're revolutionizing the way we spend, listeners to TwentyVC have the exclusive opportunity to join PointCard's invite-only launch out of beta in July.
20VC: Brad Feld, Jerry Colonna and Tracy Lawrence on Depression and Mental Health, The Dangers of Tying Happiness To Milestones & Why Fear, Anxiety and Guilt Are Useless Emotions
- ▶ 2:07 Harry Stebbings And check this out, they recently announced their 10 and a half million Series A, led by Valor Ventures, alongside Y Combinator and Kindred Ventures, and they're revolutionizing the way we
20VC: Chamath Palihapitiya on Why IPOs and Direct Listings Are Broken, Turning Social Capital Into A Combination of Berkshire Hathaway, Koch Industries and The Red Cross, Why Forecasts Are Worthless, What Creates True Defensibility & Why You Have To Be Pr
- ▶ 46:40 Chamath Palihapitiya And I think there are really great initiatives like Y Combinators, Startup School,
20VC: The Future of Subscription Media, Why Startups Need To Stop Blaming Facebook and Google & How Founders Should Think Through Customer Acquisition Channel Dependencies with Alex Mather, Founder & CEO @ The Athletic
- ▶ 0:28 Harry Stebbings Y Combinator and Emerson Collective, to name a few.
20VC: 8VC's Joe Lonsdale on How To Foster Contrarian Thinking Within Venture Partnerships, Why The Best VCs Are Company Builders & Why It Is Not Possible To Build Multi-Billion Dollar Companies and Have Worklife Balance
- ▶ 2:31 Harry Stebbings Instead of drawing up a credit line for rewards that aren't relevant, you can use point card and start getting a break on purchases with your favorite brands, and it's backed by the likes of Y Combinator and our dear friend from the show,…
- ▶ 38:19 Harry Stebbings Backed by the likes of Y Combinator and our dear friend from the show, Jeff Morris Jr., they're revolutionizing the way we spend, and listeners of TwentyVC have the exclusive opportunity to join Point's invite-only launch out of beta in…
20VC: Oren Zeev on Why Diversification Is Overrated, The Downside of Thematic Investing, Making Quality Decisions In Uncertain Conditions & Why He Has No Reserves Allocation
- ▶ 2:17 Harry Stebbings Instead of drawing up a credit line for rewards that aren't relevant, you can use PointCard and start getting a break on purchases with your favorite brands, And it's backed by the likes of Y Combinator and our dear friend from the show…
- ▶ 37:55 Harry Stebbings Backed by the likes of Y Combinator and our dear friend from the show, Jeff Morris Jr., they're revolutionizing the way we spend, and listeners of TwentyVC have the exclusive opportunity to join Point's invite-only launch out of beta in…
20VC: Substack Founder Chris Best on The Future of Public Journalism, Why The Economics Of Attention Have Been Flipped & Why Micropayments For Content Will Not Work
- ▶ 0:22 Harry Stebbings To date, Chris has raised over seventeen million dollars in funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator,
- ▶ 7:04 Chris Best We came and did YC.
- ▶ 24:22 Chris Best I found the Y Combinator, going through Y Combinator, very valuable. 4 times in the scene
20VC: Sarah Kunst on Why There Is Plenty Of Investor Money Still Available, The Megan Markle Effect and How It Impacts Hiring and Talent & Whether GP Commits Prevent Diversity and Inclusion
- ▶ 3:28 Sarah Kunst And then I ended up working for a Y Combinator backed startup in Silicon Valley.
- ▶ 9:36 Sarah Kunst So if you invested in a Y Combinator company post-demo day, three demo days ago, so it would have been about a year and a half ago, and you were paying fifteen million valuation on a company that just launched and only had a tiny bit of…
20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools
- ▶ 3:48 Howie Liu Learned more about this new genre of web companies, and ultimately decided to start a company right after college, went through YC for that one called eTax, very briefly kind of experienced that entrepreneurship experience, and then…
- ▶ 4:39 Howie Liu We applied to Y Combinator with a demo that I think we built in weeks throughout YC. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Superhuman's Rahul Vohra on How 1-1 Customer Onboarding Can Scale Efficiently to $100M ARR, Why Gamification Does Not Work But Game Design Does & What Game Design Means For The Next Generation Of Product Managers
- ▶ 26:15 Rahul Vohra In just the Y Combinator batch, I saw five different companies that had incorporated this into their product, and we have companies like Linear that have just recently raised from Sequoia that have done the same.
20VC: How To Assess Risk and Value Creation, Why It Would Be Better If VCs Had Smaller Portfolios & How To Optimise Internal Decision-Making with Misha Esipov, Founder & CEO @ Nova Credit
- ▶ 7:49 Misha Esipov We got into Pagemon's summer program, Y Combinator's summer program, and so through that, we got an incredible amount of visibility from a very early start that sort of put us on the map in the first place, and so that gave us an…
- ▶ 13:24 Misha Esipov Actually, the best ways I've seen this framed is actually from Ali Rogani at YC growth is as a CEO, your first chapter is all about steering the company to find product market fit.
- ▶ 22:39 Misha Esipov It would either be Pajmon and their summer program or YC summer program.
20VC: Matt Mochary, Coach To Silicon Valley's Leading VCs & Founders on How To Deal with Imposter Syndrome and Self-Doubt, How To Manage Fear and Anger & Why Board Seats Are The Death of Investors
- ▶ 5:20 Matt Mochary They were students, and YC wouldn't even accept them into their class.
- ▶ 34:10 Matt Mochary And so YC has started to do this.
20VC: Index Ventures Partner, Mark Goldberg on The Questions Founders Must Ask A Multi-Stage Fund Before Taking Their Money At Seed, Why Most Angels Will Lose Their Money & Why We Will See Our First $100Bn Neo-Bank Shortly
- ▶ 10:25 Harry Stebbings And, you know, Paul Graham and YC have said certain things, and other people have said lots of other things.
20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con
- ▶ 8:31 Tomer London Yeah, so in Gasto, you know, we've been in a very fortunate situation ever since Y Combinator. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:33 Harry Stebbings Tell me, the biggest takeaway from your time at YC? 3 times in the scene
20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
- ▶ 2:27 Harry Stebbings Emmett, my word, I've heard so many great things from PG at YC, from Mike Maples, the team at Felicis, so it really is such a pleasure to have you on the show, and thank you so much for joining me today.
- ▶ 3:21 Emmett Shear And then we heard about YC, and we applied for that. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:11 unnamed speaker I guess most exemplified in its most abbreviated form by the YC Demo Day pitch of two minutes, hitting these very high point conceptual why this is going to be huge and why we're going to win ideas.
20VC: Lessons from 150 Angel Investments into the likes of Carta, Gusto, Airtable and Superhuman, Creating Algorithms and Models For Investing At Seed & Why Younger Investors Have An Advantage When It Comes To Finding Deals Early with Jude Gomila, Angel I
- ▶ 6:56 Jude Gomila That was my first proper break for me, and I rushed out to San Francisco, determined to get into Y Combinator in 2008, and got into YC, and that was the start of my real tech career, trying lots of other things, including, as you said,… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:27 Jude Gomila We had just burnt through all our YC money.
- ▶ 44:12 Jude Gomila Now, I know YC have said this for a long time, but I was very market and product obsessed, and I still am.
20VC: Moxxie Ventures' Katie Stanton on What It Takes To Raise A First Time Fund As A Solo GP, The Entrance of Multi-Stage Funds Into Seed Rounds and The Inverse Relationship of Those That Fund Diverse Managers and Those That Say They Do
- ▶ 25:57 Katie Stanton I actually noticed this at YC, and would love to dig into the data a bit, but what I found was that the female-led companies at YC that I met with were valued less than fifteen million. 2 times in the scene