Y Combinator

“We have 30 hosts in New York who are renting their extra rooms out in their homes”

“The reason we got in wasn't because of our idea. It was because through the breakfast cereal, we had proven to him that we had hustle, we had grit, we had the, if we could figure out how to sell breakfast cereal for 40 dollars a box, we could figure out how to…”

“I opened the app, I ordered a six pack of beer, and I addressed it for the Y Combinator headquarters. And half an hour later, I get a call from Gary Tan, and he's like, what is this? And I was like, oh, this is Instacart. And I guess the beer must have been pr…”

“I didn't write the first line of code until June, and I had never built a website before, and we were kind of Paul's special projects a little bit, you know, because of how we got into YC,”

“We like you to, and if you change your idea, we'll invest.”

“And this was a chance to basically get 12,000 dollars from an investor we really trusted to just try something for three months.”

“Like those black businesses should be held to the same standard of return on capital. It's just the opportunity to have access to that capital. Have access to the support and training that Y Combinator companies may get, or that, you know, first-round capital …”

“And I get a one-line email from Paul Grime. Saying, they like the idea, certainly liked your software, but you need a co-founder.”

“Like, those Black businesses should be held to the same standard of return on capital. It's just the opportunity to have access to that capital, have access to the support and training that Y Combinator companies may get, or that, you know, first-round capital…”

“Having a co-founder is like getting married, basically. Like, it should be somebody that you have worked with for years, and you've, at least maybe you've known them for years, ideally.”

“I think there's a real danger in consensus, especially when you're talking about real breakthrough innovation, because yes, Every breakthrough innovation looks like a bad idea, but it's actually a good idea, and so you, I think you really want to avoid, like, …”

“The original YC was heavy on, like, show us a demo, and interviews are now 10 minutes. At the time, you've got 40 minutes per Per interview.”

“I think what YC is looking for is people who can communicate clearly, but most of all, people who, when they're challenged, they neither rebel nor acquiesce. And I think that's a, that's one of the most important traits in startup founders, actually.”

“There's a thing about Silicon Valley, which is it's, it had not been that well geared towards the time and capital intensive science projects.”

“I didn't, like, have a ton of respect for the career path. And so there was, like, some sense in which it was an admission of defeat about, you know, I just, I can't run a company, so I'm gonna go do the easy job, or I'm gonna go do the retirement job or somet…”

“We made enough oil, got up on stage for two minutes, held it up, and gave our pitch, and in about two weeks, we were able to raise four million dollars to get the company started.”

“And the key reason they said no was because we had, we, they didn't believe that we knew Larry long enough. And they were like, it's a huge risk to have two business founders and a technical co-founder of which was such a new relationship.”

“I remember on the first demo day we did, which is the one that's for YC alumni, Emmett Scheer came up to me and he said, Emmett Scheer, founder of, co-founder of Twitch, who was on the show a couple years ago, yep. Yeah, he's like, I look at you guys, I'm real…”

“By the time we Finished YC at the end of March. We had, we, 7000 paid subscriptions across the network that we could point to and say, look, this thing is working.”