Y Combinator
also referred to as: yc
18 statements across 10 episodes · 4 bullish · 2 bearish · 10 people on the record · first statement Sep 28, 2023 by Laura Behrens Wu · said 105 times in 20 episodes since 2023 · across every show →
Mentions by year
brought up most by Brett Berson (13), Amjad Masad (12), Paul Copplestone (10), Adit Abraham (10), Sam Chaudhary (8), Karri Saarinen (8), Qasar Younis (7), Imad Akhund (7)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 10 mentions in 1 episode
2025 69 mentions in 11 episodes 6 per episode
- Inside the ex-YC partner’s $15B self driving car company | Qasar Younis
- How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (CEO at Reducto)
- Starting an education giant in a “bad market” | ClassDojo’s story | Sam Chaudhary (Co-founder & CEO)
- Inside Linear: Why craft and focus still win in product building | Karri Saarinen (Co-founder & CEO)
- Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
- How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying a burning problem
- From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of Persona | Rick Song (Co-founder and CEO)
- How rejecting conventional wisdom grew Sentry to a $3 billion company | David Cramer (Co-founder)
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 17 mentions in 3 episodes 6 per episode
- The secret lever Replit pulled to scale ahead of its competition | Amjad Masad (Co-founder and CEO)
- How to find & pull startup growth levers | Matt Lerner (Founder of SYSTM, Author of Growth Levers)
- Building a $4B data platform: Inside dbt Labs' unconventional path | Tristan Handy (Founder & CEO)
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- How young outsiders changed the shipping industry | Laura Behrens Wu (Shippo)
- Mastering modern entrepreneurship | Steve Blank (Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany)
- AI Hot Takes and Unusual Twitter Fundraising Strategies with Dan Siroker (Rewind AI)
- Contrarian takes on growth, hiring, and fundraising | Wade Foster (Co-founder & CEO at Zapier)
- Lessons from Stripe on adding new products | Tara Seshan (Watershed, Stripe)
- every mention in 2023, scene by scene →
Everything said about Y Combinator, oldest first
Sep 28, 2023
Feb 15, 2024
Masad: Replit submitted a Rickroll video for its Y Combinator application
“So I put in the Rickroll video. Rick Astey is never going to give you up. And till this day, if you go to the YC portal and you click on Repplin and you click the video where it should be the founder interview, you'll get Rickrolled.”
Feb 15, 2024
Dec 19, 2024 negative
Handy: Lean Startup and Y Combinator frameworks fundamentally misunderstand innovation
“I understand there's a lean startup approach and there's Y Combinator and all this. I actually am not a big supporter of these approaches because I think fundamentally what they're trying to say is you can take the process of innovation and you can put a metho…”
Feb 20, 2025 neutral
Busque: Tackling the hardest foundational problems first isn't the standard YC playbook
“I think starting at the bottom and doing the hard things first isn't necessarily like the MO of YC, at least not out of the gate. Not that they don't do really hard things they do, but they don't do them first.”
Apr 29, 2025
Jul 1, 2025
London: Gusto's YC Demo Day pitch mapped expansion beyond payroll
“The last slide was all about that. It was about, hey, we're starting from payroll. The next step is benefits and HR. And from there, it's going to be a full what we call their people platform. So everything, you know, to help you start building, grow your busi…”
Aug 1, 2025 negative
Younis: Recruiting a co-founder after an idea creates glorified employees
“It's not come up with the idea and then go find a co-founder. Brett Berson: Why is that a bad idea? Qasar Younis: Because then it's my idea and then you join Brett as really a glorified employee. Because you weren't there at the birthing of the idea. And most …”
Aug 1, 2025
Younis: Successful Startups Are Good Pretty Quickly, Not Out in the Woods
“One of the things I saw at YC were the good companies were good pretty quickly, and then were good for like 10 years. And then they went public. Like they weren't like this out in the woods for a long period of time. It's the exception, not the rule. The rule …”
Aug 1, 2025 positive
Younis: Domain expertise is a true advantage as startup ideas become commoditized
“Today it is because there's, again, the Valley is different today in 20, 25 than it is ever before, because now there's no idea. I mean, you can go to an individual YC demo day and you'll see the same company, you know, three, Companies doing the same idea. So…”
Aug 1, 2025 neutral
Younis: YC gave feedback to rejected interviewees unless the issue was the founder
“At YC, we would write feedback letters for everyone who gets rejected, right? Literally emails is like, we didn't, this is the issue that we saw. So if you get an interview, I don't know if they still do it. You know, I've been gone eight, nine years at this p…”
Aug 6, 2025 positive
Sep 3, 2025
Jun 25, 2026 positive
Copplestone: Supabase team was engineered specifically to be YC-friendly
“I thought at the time, again, to de-risk things, I thought, I'm going to build a, the most Y Combinator friendly team and apply for YC and that will help from a DevTool point of view. I think that's the pitch that actually convinced him he really wanted to go …”
Jun 25, 2026 positive
Jun 25, 2026
Copplestone: Startups should never compromise between high agency and high performance
“If you can keep the best people it was at YC yesterday and so on was saying, should I take someone who's high agency or should I take someone who's high performance? And like, it's very clear to me. It's both. Like, you just don't compromise on, on any of thos…”