Y Combinator, every mention
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every year anyone Brett Berson 13Amjad Masad 12Paul Copplestone 10Adit Abraham 10Sam Chaudhary 8Karri Saarinen 8Qasar Younis 7Imad Akhund 7Tomer London 5Rick Song 4
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Y Combinator comes up
The egoless culture that built Supabase | Paul Copplestone (Co-founder, CEO)
- ▶ 6:11 Paul Copplestone Y Combinator friendly team and apply for YC and that will help from a DevTool point of view. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:09 Paul Copplestone If you can keep the best people, um, it was at YC yesterday and so on was saying, should I take someone who's high agency or, or should I take someone who's high performance?
- ▶ 12:27 Paul Copplestone I can kind of peg a few key dates at the start of, like, 2020, we got into YC, and we did this accidental launch.
- ▶ 13:45 Paul Copplestone So we did it, and we managed to launch that before the Y Combinator demo day, and again, like, we just saw the slope of the chart change.
- ▶ 29:55 Paul Copplestone What we saw even at YC, but now happening off a base of seven, eight million developers.
- ▶ 35:59 Paul Copplestone I think we would have been forced to through YC. 2 times in the scene
Starting an education giant in a “bad market” | ClassDojo’s story | Sam Chaudhary (Co-founder & CEO)
- ▶ 12:10 Sam Chaudhary I'm going to apply to YC as a solo founder. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:17 Sam Chaudhary We show up and, um, the, I mean, like, you know, the YC motto, like imagine K-F-II adopter too. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:27 Sam Chaudhary But the, the precondition to that was the YCE mantra. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 51:58 Sam Chaudhary They're YC founders.
From Chrome extension to $5B platform | Postman’s journey | Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder & CEO)
- ▶ 29:34 Abhinav Asthana I think, uh, the idea of which YC's Paul Graham alludes to is be RAM and profitable was, was very appealing. 2 times in the scene
Ignoring Silicon Valley advice to build a $3B fintech unicorn (Mercury)
- ▶ 24:26 Imad Akhund And yeah, I did Y Combinator twice. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:44 Imad Akhund So, I mean, a good example I have of this that gave me a lot of like humbleness around this is, you know, I was in the YC batch with Dropbox and I was like, okay, amazing idea, amazing founders. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:53 Imad Akhund It was a Y Combinator company, and I was like, I guess they weren't kids, they were adults, but, but they weren't like any different from me.
- ▶ 33:54 Imad Akhund I talked to every single fintech entrepreneur I could find, um, and, you know, I, like, especially the Y Combinator fintech, uh, founders were particularly helpful, like, they're very open to chatting and, you know, laid out, like, you…
- ▶ 1:00:37 Imad Akhund So, you know, I did Y Combinator in 2007 and back then it was mostly a Paul Graham show.
Inside the ex-YC partner’s $15B self driving car company | Qasar Younis
- ▶ 0:44 Brett Berson He then joined YC, where he was the COO and a group partner. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:17 Brett Berson So winding back the hands of time a little bit, in the mid-two thousands, you were at YC, you were COO and group partner there for a number of years, and then you obviously started Applied Intuition. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:04 Qasar Younis And then talk to Paul Graham at YC about it. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:57 Qasar Younis I think it's one of the, yeah, it's, I mean, one of the things I saw at YC were the good companies were good pretty quickly, and then were good for like 10 years.
- ▶ 18:23 Qasar Younis No one's going to say, you know, at YC, we, we would write feedback letters for everyone who gets rejected, right?
- ▶ 21:46 Brett Berson So going back to sort of the founding moment for Applied Intuition, you spent time seriously considering building a robo-taxi company before you got into YC, before you started, um, helping lead YC.
- ▶ 22:15 Qasar Younis Now the way, very practically how we do, and this is my, I always say my order of operations that I had since I was at YC of starting a company is one, you find a co-founder.
- ▶ 38:14 Qasar Younis I think, I mean, this is the YC kind of way, which is like,
- ▶ 51:04 Brett Berson You said there were other companies doing something similar, but like, what were you figuring out, or what was, what was the reason there weren't seven YC companies doing the identical thing?
- ▶ 57:05 Qasar Younis I mean, you can go to an individual YC demo day and you'll see the same company, you know, three,
How Gusto built a $9.5 billion company by identifying a burning problem
- ▶ 20:30 Tomer London When we were then a part of YC and we were like, okay, payroll for small businesses, that's where we're going to start. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:06 Tomer London So one, we were part of the YC batch.
- ▶ 26:44 Tomer London It was like fifty-fifty and we, again, we, so we had, so that was, uh, post YC.
- ▶ 29:44 Tomer London Um, so I, you know, this is, this was post YC, but like in the first stretch of like a year, every single month was about, you know, here's the thing that we need to ship, and this is in order for us to get to our goals.
How rejecting conventional wisdom grew Sentry to a $3 billion company | David Cramer (Co-founder)
- ▶ 9:40 David Cramer It was a YC company.
- ▶ 29:30 David Cramer And so I, you know, I, I don't know how YC works.
- ▶ 1:13:45 David Cramer And even, even at our scale, I'm very much like, why are all YC companies not adopting Century Day Zero?
Inside Linear: Why craft and focus still win in product building | Karri Saarinen (Co-founder & CEO)
- ▶ 9:01 Karri Saarinen So we went to apply to YC in 2012 and then got into the summer batch. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:09 Karri Saarinen I feel like I learned a lot from YC just generally that they, I think they give like pretty sage or pragmatic advice. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:31:46 Karri Saarinen I would say that YC and probably like Bo Graham where I think a lot of this stuff came from has been like probably the most influential things. 2 times in the scene
From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of Persona | Rick Song (Co-founder and CEO)
How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (CEO at Reducto)
- ▶ 0:42 Brett Berson But back when Adit and his co-founder, Ronak, applied for YC's Winter-twenty-four batch, they intended to build a really different product, a long-term memory solution for language models.
- ▶ 1:35 Adit Abraham We didn't know this at the time, but when Ronic and I decided to, you know, work on something and to apply to YC, we actually applied with something fundamentally different. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:22 Adit Abraham But even a day after we got into YC, we were very upfront.
- ▶ 9:02 Adit Abraham And we posted that as a technical blog within YC's forum of here's how we segment documents.
- ▶ 19:30 Adit Abraham So YC has a way for you to announce that you are part of the batch. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:32 Adit Abraham He gave a fantastic sales call, like overview to our YC batch that just changed the way that I look at this.
Inside Guideline's mission to modernize 401(k)s | Kevin Busque (Co-founder and CEO)
- ▶ 1:13:06 Brett Berson 30 YC companies that are going to compete. 2 times in the scene
Inside Braze’s blitz to $500M in CARR | Building broad, going global, and outfoxing the competition
- ▶ 1:04:50 Bill Magnuson And so there was, there were moments where then the noise and we were in New York, we weren't in Silicon Valley, you know, we weren't a YC company.
- ▶ 1:12:42 Kevin Wang And, you know like, YC very famously talks about how they like technical founders and things like that.
Building a $4B data platform: Inside dbt Labs' unconventional path | Tristan Handy (Founder & CEO)
- ▶ 33:28 Tristan Handy I understand there's a lean startup approach and there's Y Combinator and all this.
How to find & pull startup growth levers | Matt Lerner (Founder of SYSTM, Author of Growth Levers)
- ▶ 1:02:59 Matt Lerner And in the initial iteration, it's a Y Combinator company. 2 times in the scene
The secret lever Replit pulled to scale ahead of its competition | Amjad Masad (Co-founder and CEO)
- ▶ 1:58 Todd Jackson We start by chatting about Amjad's long and winding path to become a founder in the United States, as he recounts the biggest lessons he learned after being rejected from YCom dinner multiple times before getting in.
- ▶ 7:07 Amjad Masad Codecademy was part of that movement and they had just finished YC
- ▶ 16:55 Amjad Masad But winter, 2018 is when we got into YC and we had already significant traction. 9 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:24 Todd Jackson So it was part of that, you know, you mentioned the VC conversations and the YC applications.
- ▶ 53:06 Amjad Masad The Y combinator, not the accelerator, the Y combinator is a Lisp function that allows you to do recursive calls on anonymous functions. 2 times in the scene
Mastering modern entrepreneurship | Steve Blank (Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany)
- ▶ 42:49 Steve Blank I think Y Combinator has done a good job on the front end.
- ▶ 50:47 Steve Blank I think when Sam Altman came into, you know, why comedy?
Contrarian takes on growth, hiring, and fundraising | Wade Foster (Co-founder & CEO at Zapier)
- ▶ 25:38 Wade Foster I look at, I mean, again, on the luck side, like we went through YC summer of 2012.
How young outsiders changed the shipping industry | Laura Behrens Wu (Shippo)
- ▶ 3:29 Laura Behrens Wu Through, uh, a friend who was in YC. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:15 Laura Behrens Wu And then, um, we did get into like an accelerator at, at some point, like we were rejected by YC and then got into 500 startups.
AI Hot Takes and Unusual Twitter Fundraising Strategies with Dan Siroker (Rewind AI)
- ▶ 41:21 Dan Siroker I think, um, for our benefit, you know, it's helpful that, uh, you know, folks like YC who I love really push companies for more B to B companies.
- ▶ 1:01:24 Dan Siroker I did a Y Combinator in winter, and I had previously worked at Google.
Lessons from Stripe on adding new products | Tara Seshan (Watershed, Stripe)
- ▶ 25:52 Tara Seshan Just out of YC, a company that's trying to do SaaS, but also we started selling to Atlassian and their needs are just wildly different, uh, than, than that small company.