Y Combinator
also referred to as: yc
includes Y Combinator Co Founder Matching
57 statements across 11 episodes · 18 bullish · 5 bearish · 12 people on the record · first statement Oct 30, 2022 by Sachin Monga · said 155 times in 37 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Lenny Rachitsky (78), Gustaf Alströmer (25), Jessica Livingston (11), Sam Lessin (4), Matt Mochary (4), Mike Maples, Jr. (3), Zoelle Egner (2), Oji Udezue (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2025 18 mentions in 13 episodes 1 per episode
- Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos
- How Palantir built the ultimate founder factory | Nabeel S. Qureshi (founder, writer, ex-Palantir)
- “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)
- The ultimate guide to AEO: How to get ChatGPT to recommend your product | Ethan Smith (Graphite)
- How AI is reshaping the product role | Oji and Ezinne Udezue
- How we restructured Airtable's entire org for AI | Howie Liu (co-founder and CEO)
- Why ChatGPT will be the next big growth channel (and how to capitalize on it) | Brian Balfour
- Rapidly test and validate any startup idea with the 2-day Foundation Sprint
- 5 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 52 mentions in 4 episodes 13 per episode
- The social radar: Y Combinator’s secret weapon | Jessica Livingston (co-founder of YC, author)
- Pattern Breakers: How to find a breakthrough startup idea | Mike Maples, Jr. (Partner at Floodgate)
- The original growth hacker reveals his secrets | Sean Ellis (author of “Hacking Growth”)
- Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 69 mentions in 12 episodes 6 per episode
- Lessons from working with 600+ YC startups | Gustaf Alströmer (Y Combinator, Airbnb)
- Reflections on a movement | Eric Ries (creator of the Lean Startup methodology)
- Brian Chesky’s new playbook
- Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)
- Hot takes and techno-optimism from tech’s top power couple | Sriram and Aarthi
- Lessons from Airtable’s unconventional growth strategy | Zoelle Egner
- Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks | Oji Udezue (Typeform)
- An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth | Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 10 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- How to work through fear, give hard feedback, and doing layoffs with grace | Matt Mochary
- Building Substack | Sachin Monga (Substack, Facebook)
- The role of AI in new product development | Ryan J. Salva (VP of Product at GitHub)
- How to grow a subscription business | Yuriy Timen (Grammarly, Canva, Airtable)
- Persuasive communication and managing up | Wes Kao (Maven, altMBA, Section4)
- The nature of product | Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
Everything said about Y Combinator, oldest first
Oct 30, 2022
Substack's 2017 YC pitch predicted podcasting and network effects
“We're actually doing all those things now that Chris got up on stage and talked about, like, you know, one day in the future, subsets going to get into podcasting and we're going to have this network effect that helps writers grow by virtue of there being othe…”
Nov 10, 2022 neutral
Mar 2, 2023 negative
Alströmer: Offering an engineer 10% equity signals undervaluation of engineering
“You apply to YC and you have 90% for yourself and 10% for the engineer, right? That's, you're basically saying they're like, oh, the engineering part of this company is only worth one-tenth of me. I'm the non-technical person. So that, that to me is a signal t…”
Mar 2, 2023
Alströmer: YC rarely accepts teams that cannot build their own prototype
“And this is something we screen for when we interview people in YC and we aren't accepting a whole lot of team that Don't know how to build or get their first prototype built themselves, because we know it is like a super common value pattern.”
Mar 2, 2023
Alströmer: The best way to discover customer pain is watching workflows
“So the best thing I've learned about how to discover the pain is to watch people, have them screen share, have them walk, walk you through their daily workflow about the area where you're doing some discovery. That is the best thing.”
Mar 2, 2023 positive
Alströmer: Hard tech builds stronger legacies than software despite worse business models
“Because they're much harder to do, but when you succeed, they're much more tangible. And you can be like, I like have a tiny little piece in like this space rocket or this airplane that we funded or the satellite that's above us. And I really think that that's…”
Mar 2, 2023 positive
Mar 2, 2023
Alströmer: Founders confuse VC funding and YC acceptance with product-market fit
“So the people are validating that even if you don't talk to customers, why has he accepted you? This investor invested in you. This investor said you were great, like blah, blah, blah, like all these different validations that you confuse with product market f…”
Mar 2, 2023 positive
Alströmer: Knowing YC Partners Does Not Affect Application Outcomes
“To apply to AC, you don't need to know any of us. You don't need to reach out to us. It doesn't make Any specific difference? The principles of YC is that you should be able to get, become an insider in YC in Silicon Valley without knowing anybody. And that's …”
Mar 2, 2023
Alströmer: Co-Founders Frequently Fail to Discuss Motivation, Impairing Conflict Resolution
“Actually, surprisingly often, founders have not talked about why they're doing this. And just knowing why someone is here really helps with conflict resolution, for example, really helps with sort of like understanding why someone is there on a certain day or …”
Mar 2, 2023
Alströmer: 90% of potential customers are not early adopters
“The problem is, which anyone who hasn't done sales before that joined YC, they realize this, is that if you take the average customer group in the world, 90% are not early adopters. It doesn't matter if you have something new and cool that is not interested. T…”
Mar 2, 2023
Alströmer: Initial Founder Motivation Does Not Predict Startup Success
“And it doesn't matter, in my experience, what your motivation is. I don't think either of these motivations, like, it sounds like some of them would be better than others. In my experience, it's not the case. The motivation will change over time to just runnin…”
Mar 2, 2023
Mar 2, 2023 neutral
Alströmer: YC cannot predict breakout hits, only recognize failure modes
“I think the truth is that we're not, not, not very good at knowing what's going to succeed. We're not, certainly we cannot figure out who's going to be the really successful company in the batch. Like that's not possible. What we're good at is knowing what fai…”
Mar 2, 2023
Alströmer: Office hours must focus on bottlenecks, not updates or strategy
“So the goal of the regular office hour, I always ask the question, what's holding you back from moving faster? And we don't want to hear updates. We don't want to hear strategy questions. We want to understand what's slowing you down or what's, what's holding …”
Oct 8, 2023
Early founders should only build product, talk to customers, and exercise
“What you should be focusing on when you build a startup is, like, talk to customers, build the product, exercise, and, like, if you, if you're not, like, if you find yourself doing something else, then those three things, it's probably, like, the wrong thing t…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Dalton Caldwell: Elite founders need coaching on basic fundamentals, not complex tactics
“Even if you're the best in the world, being coached and being reminded of the fundamentals and basics is what puts you in the right mindset and that you already know everything, right? You're at the top of your game. If you make it to the elite levels of being…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Apr 18, 2024
Caldwell: Startups usually die from founders losing hope, not running out of cash
“It's pretty rare. I would argue that the cause of death is that they had lots of firepower and they were feeling really positive and they just ran out of money. That's actually like more rare than founders think. It's much more common that they still have some…”
Apr 18, 2024 neutral
Caldwell: Airbnb founders' decision to keep going was purely irrational
“When they probably should have shut down like three or four times before they got into YC. It objectively wasn't working. They were basically ruining their lives. They were disappointing their parents. Everything was wrong. And it was a purely irrational act f…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Shutting down a startup is forgotten within 10-20 years if handled with integrity
“No one will remember that you shut down your company probably in 10 years or 20 years, like time, as long as you have integrity. As long as you're an honest person, as long as you handle yourself well through good times and bad, people will remember you fondly…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Outlier founders share deep internal conviction and refusal to fail
“The thing that I would argue folks that build really big companies have in common is they just really want it and they really believe in themselves and they really believe they can make it work. And that they're somehow deep in their internal psyche. There's s…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Brex and Retool appeared to be their YC batch's worst startups
“Vyond Change their idea and got really excited about it and renamed to Brex. And this was Brex, which is like a Decacorn. And Cashew changed their idea and renamed to something called Retool. And so out of my 35 companies, the ones that objectively seemed the …”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Startup success requires irrational persistence through multiple near-death experiences
“Across the portfolio of YC and non YC companies, there has to be this irrational, you know, intention to keep going even when the world tells you it's not working and you feel completely defeated. And you likely have to go through this many times and have thes…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Caldwell: Founders should validate and pre-sell before writing code or raising money
“If someone wants to do a startup and doesn't know where to start, just to give you permission to talk to potential customers and try to pre-sell something before you write code and have those conversations. I think so many folks don't know where to begin on st…”
Apr 18, 2024
Caldwell: Identical information diets cause founders to create identical startup ideas
“If you just are following the same principles and have the same information flow into your brain, you're going to come up with the same ideas as everybody else. And so the prompt here is to try to go more off the beaten path, either from your personal experien…”
Apr 18, 2024 neutral
Caldwell: Tar pit startup ideas generate positive feedback and persuasive arguments
“The weird aspect of what we call a tar pit idea is an idea that a lot of people come up with, and then it seems like an unsolved problem and you get lots of positive feedback for, right? And you have a really good set of arguments that it's a really good start…”
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Apr 18, 2024
Jun 27, 2024 neutral
Paul Graham often pitched growth strategies to founders during YC interviews
“And sometimes I always tease Paul because one of his defining qualities is that sometimes someone would have an idea that he'd get so excited about that by the end of the interview, he'd be giving them ideas about how to grow their product and, you know, what …”
Jun 27, 2024
Jun 27, 2024 negative
Jun 27, 2024 positive
True founder confidence means admitting ignorance while outlining a plan
“Confidence means you can say, I've thought about that and I don't know the answer. Like that's confidence, you know, and they'll say, but here's what I do to try to figure it out. Here are my plans to do that, to address that.”
Jun 27, 2024 neutral
Jun 27, 2024 neutral
YC software automatically flags unusual equity structures and job statuses
“No, it's all just stuff in the application that automatically, like, flags certain things. I actually don't remember all of them, but it's just, all it is, is, is a, please pay attention to this reader of the application. It's not, this disqualifies anyone. It…”
Jun 27, 2024
Founders with corporate day jobs consistently abandon startups when obstacles arise
“You have to burn the boat because we found that founders who are still getting a paycheck and health insurance
Once the going got tough they did not quit their job. And you need that deterrent, like you sort of need that desperation. Like I have to make this s…”
Jun 27, 2024
Jun 27, 2024 neutral
Y Combinator originally planned to abandon cohort batches for asynchronous investing
“We definitely did wanted to learn more about how to be investors. So that's when we decided to do this, you know, summer founders program where we could invest in a whole bunch at once. And then the plan was to go to asynchronous investing like normal investor…”
Jun 27, 2024
YC kept interviews to 10 minutes because longer sessions wasted time
“You read the application, but then the 10 minutes is kind of as long as you need in most cases, because we found when they were longer, like 20 minutes, you'd know in 10 minutes and be like twiddling your thumbs. Trying to get through the interview for the nex…”
Jun 27, 2024 neutral
Jun 27, 2024 neutral
Jun 27, 2024 positive
Livingston would have funded a young Steve Jobs despite his abrasive reputation
“I think I would have funded him because he's so incredible and he's so, he was so smart and so interested in the product and knew, like, I'm very persuaded by people who know what they're talking about and love their product and are domain experts.”
Jun 27, 2024 positive
Jun 27, 2024 positive
Livingston says YC's early advantage was having deeply technical investing partners
“I really think that our advantage was that my three co-founders were deeply technical people. And I think a lot of investors back then, you know, weren't a lot, you know, didn't have that background. And I think that that background really helped YC choose goo…”
Jun 27, 2024
YC only funded cockroach founders during the 2008 financial crisis
“And so we were only funding startups that we felt had like really scrappy founders and could be Cockroaches, meaning could live off of very little amounts of money or could charge customers and make money. And we didn't fund that many people in that winter oh …”
Jun 27, 2024 negative
Defensiveness during questioning is a major red flag in YC interviews
“And if a founder would get defensive, that was always a bad sign. Always a bad sign. The best founders would say, you know, gosh, I have thought about it and here's what I figured out. Or they just have this almost a tennis match and a conversation rather than…”
Jun 27, 2024 negative
Critics erase Livingston from YC history to maintain diversity narratives
“The people that, that sort of don't want me to be part of the narrative are the ones that think that Y Combinator only invests, it's run by white men, only invests in white men. And gosh, if there was a woman on the founding team making choices of who to fund,…”
Jan 9, 2025
May 11, 2025 positive
Rachitsky: More YC founders come from Palantir than from Google
“And when you look at YC founders and they're where they've come from, I think you may be shared in this in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size…”
May 11, 2025
Qureshi: Founders must immediately demand big money from customers to validate demand
“The classic YC thing is just when you take something to a customer, ask them to pay you a lot of money, and if they say no, then find a new problem. Like, don't wait three weeks, which is what every founding team typically does, because you don't have that kin…”
Jan 1, 2026 positive
Jan 15, 2026 negative
Lessin says Y Combinator founders pitch investors like 'animals'
“We're a little bit making fun of the fact that YC founders do come out a little bit like animals, right? There's like having met with many of them, I guess not their fault. They're like young kids. They've been holed up in a room coding and that's all they've …”
Mar 8, 2026 neutral
Younis: I asked Sam Altman to delay announcing my YC COO role for a year
“Even like at YC when I became a COO, I told Sam, Sam Altman was a president and I told Sam let's not announce this for like a year because you know, if the partners don't want me to be COO, it's not a successful thing. I, you know, I don't have the pressure of…”