Y Combinator
also referred to as: yc
includes Y Combinator Continuity Fund
46 statements across 16 episodes · 16 bullish · 8 bearish · 10 people on the record · first statement May 8, 2019 by Michael Seibel · said 202 times in 56 episodes since 2018 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Michael Seibel (38), Jason Lemkin (38), Anu Hariharan (31), Sam Blond (25), Eric Rea (9), Henrique Dubugras (6), Ben Braverman (5), Mathilde Collin (4)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 13 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- What Happens When AI Kills Your SaaS Growth? Live Q&A with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- From $1M to $3B ARR: Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko on Scaling a Revenue Rocket Ship
- Is The Classic GTM Playbook Really Dead? with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- The Complete Guide to Vibe Coding without a Developer with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- Redpoint Ventures Playbook: How Top VCs Are Really Investing in AI with Jacob Effron
- The AI Impact on Banking and Finance with CEO and Co-founder at Treasury Prime, Chris Dean
- The 2025 SaaS Vibe Check: What Founders Need to Know Right Now with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin
- The Future of AI in B2B SaaS: Insights from Synthesia and Theory Ventures. Hosted by Jason Lemkin
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 18 mentions in 11 episodes 2 per episode
- The Era of HyperFunctional SaaS is Here l SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- From Zero to Hero: How to Dominate Outbound SaaS Sales with Rippling and Sam Blond
- From Outbound to Channel Partnerships: Your Burning Sales Questions Answered by Jason Lemkin
- How to Think About Product-Led Growth, Bootstrapping vs VC, and Early Exits with Jason Lemkin
- 5 Things That Are Working and 5 Things That Aren’t in B2B SaaS AI with Ironclad's CEO and a16z
- Samsara’s Rise to Vertical SaaS Leader and $1B+ ARR with Samsara's CEO and Co-Founder
- Navigating Fundraising and the VC Landscape Today with 20VC and Visionaries Club
- Deep Dive: AI-Powered Marketing to Get More Leads and Customers with HyperGrowth Partners
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 54 mentions in 14 episodes 4 per episode
- How To Perfectly Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup With Y Combinator's Michael Seibel
- CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment and Hiring Managers With Ben Braverman
- How to Navigate Strategic Change for Growth with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
- CRO Confidential: 3 Secrets For Early-Stage Startups To Acquire Customers | CoSell.io Co-Founder
- SaaStr CRO Confidential: Sam Blond + Omni Founder Colin Zima on the Power of Leveraging Your Network
- From $5M to $100M: How to Scale a Multi-Product Startup with Lattice CEO Jack Altman
- What the Future of SaaS Holds with David Sacks, Founder & General Partner, Craft Ventures
- From 2 Weeks of Runway to $1B Acquisition: The Founder Playbook with Loom's CEO and Co-Founder
- 6 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 55 mentions in 8 episodes 7 per episode
- 5 Critical & Company-Altering Learnings from B2B Startups | Y Combinator MD Anu Hariharan
- Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: AMA with SaaStr's CEO
- SaaStr CRO Confidential: Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond + Rippling VP Sales Matt Plank
- The Office is Back!! But What Will It Be Like? Jason Lemkin & Justin Bedecarre of Raise.Work
- VC State of the Market with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder & MP Aileen Lee
- Navigating the Rocky Road from Founder-Led Sales to The First Dozen Sales Professionals | Demodesk
- The Answers To Scaling, Hiring, And Everything Else: An AMA With Saastr Founder & Ceo Jason Lemkin
- How Hybrid is Working in Practice: What the Data Shows | Raise Comm. Real Estate CEO + President
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- How to Build a Great Intern Program from Scratch | @shopify VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar
- Scaling a Successful SaaS Sales Team w/ 20VC Founder Harry Stebbings and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin
- The Highs and Lows of Fundraising from Founders That Have Raised $1B w/ Calendly, Coda, LaunchDarkly
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2019 42 mentions in 5 episodes 8 per episode
- A Decade of Learnings from Y Combinator's CEO Michael Seibel
- Lessons From a Second-Time Founder: How Brex Went From 0 - $1B in Under 2 Years
- Going from $0 to $60M ARR in 4 Years with Podium CEO Eric Rea | SaaStr Software Community
- "Early Gains, Early Pains: 5 Lessons for Surviving Hypergrowth" Harry Stebbings and Robert Vis
- The Things Nobody Tells You About An $8B Acquisition with Ryan Smith from Qualtrics
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
Everything said about Y Combinator, oldest first
May 8, 2019 neutral
May 8, 2019 negative
Seibel: Most Common B2B Mistake Is Miscalculating Customer Acquisition Cost
“If we really look at a lot of YC companies nowadays, we have a ton of B to B companies, and the most common mistake they make is they don't really understand if they can afford the process they need to do to acquire customers.”
May 8, 2019 positive
B2B startups need $150k-$250k MRR for maximum Series A leverage
“Usually our guidelines for B to B companies is trying to be in the 150 to 250 K a month range. That, and close to profitable. That puts you typically in the maximum leverage category, which significantly increases the chance that going out and raising a series…”
May 8, 2019 positive
Seibel: YC portfolio is worth $100B across 2,000+ funded companies
“To give you a sense of YC, we've now funded over 2000 companies, about 4000 alumni. Our companies combined are worth about a hundred billion dollars. We have about a hundred companies that are worth over a hundred million dollars and 17 worth over a billion, a…”
May 8, 2019
May 8, 2019
Seibel: Pre-PMF startups must minimize non-essential staff and fire frequently
“An early stage pre-product market fit company should be trying to minimize their non-essential employees, and you should not believe you're great at hiring, which means, unfortunately, you're probably gonna have to do a lot of firing.”
May 8, 2019 positive
Stripe, Mixpanel, and Brex acquired early customers through the YC network
“One of the superpowers that not many people understand about YC is because we have so many companies who've done YC, In effect, you get warm leads to anyone who's ever done YC. So it's a lot easier for YC companies to sell to one another. That's not a surprise…”
May 8, 2019
Most startups fail from running out of iteration time, not flawed hypotheses
“I think that most of them fail not because their hypothesis or thesis was wrong. I think most of them fail because either their timing was slightly off, or because of some of these problems, they didn't have time to iterate their products so that they can find…”
May 8, 2019 positive
Seibel: Selling to startups works if the product is critical infrastructure
“We've seen a long history of YC companies be very successful in selling to startups initially. If they're selling key components that if they work, they will not be ripped out. If your payment system works, you're not going to rip it out.”
May 8, 2019 positive
Seibel: Financial transparency makes employees rally during crises
“When you're transparent with your employees, they will actually rally to the cause, even when it looks like you're in your darkest hour. When you're not transparent with your employees they're not gonna rally, unfortunately, and they're probably gonna be prett…”
Mar 27, 2020 neutral
Lemkin: Failing to raise quickly out of top accelerators creates negative signaling
“I think if you are in a top tier accelerator and you don't get funded quickly, there is a bit of a black star, a scarlet mark. It's not huge, but if you're, it's not just YC, but if you're in a top program, there's an assumption that Bessemer has an army of an…”
Sep 10, 2020
Brescia: Interview unhireable top executives to define criteria for your open roles
“Go and meet as many exceptional folks for whatever role you're trying to fill as possible. Find the folks that are really at the On top of their game, even if there's no way you'll be able to hire them, and ask them about their roles, what it makes takes for s…”
Feb 27, 2022 bullish
Mar 11, 2022 positive
Betakure: 95% of top YC companies plan post-pandemic hybrid offices
“We just did an analysis of the top YC companies that they publish every year, the largest market cap coming out of YC in the history. 95% of those companies are going to have offices post-pandemic, and most of them will be hybrid.”
Sep 16, 2022 positive
Sep 16, 2022 positive
Lemkin: Undecided founders should always join Y Combinator for institutional signaling
“If you're not sure, I always tell founders, just do it. Even if you have the revenue, even if you have, if there's a missing slice, like, just go to Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, get it done, and it's worth it, right?”
Sep 29, 2022 negative
Sep 29, 2022 neutral
Sep 29, 2022 negative
Sep 29, 2022 neutral
Hariharan: PostHog converted only 30 of 30,000 signups when launching paid tier
“There's another company that went through YC called PostHog. It was one of the most successful open source product analytics launch that they did through YC. Top number one on Hacker News. 30,000 signups. James was extremely confident that when he turns on the…”
Sep 29, 2022 neutral
Hariharan: Startups lack PMF if under 40% of users would be very disappointed
“And if at least 40% of your customers don't say very disappointed, you probably don't have a good enough product. It's just moderately appealing. So we say a rule of thumb is at least 40% of your customers will be very disappointed if your product goes away.”
Dec 15, 2022
Early Rippling had no paying customers, selling exclusively to YC startups
“And so at that point we were really just selling to YC companies. Like we had come out of the recent winter batch. And so that was really what our top of funnel was selling to other YC companies in the batch. And we were really starting from zero. I mean, we h…”
Jan 27, 2023 positive
Braverman: Top VC Recommendations Provide Highest Signal for Career Decisions
“If people are willing to give you sort of their best 30 minutes, so to speak, you know, the best company they've found in years of searching, in the case of YC, through hundreds or thousands of companies, there's really nothing that's going to be higher signal…”
Jan 27, 2023 neutral
Jan 27, 2023 neutral
Braverman: Paul Graham identified Flexport as breakout before official YC acceptance
“Paul Graham had already identified Ryan and Flexport as a breakout from YC before he went into YC, and you know that because he got called on stage at startup school by Paul before he was officially accepted into YC.”
Feb 3, 2023 neutral
Lemkin: Seed investing is an artisanal craft, not money management
“Seed investing is not money management, okay? ... Once you get up to a certain size, you are money managers, right? You're money managers of these illiquid investments, and you do want these huge teams, and you want the IR team and the folks doing this. ... Th…”
May 16, 2023
Oct 5, 2023
Oct 5, 2023 negative
Oct 5, 2023 bullish
Oct 5, 2023 negative
Oct 5, 2023 positive
Oct 5, 2023
Oct 5, 2023
Seibel: Pitching unique insights requires first explaining what the startup does
“You only get the right to do this if I know what your company does and if I'm impressed with your team. A lot of founders try to skip to this point And if I don't know what your company does, I can't tell whether your insights good or not.”
Oct 5, 2023 positive
Michael Seibel: Demo Day auctions help startups raise higher and dilute less
“Running a demo day means that you're running a fundraising auction, and everyone knows you're trying to get the highest price for any product, good, or service. You want to run an auction. So YC companies tend to raise at a higher valuation and dilute less.”
Oct 5, 2023 positive
Seibel: Early investors value execution speed over revenue numbers
“What investors are looking for is momentum. They're looking, do you get things done quickly? They're not necessarily looking for, do you have a ton of revenue or a ton of users? If they're investing in an early stage company, they know that you might not have …”
Oct 5, 2023
Michael Seibel: Startups need separate pitch explanations for investors and customers
“You need two different answers to what do you do. One that you give investors, and another one you give customers, and they're different. The words on the front page of your website are for customers. If you're using that for investors, more often than not, yo…”
Oct 5, 2023
Seibel: Founders must earn investor attention every two minutes of a pitch
“A lot of people think that an investor is going to sit down for a 30 minute meeting and give them 30 minutes of their time. It's not true. Especially on Zoom, it's very not true. You earn every two minutes of that meeting. If the last two minutes sucked, that …”
Oct 5, 2023 positive
Seibel: Bottom-Up Market Sizing Math Matters Far More Than Headline Numbers
“The reality is how you calculate the number is what's important. As an investor, I don't know how many potential users you might be able to get. You have to educate me about that. You should do that research. I don't know how much you're going to charge the us…”
Oct 5, 2023 negative
Seibel: Hiring a designer for a startup pitch deck is a mistake
“If you need a designer to build a slide deck, you're doing it wrong. And here's an even deeper, more important point. Your designer has no idea what the most interesting and important points of your pitch are. So if you hand them your pitch to design, they wil…”
Oct 27, 2023 positive
Jul 19, 2024 negative
Cabane: Full AI SDR agents from YC startups produce mediocre results
“For example, like all of the YC companies that are doing like AI agents that does the entire SDR for you, like the output of that is like, eh, it's not great. It's okay, but it's not great, ok? What we're seeing working, however, is like very specialized LLMs …”
Oct 15, 2024 bearish
Lemkin: 95% of new AI support and contact center startups will fail
“Now there's like, 200 folks in the last YC batch that are doing bots and others to automate contact center, to automate support. It's exploded. And they're all promising 10 times better functionality than exists today versus AI. Mathematically, there's no room…”
Sep 12, 2025 neutral
Lemkin: AI-vibe-coded sites all look like Claude and share a recognizable smell
“At the end of the day, all these sites look like Claude. Once you see one Replit or Lovable site and you can just smell it. You know, there, someone was saying that like, 30% of this YC class vibe coded their app. And I want to see a couple. I'm like, I, that …”