Y Combinator, every mention
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every year anyone Michael Seibel 38Jason Lemkin 38Anu Hariharan 31Sam Blond 25Eric Rea 9Henrique Dubugras 6Ben Braverman 5Mathilde Collin 4Matt Plank 3Erica Brescia 3
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Y Combinator comes up
Software Stocks Have Massively Crashed. Here's What Founders Need to Know.
- ▶ 10:47 Jordi Hays Uh, earlier this week, I forget who we were talking to, but, uh, I had been talking to a founder, uh, and he had some idea, and I was just thinking to myself, like, sounds like a great idea, but I can guarantee that four different YC…
- ▶ 16:22 Jason Lemkin You better have, one way or another, you better have four or five amazing folks on your team, or you're gonna get crushed by the kids at Y Combinator.
- ▶ 22:59 Jason Lemkin We're running a hot YC company called artisan.
AI + B2B in 2026: Find the Tailwinds or Get Left Behind | Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 20:58 Jason Lemkin Certainly to go like to white comedy or in the Bay area, you meet a lot of 18 year old, 19 year old founders dropping out of Stanford.
Is The Classic GTM Playbook Really Dead? with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 9:32 Jason Lemkin I just saw a new one, a new competitor launched on YC today.
- ▶ 25:27 Jason Lemkin And I just had this conversation at YC demo day.
The Complete Guide to Vibe Coding without a Developer with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 37:44 Jason Lemkin Um, you know, there, someone was saying that like, 30% of this YC class, uh, vibe coded their app.
What Happens When AI Kills Your SaaS Growth? Live Q&A with SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 4:04 unnamed speaker YC is, uh, worth doing. 3 times in the scene
Redpoint Ventures Playbook: How Top VCs Are Really Investing in AI with Jacob Effron
- ▶ 7:13 Jacob Effron I think YC is a great proxy for what types of companies are being founded, and so you're seeing the proportion of AI companies go way up.
The AI Impact on Banking and Finance with CEO and Co-founder at Treasury Prime, Chris Dean
- ▶ 1:45 Jason Lemkin Now he's got a YC back company that's raised over fifty million dollars that has many top banks and fintechs in a marketplace for them.
The 2025 SaaS Vibe Check: What Founders Need to Know Right Now with SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 1:17 Jason Lemkin Y Combinator has four batches a year.
From $1M to $3B ARR: Databricks CRO Ron Gabrisko on Scaling a Revenue Rocket Ship
The Future of AI in B2B SaaS: Insights from Synthesia and Theory Ventures. Hosted by Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 34:06 Jason Lemkin It may not, but how many can we, I believe that the, all the energy in venture, in startups, in YC, in SF is somehow based on this idea.
How to Think About Product-Led Growth, Bootstrapping vs VC, and Early Exits with Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 6:50 Jason Lemkin If it's a hot YC company, they might do 10 or 15 or 30, but they want to own 20.
From Outbound to Channel Partnerships: Your Burning Sales Questions Answered by Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 3:36 Jason Lemkin And while YC is as hot as ever, right? 2 times in the scene
5 Things That Are Working and 5 Things That Aren’t in B2B SaaS AI with Ironclad's CEO and a16z
- ▶ 14:01 Jason Boehmig Um, I was at the YC event where that happened, and I loved the passion and intensity, and I think that the core is something I do agree with.
Samsara’s Rise to Vertical SaaS Leader and $1B+ ARR with Samsara's CEO and Co-Founder
- ▶ 27:26 Jason Lemkin If you're in Y Combinator, everyone's telling you not to spread yourself too thin and focus.
The Era of HyperFunctional SaaS is Here l SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 12:07 Jason Lemkin YC is great. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:02 Jason Lemkin Now there's like, 200 folks in the last YC batch that are doing bots and others to automate contact center, to automate support.
Navigating Fundraising and the VC Landscape Today with 20VC and Visionaries Club
- ▶ 6:32 Robert Lacher You're having a larger fund size, but you can't build a portfolio of 50 companies, then you're ending up Y Combinator.
Deep Dive: AI-Powered Marketing to Get More Leads and Customers with HyperGrowth Partners
- ▶ 26:38 Guillaume Cabane 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.
Klaviyo's CEO Founder on the Journey to an $800,000,000 ARR Leader in Marketing
- ▶ 32:29 Jason Lemkin You'd be on whatever just launched out of YC or on TechCrunch, right?
6 Questions Founders Should Ask Themselves to Drive Value from Generative AI with Base10 Partners
- ▶ 11:32 Lucy Fonseca So even if you just take a look at the list of founders building in the last YC batch,
2025 State of SaaS: Trends and Predictions with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 9:46 Jason Lemkin And some of it's good, like my Combinator mainstream to fight for founders.
From Zero to Hero: How to Dominate Outbound SaaS Sales with Rippling and Sam Blond
How to Navigate Strategic Change for Growth with SaaStr CEO and Founder, Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 19:04 Jason Lemkin I don't personally, I don't care about any of that, but I need some, everyone needs something to sink their teeth into, except an angel. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:48 unnamed speaker YC batch, we were doing a lot of founder-led sales.
- ▶ 40:24 Jason Lemkin But everything's outside of, you know, some, some great stuff in the YC batch.
How To Perfectly Pitch Your Seed Stage Startup With Y Combinator's Michael Seibel
- ▶ 0:53 Michael Seibel And so, what I wanted to do today is give you all the tips that we give YC companies to be much more successful at fundraising when you are pre-product market fit.
- ▶ 1:33 Michael Seibel I think it's over 2000 YC interviews.
- ▶ 5:39 Michael Seibel So one thing we tell YC companies is, you need two different answers to what do you do.
- ▶ 11:38 Michael Seibel The biggest mistake YC founders make here is they say this list of things, and they didn't tell me do they do it in a month, or four months, or a year, or two years.
- ▶ 26:01 Michael Seibel Let me see if I can pitch YC. 15 times in the scene
From $5M to $100M: How to Scale a Multi-Product Startup with Lattice CEO Jack Altman
- ▶ 1:22 Jack Altman Um, you know, you look at even like a YC batch. 2 times in the scene
What the Future of SaaS Holds with David Sacks, Founder & General Partner, Craft Ventures
- ▶ 35:52 Jason Lemkin It can grow out of control the day after demo day, OIC, but there's this moment in time, it's starting to click, right?
From 2 Weeks of Runway to $1B Acquisition: The Founder Playbook with Loom's CEO and Co-Founder
- ▶ 23:23 Joe Thomas Like, I think that he, obviously, being the president of YC for about six years, they think really, really, really hard about what it means to have a successful company, and I just took that framework and I applied all of the Loom stories…
Scaling to $100M ARR: The Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid From LaunchDarkly Co-Founder Edith Harbaugh
- ▶ 21:31 Edith Harbaugh Uh, Optimizely, for those who didn't know, had come out of Y Combinator, and their sell was that you could do on-the-fly experimentation.
SaaStr CRO Confidential: Principles that Drove Wiz’s $0 to The First $100m ARR | Wiz CRO Colin Jones
VC AMA with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Black Mangroves MD Arnaud Bonzom at SaaStr APAC 2023
- ▶ 11:28 Arnaud Bonzom Uh, I mean, you get a bunch of them, like your Algolia, Front, TallDesk, all of them studied between France and Portugal, and they go over, I mean, uh, the first two went to YC, TallDesk went to 500 startups, so they use Accelerator to…
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
- ▶ 19:51 Sam Blond That could be if you've done YC, leverage YC in their network.
- ▶ 37:03 Sam Blond It was mostly YC, um, because like Pedro and Enrique were in YC, uh, we could leverage their batch and, and say like, you know, your batch mates, Pedro and Enrique, we could also leverage previous batches and say like, you know, we were in… 2 times in the scene
Being a Rebel to Build a Movement: Non-Traditional Approaches to Scale | DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder
- ▶ 20:55 Joshua Browder The YC, uh, mantra is you build one thing and you build it well.
How The Biggest Product-Led Enterprise Company In The World Did It | Atlassian CRO Cameron Deatsch
What Venture Looks Like In 2023 | SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin + 20VC Host Harry Stebbings
- ▶ 50:19 Jason Lemkin Crafted weird space that maybe YC has disrupted, but no one else has.
CRO Confidential: Sales Recruitment and Hiring Managers With Ben Braverman
- ▶ 9:30 Sam Blond Uh, YC introduced me to Brex. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:50 Ben Braverman But yeah, 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…
- ▶ 31:47 Ben Braverman Like YC was smaller, like YC was more able to identify. 4 times in the scene
SaaStr CRO Confidential: Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond + Rippling VP Sales Matt Plank
- ▶ 4:34 Matt Plank Um, and we had really nothing like we, we didn't, you know, we, we, at that time we were really, we had Parker gone through YC for the second time around. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:19 Sam Blond Uh, some that come to mind, YC was huge for Brex in the early days, uh, and having a presence at like the different events and even hosting different events. 3 times in the scene
5 Critical & Company-Altering Learnings from B2B Startups | Y Combinator MD Anu Hariharan
- ▶ 0:06 Anu Hariharan YC is university for startups. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 0:16 Anu Hariharan Think of the accelerator as the undergraduate program and continuity is the graduate school. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:38 Anu Hariharan And I actually went back with our team and reflected on all our notes of some of the most successful YC companies. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:26 Anu Hariharan The second mistake, which we've seen pretty much hundred percent of YC companies do, including the founder who's going to talk after me, which is Josh and Gusto, you should ask him, is they all underprice. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:17 Anu Hariharan This is another mistake I often see founders do, especially when they go right after YC demo day.
- ▶ 20:00 Anu Hariharan So I often tell founders, one of our most critical advice at YC is, do the sales till it becomes so boring that you know how to predict, that's when you hire your first sales leader.
- ▶ 21:05 Anu Hariharan This is something that YC takes very seriously. 4 times in the scene
Live from SaaStr Annual 2022: AMA with SaaStr's CEO
- ▶ 27:12 unnamed speaker So, um, if you are a founder today in 2022, a first-time founder, and you get accepted to YC, but at the same time you have a seed offering, uh, which, and you're under one million ARR, would you go for YC or 14 times in the scene
- ▶ 47:28 Jason Lemkin The YC is great that we talked about that first round did the pre seed, but fuck that.
VC State of the Market with SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin and Cowboy Ventures Founder & MP Aileen Lee
- ▶ 16:56 Jason Lemkin I mean, I wish I had the data from this YC class,
- ▶ 45:01 Jason Lemkin I think that's, that is, if you're not in the bubble, if you're not from YC, if you don't have elite founders, I do think for my whole career that's been an anchor point, and you can anchor up based on, you know,
Navigating the Rocky Road from Founder-Led Sales to The First Dozen Sales Professionals | Demodesk
- ▶ 4:14 Veronika Riederle When we had that end of two, 2018, we, um, applied for Y Combinator. 2 times in the scene
The Answers To Scaling, Hiring, And Everything Else: An AMA With Saastr Founder & Ceo Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 22:44 Jason Lemkin That doesn't mean the office is dead, and it's, I invested in a, I'm a small investor in a company that used to be called Hello Office, that's now called Raze, that does leasing and software for, for Y Combinator, and RO Co-Working Space,…
How Hybrid is Working in Practice: What the Data Shows | Raise Comm. Real Estate CEO + President
- ▶ 2:07 Justin Betakure 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.
The Office is Back!! But What Will It Be Like? Jason Lemkin & Justin Bedecarre of Raise.Work
- ▶ 0:34 Jason Lemkin Why Combinator?
- ▶ 29:56 Justin Bedecarre Like, you know, we, we did a study of the top 160 YC, most valuable YC companies
- ▶ 40:12 Jason Lemkin But people are going to look, are going to try more kids at Y Combinator.
Scaling a Successful SaaS Sales Team w/ 20VC Founder Harry Stebbings and SaaStr Founder Jason Lemkin
- ▶ 32:32 Jason Lemkin I'm just talking about great folks that didn't come out of Facebook, Twitter, Y Combinator, right?
The Highs and Lows of Fundraising from Founders That Have Raised $1B w/ Calendly, Coda, LaunchDarkly
- ▶ 50:44 Jason Lemkin It sucks if you didn't come out of Google or Y Combinator.
How to Build a Great Intern Program from Scratch | @shopify VP of Engineering Farhan Thawar
- ▶ 6:26 Farhan Thawar You know, one example is I know a few companies who look to Y Combinator, which is an accelerator, to figure out what the next version of tech stacks are. 2 times in the scene
What Being a Founder Taught Me About Leadership - Lessons from GitHub’s COO
- ▶ 1:03 Erica Brescia I was the co-founder and COO of a company called Bitnami, which we took through Y Combinator and mostly bootstrapped to 75 employees.
- ▶ 22:11 Erica Brescia Talking about leaders, another important lesson learned, and this was really impressed upon me when we went through Y Combinator with Bitnami, is to know what great looks like.
- ▶ 23:01 Erica Brescia I got this advice from a woman named Gia Sinto at Y Combinator, and it's absolutely stuck with me.
Flexport: How to Build a Truly Global Business From Day One with CEO Ryan Petersen
- ▶ 2:48 Ryan Petersen And because during that time I was guilty of what Paul Graham, who's the founder of Y Combinator, Flexport's first investor, he calls this schlep blindness.
The Current State of Venture Capital and Cloud | SaaStr Software Community
- ▶ 13:19 Jason Lemkin Like, literally, if you're an EF or YC or 500 startups and you're like going through an accelerator right now, right? 2 times in the scene
Going from $0 to $60M ARR in 4 Years with Podium CEO Eric Rea | SaaStr Software Community
- ▶ 7:10 Eric Rea But luckily we had heard of Paul Graham and Y Combinator, so we read all of their essays before we decided to invest 750 dollars each into Podium, which was actually the only money we ever put into the company.
- ▶ 11:27 Eric Rea When you start a business, you need people around you to make it work, and when we started, like I said before, we had none of that, and so you need to build a network of other entrepreneurs, investors that can potentially give you money,… 8 times in the scene
"Early Gains, Early Pains: 5 Lessons for Surviving Hypergrowth" Harry Stebbings and Robert Vis
- ▶ 5:09 Robert Vis Yeah, um, YC invited me to, Y Combinator, to, to, to host an event for founders in Europe
A Decade of Learnings from Y Combinator's CEO Michael Seibel
- ▶ 0:04 Michael Seibel Um, I thought what I would do that could be the most helpful is teach you a little bit about what we've learned at YC over the years. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:43 Michael Seibel Um, we tend to get a lot of founders in YC who've never experienced, um, the frenzy of a normal demo day and have never seen all of these interesting investors actually wanting to talk to them.
- ▶ 5:10 Michael Seibel Um, 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.
- ▶ 6:08 Michael Seibel So this is one that YC has a lot of experience in. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:58 Michael Seibel So I often see a disconnect with YC founders who get promised the world on demo day. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:49 Michael Seibel Um, this is the biggest one, and this is something that cripples YC companies specifically a lot.
- ▶ 23:09 Michael Seibel These are the 10 things that most YC companies get wrong, especially the B to B ones, post demo day. 2 times in the scene
Lessons From a Second-Time Founder: How Brex Went From 0 - $1B in Under 2 Years
- ▶ 1:49 Anu Hariharan Um, we, I've known Henrique for a very long time because he went through YC from the early days. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:51 Henrique Dubugras Um, so, you know, so we applied to YC with this, you know, VR idea, um, which looking back, it was, like, pretty bad, but at the time we thought it was great. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:04 Anu Hariharan And, you know, one of the things we often tell in YC is talk to your users a lot, right, because then you sort of learn, ah, how they're using the product.
- ▶ 19:02 Anu Hariharan Yeah, and one of the other elements we actually talk about a lot in YC is, it's not just customer scale, um, that happens at this pace, like, especially if you're hitting a huge pain point, but also, how do you scale the company along,…
- ▶ 23:41 Anu Hariharan And, you know, we often see at YC that this is where
- ▶ 26:34 Anu Hariharan So talk a little bit about, you know, you did your demo, you know, by demo day, even though you hadn't launched, you did your series A round, and, you know, you have Mickey from Ribbit left that round, and then YCV did the series B, um,…
The Things Nobody Tells You About An $8B Acquisition with Ryan Smith from Qualtrics
- ▶ 12:19 Jason Lemkin But looking back, you started in 2002, and it was a terrible time to start, but also good, because there weren't 10,000 companies each year out of Y Combinator and EF and others,
SaaS Metrics Masterclass: Pricing Strategies and Billing Models with Stripe
- ▶ 12:25 Guillaume Princen Um, when Patrick and John in 2010 were at Y Combinator and kind of spend their days doing office hours with the whole cohort Y Combinator and, you know, a little wider in the valley. 2 times in the scene
Fireside Chat with CEO and Founder of Front, Mathilde Collin
- ▶ 8:55 Mathilde Collin So I think it's super important to be transparent about what it's really like to start a business because I feel like at least for me, so I went to YC three, three or four years ago, three, three years ago.
- ▶ 14:13 Mathilde Collin Um, and so when, uh, one story that I share sometimes was as I went to YC, 3 times in the scene