Joining YC

I’m excited to share the news that I’ve joined Y Combinator as a partner.

YC has done more than anyone else to get people to start companies. If not for YC and for Paul Graham’s eloquent writing about startups, I would never have gone down this path in life. The same is true for probably thousands of other people. Many of the products you use every day would not exist.

I was talking to a company earlier this week that was unsure about applying to YC. I told them to talk to any, any YC founder and ask them if it was worth it. I gave them a list of 20 names at random. I didn’t need to pick, because for virtually 100% of people who go through YC, it becomes the defining moment of their career. Paul Graham says that you are better off having a product that a few people love a lot, than a lot of people like a little. If YC is a product, he’s followed his own advice.

You can tell a lot about an organization by the people it hires, and YC is hiring the best people in the world. In the last year, we’ve added Peter Thiel, Anne Wojcicki (23&me), Ben Silberman (Pinterest), and Joe Gebbia (Airbnb) as part-time partners to an already outstanding team. I’m humbled to get to work with these people.

Most VC firms encourage innovation by investing, but they don’t tend to innovate much on their own business. YC acts like a startup. We are making big, bold bets: launching a research lab, a new venture funding model, and a new program that could someday be bigger than YC itself. Sam has a vision for putting YC at the center of all kinds of innovation, and you can see it emerging piece by piece. Much like when I read PG’s essays a decade ago, it’s inspired me all over again to believe in the power of a small group of individuals to create the future.

Nine Years of Demo Days: How YC has changed

My first Y Combinator demo day was the one I presented at, back in the summer of 2006.  I’ve gone to every single demo day since then, making me, I believe, one of the few people who have seen virtually every YC company present.

People often ask me, “how has it changed?”.  In a word, utterly.

The demo day I went to today, about 100 companies presented.  It took place in a huge auditorium and basically every serious investor in silicon valley had a representative there.  The companies delivered polished presentations and together will raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming months.

The first demo day took place in a small building near Harvard.  A couple of VCs attended, but I think they were just being polite, because they certainly had no intention of investing in any of the companies.  The audience was mostly personal friends of Paul and Jessica.

12 companies presented, and the presentations were 10 minutes each (these days they are 2 minutes).  Not a single company raised money.  Most of them died within a few months and the founders went back to school or got jobs.

Here are some of the trends I’ve seen over nine years of demo days.

● Companies are much more ambitious now.  In 2006, getting acquihired by Google for a couple million buckets was considered a fabulous outcome and basically the goal of every company.  Today, there are six YC companies worth over a billion dollars, and as a result new startups aim much higher.

● Companies are joining YC at a much later stage.  When I started YC, most companies wrote their first line of code in the first week in the program.  Today, many of the companies have been working on their business for a long time and some even have substantial customers and revenue before applying. If the companies in my batch applied to YC today, I doubt that many of them would get in.

● Founding teams are much more diverse, and much older.  In 2006, almost every founder was between the ages of 20 and 25, majored in computer science and was building a website.  Today the average age is over 30 and the founders come from all walks of life – lawyers, doctors, real estate agents, and domain experts of all kinds.

● The companies are working in much more diverse areas.  This is maybe the most publicized change – that YC has gone from being all about software to doing everything from pharmaceutical research to fusion.  But even within software, things have gotten much more diverse.  In 2006, founders were essentially all making software for ourselves, which meant they had to be things that college students would want.  Today, YC companies make software for everyone from transit route planners to parking lot operators.

● YC is less personal.  Getting into YC in 2006 was like joining an outcast band of adventurers.  Our little band of rebels didn’t have much going for it, but in our shared struggle we made lasting personal connections.  Getting into YC in 2015 is more like getting into Harvard: you will be showered with resources and doors will open for you.  But you’re traveling a well-trodden path.

It’s been incredible to watch YC grow from a bunch of college students with big dreams to the very center of innovation of the technology world.  Every year I think “this must be the peak of YC”, and yet the quality of the companies has been monotonically increasing so I keep being wrong.

This didn’t happen on its own; Paul, Jessica, Sam and the other YC partners made it happen by force of will, hard work, and smart decisions. I don’t know what the future of YC is, but as long as those people are still running it and doing pioneering things like the YC Fellowship program, I think we could still be in the early part of a much bigger story.