snowmaker

Y Combinator (yes, the people who run this site) | Software Engineer | Anywhere in US | REMOTE | Full-time

Y Combinator has a small ~10 person team that builds all the software that runs YC. We don't hire for this team very often, but we're looking to hire a couple of people now. Several of the people we've hired have come from prior monthly Who's Hiring threads.

This is a great role for somebody who loves startups and is interested in being part of the YC startup community, and wants to own projects from start-to-finish.

It could also be a great role for someone who's interested in doing a startup in the future (though that's certainly not a requirement). If you're interested in getting funded by YC as a founder in the future, but you don't have a startup that's ready for that yet, joining the YC software team could be a great step. Several former software team members are now running YC startups.

We work primarily in Ruby on Rails and React (learning on the job is fine though), and we spend most of our time coding. That said, we encourage everyone to participate in all of YC -- read applications, join our batch talks, help out with Demo Day and speak up on the projects you'd want to work on.

The software team you'd be joining has about ten people with lots of collective years of start-up and big company experience, so you'll get the best of both worlds: moving fast and shipping and strong teammates/mentors to help you learn. About half of us are YC alums and several of us are parents. We're open to people 2+ years out of school or with 10+ years of experience. Lastly, the work-life balance and compensation are great, and you get to work with people across the company.

YC is fully remote and is hiring people anywhere in the US. We plan to reopen optional, part-time in-person offices in the SF Bay Area in the future for employees in the area.

There are two specific product teams we're hiring for at the moment. The first is https://www.startupschool.org/, which is the world's largest course about startups. The second is the YC admissions team, which is the team that builds software that helps us decide which startups to invest in.

If that sounds interesting, apply below or email me: jared@ycombinator.com

https://www.ycombinator.com/careers?ashby_jid=97a2711c-1f0d-... https://www.ycombinator.com/careers?ashby_jid=ef00c8d1-76e7-...

(I work with YC's biotech companies). I'm particularly excited about what this deal means for biotech companies. YC's previous deal of $125K was always a bit light for companies doing wetlab biotech, which is still expensive compared to building software. $500K is a much better fit for the needs of most new biotech companies.

Most companies in YC these days raise over $1M at demo day, so no, I don't think many companies are likely to skip demo day as a result of this.

Our goal instead is to make companies more successful at demo day. Now they'll have more capital to use to grow during the batch, and they'll have more leverage to negotiate with demo day investors because they are better capitalized going into their fundraise.

No. There is no requirement (or implied requirement) to raise more money after doing YC.

(I work at YC). We do offer equity-like ownership in YC to all employees. Unfortunately we can't share the details or numbers publicly. But philosophically we think it's very important for all startups to offer generous ownership to their employees, and we follow this philosophy ourselves.

Y Combinator (yes, the people who run this site) | Software Engineer | Anywhere in US | Full-time

Y Combinator has a small ~7 person team that build all the software that runs YC. We don't hire for this team very often, but we're looking to hire a couple of people now.

This is a great role for somebody who loves startups and is interested in being part of the YC startup community, and wants to own projects from start-to-finish.

It could also be a great role for someone who's interested in doing a startup in the future (though that's certainly not a requirement). If you're interested in getting funded by YC as a founder in the future, but you don't have a startup that's ready for that yet, joining the YC software team could be a great step. Several former software team members are now running YC startups.

We work primarily in Ruby on Rails and React (learning on the job is fine though), and we spend most of our time coding. That said, we encourage everyone to participate in all of YC -- read applications, join our batch talks, help out with Demo Day and speak up on the projects you'd want to work on.

The software team you'd be joining has seven people with lots of collective years of start-up and big company experience, so you'll get the best of both worlds: moving fast and shipping and strong teammates/mentors to help you learn. About half of us are YC alums and several of us are parents. We're open to people 2+ years out of school or 10+ years of experience. Lastly, the work-life balance is great, and you get to work with people across the company.

To give you a sense of what we work on, since YC went remote due to covid, we've been very busy retooling everything for an all remote experience. We've rewritten our entire Demo Day experience (to connect founders with potential investors), re-created the batch experience with both in-house tools and 3rd party integrations, and written software to help founders connect with one another for advice, intros, deals, networking and so much more.

If that sounds interesting, apply below or email jared@ycombinator.com

https://www.workatastartup.com/jobs/43776

Wow, I'm really excited about this. Running a large rails website, we spent egregious amounts of money getting EC2 instances with extra ram. If they can fulfill their promise of reducing memory usage by 50%, that'll save us tens of thousands of dollars.

One of the nice things about YC is that we have the luxury of being able to take a long-term view. YC itself didn't show massive results for 10 years so we're used to that.

I work with Daniel and I have no idea how he manages to do this. He's incredible.

Well, when we first tried remote companies, it was ten years ago. Remote tools have come a long way - zoom and slack didn't exist back then.

Also, honestly, we didn't try hard enough before covid forced us to really invest in building a great remote experience. After covid started, we put all of YC's resources behind this, and built custom software and redesigned the whole batch experience to work well remotely. That's what it took.

(I work at YC)

I'm glad you brought this up!

It would be very easy for us to expand the YC batch by being less selective in the companies we accept. However, we wouldn't knowingly do this because it would run directly against our own financial incentives, and also degrade the quality of the experience for founders.

The hard thing is to increase the batch size while also keeping the quality of companies the same or better. To do that, we need to attract more great applications every batch. That's what we need to do.

For a lot of people, it's hard to imagine how that would be possible, but actually YC still funds only a modest percentage of all the successful companies started every year, so there is a lot of room to grow.

It seems that we're doing it. By every metric we can measure, the YC companies we fund today seem more successful on average than in previous years. They're more likely to raise a Series A, more likely to make $1M / year in revenue, more likely to be worth $1B, etc.

Many people outside YC for years have thought that because we are growing, we must be becoming less selective. But actually within YC, we're more concerned about the opposite: that we risk becoming too selective and need to constantly fight against that.

We've definitely talked about it. One of the downsides is that it's logistically quite complex to have overlapping batches. But it's still something we might do in the future.

(I work at YC)

This is most people's first reaction - they assume that if YC is getting bigger, some limited resource must be getting diluted. But that's actually not the case: there is no limited resource that isn't being increased. And it also misses an important trend that works in the opposite direction: the network effects that make YC more valuable for companies when the batch is larger.

These network effects aren't obvious to outside observers (actually some of them weren't obvious to us at first!), so here are some of them.

1) The larger the batch is, the more companies there are that are similar to you. The author of the parent comment described this as a "cohort of folks going through the same thing as you".

Suppose you're building a fintech company in India. In an earlier batch where we only had 75 companies, you might well have been the only India fintech company in the batch. Now, there are probably 4 other companies in the batch that are also India/fintech. Those companies are likely to be the ones that can be most helpful to you.

2) Related to (1), having more scale in each vertical has allowed us to specialize our program and deliver more specific advice for different kinds of companies.

We now have specialized advice, content, and events for devtools, fintech, saas, consumer, enterprise, bio/healthcare, hard tech, & hardware companies. Much like AWS's large scale allows it to offer more and more specialized products, our larger scale allows us to offer more specialized programming.

3) For a large percentage of the YC batch, other YC startups and YC founders make up an important customer segment. The more YC companies there are, the more potential customers they can get from this community.

Related to that, the YC network is also a powerful tool for getting introductions to non-YC companies. Suppose you want an introduction to a key person at Apple. Apple isn't a YC company, but the YC network of founders who used to or currently work at Apple will be very helpful for reaching the right person. And that gets better when we have more founders.

4) The YC companies effectively collectively bargain for a large variety of things: discounts on services (worth over $1M / company now), press exposure, investor attention, etc. The more companies in the pool, the stronger our bargaining position becomes.

5) The more highly successful companies YC has, the more brand recognition YC's name has. That's obviously good for YC, but it is also good for YC companies. One of the hurdles new companies have is getting other people and particularly big companies to take them seriously. The YC brand name is now pretty helpful for accomplishing that in the tech world; we're still getting to the point where it works in every other industry and that requires more scale.

6) With more YC companies, we're now able to run https://www.workatastartup.com/ to help YC companies hire. From the standpoint of someone who is looking for a job at a startup, the more (successful) startups there are on Work at a Startup, the more useful the site is.

7) Most of the advisors who work with companies (we call them "group partners") are YC alumni who started a successful company. Because of this, when we fund more successful companies, it expands the pool of potential great group partners we can hire. To scale to the next level, we need more group partners (a.k.a more expert advisors). The trick of hiring our own alumni allows this seemingly limited resource to actually scale more-or-less proportionally.

8) As YC becomes better known, more great founders become interested in applying. YC is well known in silicon valley but still has a long way to go to be well known everywhere in the world. We've consistently noticed a trend where after we fund our first company in a new country, we get a surge of applications from that country. When we have more companies in each country, we make YC more accessible and useful to new companies in that country as well.

Interestingly, some of these network effects have just become apparent to us in the past couple of years - we had to reach a certain scale to even see them. This makes me think there will probably be other network effects that kick in as we reach even larger numbers.

(I work at YC)

Yes, we care a lot about making employee equity more generous and more fair. Part of our YC curriculum now is teaching founders about these issues and encouraging them to follow best practices around being generous and transparent with employees about equity compensation like Sam discussed in his blog post.

I think there is still a lot more we can do, though.

It's not an unreasonable suggestion (and a lot of people are making it now), but the risk with a single dose is low persistence. We know that the first dose has high effectiveness in the first month, but it may trail off sharply. Or it might not. Since we haven't tried a single dose, we don't know.

In animal studies, the second dose was required for a durable response, that's why Pfizer decided to go with it in their trial.

That's an interesting idea. Does a chromatic keyboard layout exist?

Seems like we made a mistake, and congratulations on your success!

If you're open to it, I'd love if you could email me the name of your company (jared@ycombinator.com). We are extremely interested in learning from mistakes like this.

Actually, Boom is planning to be carbon neutral by having their planes burn only fuel made from extracted CO2.

Wow, this video about Oracle is a must-watch. I was in fits of laughter.

Not quite. The ideal situation is to not have to raise money, by being default alive: http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html

Just because you don't have to raise money doesn't mean you never do. Sometimes founders who are running a profitable business and don't need investors will nonetheless choose to raise money because someone offers it on very good terms and they believe they can use it to grow faster.

Actually, at YC we tell every company we fund that ideally they would treat every dollar they raise from investors as the last, and get profitable from the money they raised already.

Not every company can do that (i.e., Boom, which is building supersonic airplanes) but if you can, you should.

After this whole NYT showdown, I'll definitely appreciate SSC more. I always liked it, but it was just one blog among many. The realization that it could disappear at any time somehow makes it seem more precious.

We've kept the partner-to-company ratio consistent as we've grown.

As a YC partner who read this comment buried deep in the comment tree, I think ... I would have to plead guilty to your charge.

I agree that no one insight in this essay is especially surprising. But I think the right way to think about this is Paul Graham's framework http://www.paulgraham.com/sun.html. Paul points out that if you are talking about very general topics, even a small delta of novelty is useful.

I think that describes Ray's work here well. He is talking about a very general topic (the narrative arc of history). It's hard to say anything completely new about a topic like that, but something that is only slightly new is still valuable.

This is the article you meant: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-viral...

Demo day is never mandatory, and for this summer batch it will be fully online.

Thanks, I'll update that.

You should apply. Whether there are companies we've already funded doing something similar is not a factor in our decisions.

I'm not sure where that belief would come from. YC only takes online applications, rather than getting introductions to founders like most investors do. When we're reading an application, we wouldn't even know if the founders have a big network or not.