snowmaker

I love this idea. I've always wanted a way to play Quidditch, and short of someone building a Quidditch court into an orbiting space station, couldn't think of how you would do it. This is the answer!

That's a good idea. I just emailed them.

Absolutely. I work for YC. An artificial kidney would transform the lives of millions of people on dialysis. It's worth trying to build one even if the chance of success is only 1%.

If you want to start it and apply to YC, we'd be very interested.

Agreed. We had to rush this page out for a Google-driven deadline. I've just fixed the formatting like you suggested.

Good point - I'll filter those out.

Unfortunately we can't open the video stream to the public because many of the companies share confidential information that they don't want to be publicly accessible (in particular, visible to their competitors).

If you want to see what it's like, this TC video does an excellent job of that: https://techcrunch.com/video/behind-the-scenes-at-yc-demo-da...

It actually did. It surprised us too!

We can track this directly so there's no uncertainty over the result. We're not entirely sure why it worked so well, though.

That's a great question. We don't look at a single success rate; we look at a wide variety of success rate metrics.

It's important to point out (thanks @ferrelty) that there are many forms of success itself. A company that takes an early acquisition for $2M, or a company that becomes a profitable life-style business, won't make YC much money. But it may be life changing for the founders and a big success for them. We like to consider those companies successes, and tons of YC founders choose paths like that and we always support them.

There are other kinds of success too - YC funds nonprofits, and when those are successful, we don't get any return at all but we think it's very valuable and important.

Still, from the standpoint of YC's business model, we need at least some companies to get big in order to make our organization sustainable. In this case, the "success rate" metrics I was referring to are more that narrow financial kind - the question of whether the same percentage of companies are on track to become big successes.

We measure that by comparing each batch to prior batches, adjusted for time. So for example, if we're looking at the W2016 batch now, we want to compare it to the W2011 batch as it looked in February 2014. We compare batches in lots of ways: fundraising and valuation, revenue, profitability, growth rate, exits.

I do think that's possible, and that is one of the confounding factors we spend a lot of time worrying about and trying to control for when we do the data science on this. One of the ways we do this is by licensing data about all the startups in the world and then normalizing our own data against the market overall.

Getting a true apples-to-apples comparison is difficult because the world doesn't stay the same. The funding market has changed dramatically since YC started, and the companies we're funding have changed a lot too - they're much more diverse now. We've tried to control for this but you are right that when building a complicated model, you can never be 100% certain and need to stay humble about your ability to correctly control for all these factors. We won't know for sure for many years; for now all I can say is that we've looked at this from many angles and the early indicators look good.

While a pure YC ETF doesn't exist, there are several YC demo day funds that approximate it. Both FundersClub and AngelList run funds you can invest in every batch that invest in many of the YC companies.

Hi, I work at YC. I think this article is a bit misleading, so I wanted to take the opportunity to give you some of the data. I'm happy to answer any questions on this topic.

1) YC's acceptance rate for applications has remained basically constant since 2015 (< 2%). This batch is not bigger because we accepted a higher percentage, but because we got way more applications. The primary reason we got more applications is that over 15K companies participated in our startupschool.org program and many of them applied to YC. Our general policy at YC is to grow the batch size proportional with the number of good applications we get, and this larger batch is just a natural consequence of that policy.

2) We have been wanting to move demo day to a new larger venue for a long time now. The reason is not that there are too many startups, but that there are too many investors who want to come. We have enough demand from investors to fill the previous demo day auditorium several times over, and this new space means we can allow many more investors to come, which is better for the companies.

3) As the batch at YC has grown, we've grown the number of partners proportionally and plan to continue to do that. The ratio of companies to partners is actually lower now than it was a few years ago, and we've increased the amount of time we spend per company.

4) I think the ultimate measure founders should care about - and certainly the one we do - is the success rate of YC companies on average. If we grew the YC batch and the success rate went down, that would be bad. So this is something we track extremely carefully to make sure that does not happen. And so far, it hasn't. Based on the last 1-2 years of companies, the success rate of YC companies is the highest it's ever been.

Also for general background, I'd really recommend reading a great short statement Paul Graham wrote about why we think growing YC is better for both us and the founders: https://www.ycombinator.com/atyc/#size

Thank you! That was all https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=mattlong

Yep! I did an internship at a startup after my senior year of high school - it was awesome.

What's your current situation? While exceptions exist, internships are usually designed for full-time students who are supposed to go back to school in the fall. If you don't have a hard commitment like that, companies would typically prefer to just hire you full-time.

That's not necessarily a deal-breaker. We often work within constraints like that - it depends on the details of your team.

Yes, for the three months of the YC program.

You would think so, but the market is dysfunctional because of the regulatory complexity of the US healthcare system: https://health.usnews.com/health-care/for-better/articles/20...

Not a hard limit.

I'm very sorry that happened to you. 90 day exercise windows remain a huge issue in the industry, and one we've been fighting to fix for years now.

Fortunately, the fix is very simple: companies should just offer 10 year exercise windows. That prevents this scenario from happening to employees. We've written about this a bunch of times: https://dangelo.quora.com/10-Year-Exercise-Periods-Make-Sens... https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity https://triplebyte.com/blog/fixing-the-inequity-of-startup-e...

We hope that 10 year exercise windows will become the industry standard so that no one needs to worry about this anymore. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened yet. In the meantime, you can see a list of companies that have committed to them here: https://github.com/holman/extended-exercise-windows.

Not currently but hopefully later this year!

Some visas, depends on the details. Email me with your visa situation and I'll let you know if we can help.

Y Combinator (yes, the people who run this site) | Full stack web | San Francisco | Onsite | Fulltime

Happy New Year, Hacker News!

Y Combinator has a small ~5 person team in San Francisco 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.

Despite our small size, we're in charge of a number of important products. We run the software that powers YC's application process, software that almost every investor in silicon valley uses (https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day-software/), and Bookface, a private community site that is very actively used by YC founders. This year we launched two big new projects - Startup School (http://startupschool.com/) and Work at a Startup (http://workatastartup.com/). Those new projects are going very well - we have over 26K founders signed up for Startup School - and we want to double down on them.

An unusual aspect of being on the YC software team is that you'll get full access to the YC program, founders and partners - from our dinner talks to demo day. You'll learn the ins and outs of how YC works, and you'll get to know and learn from hundreds of companies. If you want to start a startup someday, working at YC would be an excellent jumping off point.

We're looking for capable generalist engineers. We care mostly about your ability to write great software; we don't care if you've used the technologies we work with as long as you're willing to learn them. We look for engineers with great product instincts who can own whole projects from start to finish.

We also offer highly competitive compensation and benefits, including equity in YC's portfolio. You can read more about our values and engineering culture on KeyValues: https://www.keyvalues.com/y-combinator.

Apply here: http://bit.ly/1Od0T2l. Email me with any questions: jared@ycombinator.com

There are probably legal issues preventing them do from doing so. I'm not super familiar with this area of law, but the snippets they shared probably fall into some analogue of fair use, while the full documents would be a clear breach of trade secret laws.

Well, they operate globally and are under media and political pressure globally, so yes, they have no choice but to try to do that.

The look at the actual rulebook is fascinating. It reminds me a bit of Google's guidelines to the outsourced workforce that hand-reviews search results (https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...).

I wonder if Facebook has had to hire political experts in every region to draft these guidelines. I would think you would need a sizable task force of political experts to have the necessary expertise to do this accurately for every country in the world.

Wow, thanks for the suggestion to look at the Google maps imagery of Pyote, TX. I had heard about the Permian basis but never seen it - the drill sites just look endless.

Direct link for anyone curious: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pyote,+TX/@31.5739608,-103...

Y Combinator (yes, the people who run this site) | Full stack web | San Francisco | Onsite | Fulltime

Y Combinator has a small ~5 person team in San Francisco 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. We last posted on this thread about a year ago, and successfully found someone on the current team, so we're trying it again.

Despite our small size, we're in charge of a number of important products. We run the software that powers YC's application process, software that almost every investor in silicon valley uses (https://blog.ycombinator.com/investor-day-software/), and Bookface, a private community site that is very actively used by YC founders. This year we launched two big new projects - Startup School (http://startupschool.com/) and Work at a Startup (http://workatastartup.com/).

An unusual aspect of being on the YC software team is that you'll get full access to the YC program, founders and partners - from our dinner talks to demo day. You'll learn the ins and outs of how YC works, and you'll get to know and learn from hundreds of companies. If you want to start a startup someday, working at YC would be an excellent jumping off point.

We also offer highly competitive compensation and benefits, including equity in YC's portfolio. You can read more and apply here: http://bit.ly/1Od0T2l. You can also email me with any questions: jared@ycombinator.com

It's not in this NYT article, but from this one (https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/15/business/boeing-lion-air-cras...) apparently Boeing's stock has slid 8% likely because investors worry that it will have a huge liability associated with this.

Like many companies, the software at YC is like an iceberg: most of it lies beneath the surface.

Here are some of the things we build that you might not be thinking of:

https://apply.ycombinator.com/ - the whole process of receiving and processing 10,000 YC applications / batch

https://workatastartup.com - a site to help people find jobs at a startup

https://startupschool.org/ - a free online course in how to start a startup

https://leap.ycombinator.com/ - a private community for women in tech