3,440 karma · joined October 10, 2006
Contact: jared at ycombinator.
Having a real-time video conversation with an AI is a trippy feeling. Talk about a "feel the AGI moment", it really does feel like the computer has come alive.
But I think it would be a better analogy to compare YC to a university, rather than to a company. It's true that many companies operate remotely very effectively. But essentially zero universities have stayed remote since the early days of the pandemic.
YC itself hires software engineers from time to time. Many people don't know that YC has a small but very important software team. We run several websites - not just this one, but also workatastartup.com (the main way YC companies hire), a social network for YC founders, and the core infrastructure that YC itself runs on.
Recently, we've been spending most of our time building our own AI agents. Over the last year, YC has mostly funded AI agent companies, so it's been cool to go really deep building our own AI agents too. We're building agents to automate every aspect of what we do, and pushing the limits of what's possible with the current models to do it.
An unusual aspect of being on the YC software team is that you'll get full access to the YC program, founders and partners. The YC batch runs in the same building we work out of, so there are talks with famous founders happening most nights, right downstairs in our building. If you want to start a startup someday, working at YC would be an excellent jumping off point - several YC companies have come from team members who decided to start their own company.
YC works fully in-person in SF. We're happy to help you move here if you're in the US already. Unfortunately we can't sponsor new visas, but we're happy to transfer existing ones.
YC offers highly competitive compensation and benefits.
You can apply online (https://www.ycombinator.com/careers) or just email me at jared@ycombinator.com
What really unlocked ML was when you didn't need to have a deep academic background in ML to be able to use it. Now that the primitives exist, every software engineer can build a compelling ML app.
I'm not sure if robotics is there yet, but if not it probably will be.
If you just look in terms of aggregate market cap, defense companies are some of the larger companies in the world - i.e., Lockheed Martin is valued over $100B. That's a good sign that it's possible to build a big company in the space, which is all you need.
That's an important debate but orthogonal to what I wrote. The YC batch is not a company. It doesn't really have a close analogue, but if you forced me to choose, I'd say that doing YC is more similar to going to college than working at a company. And as all we all know, while many companies are staying fully remote, hardly any university is.
Having now done this back-to-back, I can tell you exactly the ways in which in-person YC turned out to be better than remote YC.
1). Most founders in remote YC didn't make strong connections with their batchmates. When I ask founders from remote batches "how many founders in your batch are you still close with?", they typically give an answer that's 0-3. When I ask founders from in-person batches the same question, it's 10+.
2). When YC really works, it's because it not only conveys some factual advice, but changes the way founders think and behave.
When founders go through in-person batches, they're usually significantly different by the end of the batch - tougher, savvier, and more formidable. Whatever causes that did not translate well to zoom.
3). In-person YC is simply more fun. YC has always been in part about being fun experience, because startups need to be fun or they'd be too difficult and demoralizing. Zoom is very effective for communicating information, but no one has fun at Zoom parties.
Actually, it says something much deeper about the world than whatever YC's partners' opinions are. YC funds founders, not ideas, so the reason that so many companies in S23 are AI startups is that that's what founders want to work on right now. It's an emergent phenomenon, like stock prices in the market.
One thing that's interesting is that there have been many hype cycles between 2006 and now (chatbots, several waves of crypto, VR, online-to-offline, etc). YC funded a few companies in each of those hype cycles but never anything like the current %.
1) Cyc's reasoning fundamentally did not feel "human". Cyc was created on the premise that you could build AGI on top of formal logic inference. But after seeing how Cyc performed on real-world problems, I became convinced that formal logic is a poor model for human thought.
The biggest tell is that formal logic systems are very brittle. If there is any fact that is even slightly off, the reasoning chain fails and the system can't do anything. Humans aren't like that; when their information is slightly off, their performance degrades gracefully.
2). Imagine a graph where time/money was on the x-axis, and Cyc's performance was on the y-axis. You could roughly plot this using benchmarks like SAT scores. It was clear if you extrapolated this that Cyc was never going to hit human-level performance; the curve was going to asymptotically approach something well below human-level performance.
As a side note, if you look at the performance of LLMs, I would argue that you get the opposite result for both criteria.
My first summer, I was an ontologist, which was a unique role that only existed at Cycorp where they hired people to literally hand-enter facts like "A cat has four legs" into Cyc using formal logic. My second summer I programmed (poorly) in Lisp for them.
That internship was life-changing for me, and I'll always be grateful to him for taking a wild bet on a literally a kid.
Doug was a brilliant computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial intelligence. Though I was very junior at Cycorp, it was a small company so I sat in many meetings with him. It was obvious that he understood every detail of how the technology worked, and was extremely smart.
Cycorp was 30 years ahead of its time and never actually worked. For those who don't know, it was essentially the first OpenAI - the first large-scale commercial effort to create general artificial intelligence.
I learned a lot from Doug about how to be incredibly ambitious, and how to not give up. Doug worked on Cycorp for multiple decades. It never really took off, but he managed to keep funding it and keep hiring great people so he could keep plugging away at the problem. I know very few people who have stuck with an idea for so long.
We recently added a question to the profile about "equity expectations" to try to solve this. I'm hopeful that will help, because then you can just not match with people who don't align with your expectations; would love any feedback on this.
It's not totally clear to me if OP is referring to that product specifically or something else, but I figured I would take the opportunity to get feedback anyway!
We are very actively working on the co-founder matching site and would love to hear from people who have used it - what your experience was and how we could make it better.
We've been running the site for about two years now, since we launched it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27750298. Coincidentally, the idea actually grew out of open threads just like the ones OP suggested. We started by experimenting with those threads on HN and our Startup School forum, but nobody ever found an actual co-founder that way.
So we decided to build it as an actual product. Since we launched, over 20 teams that met on the site have gotten funded by YC, and many of them are doing quite well. So we think the early results are overall promising.
That said, co-founder matching is a very hard problem. It's a multi-sided marketplace with complex dynamics, and we know we have a lot of work to do to make it work for everyone. We'd love your feedback if you've tried it.
The worst case scenario for a venture fund (not A16Z specific) is that their future funds would be smaller and as a result they would need to make fewer investments and perhaps reduce the firm's headcount. Existing companies are not very affected.
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-...