Of all the companies founded since 2000, these are the following companies that are worth more than $10B: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WorkDay, and ... WhatsApp.
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YC Badge: 0xBfe3EEACdb8F71518c565DE6A4ccfC073bA874DC
I get some variation of this question a lot. I assume that all recent YC alumni do. I always talk about (a) the intense focus that YC gives it's founders, (b) the positive pressure that the partners, the dinners, and the batch provides, and (c) the incredibly supportive guild of alumni.
YC helps founders build companies that are valuable. VCs and angels know that.
Of the several hundred applicants we've gotten at Standard Treasury, the median age is likely a little less than the founding team (we're all 27-28). That age is likely even higher than most other startups that go through YC as we build enterprise software for banks -- it's not the sexiest topic in the world. Well, it is to me but you get my point.
We've hired some people that skew older compared to most other startups we know but that only seems to our benefit, frankly.
Standard Treasury helps banks harness the power of developers and developer ecosystems by building, hosting, maintaining, and supporting white-labeled and co-branded developer platforms for banks worldwide.
Our platform wraps internal bank information and payment systems using our middleware. We then securely expose these systems to bank customers via standardized RESTful APIs. We empower the middleware and APIs, associated software development kits (SDKs) and application stores, while providing support, partner engineering, growth engineering, and more, for our bank partners.
We are looking to hire:
Platform Engineers
Infrastructure Engieners
Bank Integration Engineers
User Interface Engineers
Designers
We offer great comp:
Great benefits. Medical, vision, and dental insurance for you and your dependents.
Great comp. Salary and equity. We know some people have a greater risk appetite than others and we’re interested in finding the right balance for you.
Great perks. Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, snacks, a stocked fridge, laundry service, gym membership, Clipper card, and house cleaning by Homejoy.
Great flexibility. Flexible hours, open vacation policy, paid maternity/paternity.
Great tools. Build your ideal workstations so you can have the tools you want and need. Buy the books you need or want on Amazon. Need a Kindle for your commute — get it. The corporate Amex can be used for all expenses under a standard of trust & reasonableness.
You can see our job postings and apply at https://jobs.lever.co/standardtreasury or just email me (one of the co-founders) at zac@standardtreasury.com.
The problem with Gold is also it's virtue: it's rare. Rarity is good in that it implies value. But let's say you're the American economy and you're growing 2% this year. Should your money supply be governed by how much of it you can dig out of the ground? That is, for example, when South African gold mines were discovered the money supply internationally radically increased, despite having no relationship to economic output. That ends up not working out very well.
Bitcoin though could be thought of more like gold and diamonds not because those things are good to think of as currencies -- they really are not good currencies at all-- but because their all commodities with limited supplies that have markets that move on vagaries with little relationship to any economic necessity or output.
The Y in Dobbs’ article is my book, The Selfish Gene, and his main X is the important but far from new point that genes are not always expressed in the same way. He calls it phenotypic plasticity. Locusts are transformed grasshoppers: same genes, differently expressed. A caterpillar and the butterfly it morphs into have exactly the same genome, expressed in different ways. An animal is the way it is, not just because of the genes it possesses but because the context in which a gene sits affects how – and indeed whether – it is expressed. Dobbs makes some sensible points about all this, but there’s not a single one of them that I wouldn’t be happy to make myself – and in most cases did make, either in The Selfish Gene itself or in my other books. But his headline conclusion, namely that recent findings negate the thesis of The Selfish Gene, is not just untrue but deeply and perversely untrue.
The Selfish Gene has a lot to say about the social insects, laying particular stress on the fact that the difference between a queen and a sterile worker is non-genetic. Indeed, it has got to be non-genetic. If a gene were unconditionally “for” sterility it couldn’t be favoured by natural selection. It has to be conditionally expressed, conditional upon the environment. The difference between a massive-jawed soldier ant and the tiny minor worker riding shotgun on its head, is nongenetic too. As far as its genes are concerned, any female ant could have become any caste of worker or a queen. Genes express themselves differently when switched, by environmental triggers, into different embryological pathways. It’s a special case of another idea that received prominence in The Selfish Gene, the “conditional strategy” concept of John Maynard Smith.
"In 2007, PayPal Europe was granted a Luxembourg banking license, which, under European Union law, allows it to conduct banking business throughout the EU.[54] It is therefore regulated as a bank by Luxembourg's banking supervisory authority, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF)."
Does YC accept founders older than 30?
Yes. And according to PG, age is neither a penalty nor a bonus. He writes: “I don’t actually know the numbers. We don’t keep track. But I know there haven’t been any with founders in their 50s, and only 2 or 3 with founders in their 40s or their teens. Most founders are in their 20s or 30s. Completely guessing, I’d say 15-20% have founders in their 30s.” (That was a year ago, so the numbers may have changed.)
Basically, the age distribution of YC companies is pretty close to the age distribution of applicants. More YC founders are 25 than 35, but more 25-year-olds apply than 35-year-olds.
(Paul has an essay[3] where he says the ideal range to start a startup is 22-38. As far as I know, that isn’t a rule, just a suggestion. YC has accepted plenty of people younger than 22, and at least a few over 38.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=809885 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1642525 [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
Which is to say, there were a bunch of people in our batch that were over 25. 25 might have been the median age of founders in the batch.
Having said that, I do think their seems to be a much wider variance in the ages and experiences of YC founders than most people think. If I had to guess, the median age for our batch was likely 25/26 with a standard deviation of 3 years. Not 19/20 and I think that's been true for a long time.
There are also a ton of different education backgrounds. I'm not going to lie and say that there aren't a lot of people who went to Harvard and MIT, but there are also people who went to state schools or no college at all.
The real answer about staying in touch is the internet -- yay AIM, the best communication tool of 2003. In reality though we didn't live that far apart in New Jersey so we could hang out from time-to-time.
Also see https://plaid.io/ which is more directly going after Yodlee.
That's not a reason not to apply / work on it though. It's an ecosystem with a lot of space for innovation. Or you could come work with us!
If, on the other hand, you're saying you don't want to apply because you feel phony, well, then, that's hogwash. Impostor syndrome is deep in most YC founders, in most ambitious people, and in Silicon Valley more generally. If you have an idea that you're passionate about then you should apply.
Tons of people have been surprised by our success to be honest. We had a talk with a potential investor recently and we told him who we were working with at [big bank]. The potential investor was shocked - the gentlemen leading our project at [big bank] is in charge of a 10-digit-a-year business and is a hard man to find time with. But one of our lawyers, who is also an investor, introduced us. They are old friends. Banking innovation / payments / technology, etc, is a small world.
We spent the summer building the product to support a heavy amount of sales and business development work. We put together a prototype (we essential built the platform against something we call "fake financial") where we can use the terminal and some simple application to show banks and bank customers how easy it would be with our platform-as-a-service.
[1] Whats important here is that you can't bullshit investors. The proof is in the pudding. We had to account for where we were with every potential customer, who we were speaking to at the companies (investors might end up knowing them!), what terms were discussed, etc.