Geoff Ralston taking over as President of YC
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
Congrats Geoff! Much deserved. Looking forward to seeing great things at YC
I'm a bit confused if Michael Seibel is still CEO?
* Michael Seibel will be the new CEO of YC Core, which we are now just going to call “YC”.
* I’m going to be the President of YC Group, which includes YC, YC Continuity, YC Research, and our new online class. We’ll add more organizational units over time.
Y Combinator has one president, Geoff Ralston, who is the president of YC Group, the parent organization.
It has two CEO's: Michael Seibel, who is the CEO of YC Core, the twice-a-year program YC started with, and Ali Rowghani, who is the CEO of YC Continuity, the fund that makes large investments in YC companies when they are at a growth stage.
There are 18 full-time partners, who primarily select and then work with the companies we fund.
Staffing good advisors is hard, especially for the # of applicants, so I definitely understand. It would be really awesome to see YC be able to scale to more participates though. I wasn't looking for money, more advice about gauging viability and scaling, and doing A/B testing.
I've started a business before, one where I could pay my bills, but it was one on one with clients doing web development...it wasn't a business that could scale effectively. The idea I've been toying with for a year or two would need to scale, and mostly be automated in order to succeed, and the scaling part is what you all are good at and I have a lot of questions about.
So, if an opportunity ever comes up when one of your advisors wants to reach out to me, I'd enjoy talking with them for 30 min and then get out of y'all's hair. I'm AtHeartEngineer pretty much everywhere on the internet.
Thanks, appreciate all your work and good luck to you!
I would not expect a YC partner to reach out to you just to chat, unless you are one of a handful of startups likely to blow up and they want to invest early. I think you should reach out to them directly instead of hoping they will find you.
Never expect anyone to reach out to you. You have to reach out to them over and over if you are interested.
If they see the value in what you are doing, they will reply or reach out to you, but never expect them to do so.
This applies to everyone, mentors, investors, customers.
You have to be proactive all the time.
Being proactive and contacting people over and over is fine for a while if you're "hustling" but eventually it just becomes spam, you sound desperate, and you'll be hurting rather than helping your chances.
Also, if you feel your proposition is good enough and you don't get the response you were after, then move on and focus on getting your pitch to the right people.
1-2 weeks later - Second cold email - No response
Monthly update/touch up - No response
Move on.
Some people would consider the second or third email as spam, that is fine. If they block you, that means that was a dead end anyway.
My experience is that people are busy and we forget to reply sometimes. 3 emails in a row, in a matter of days, would be spam for me too.
Any advice for a founder six years in with a company of ~40 people is always appreciated :) https://errantscience.com/blog/2017/07/31/reflecting-on-the-...
Are you reachable by email? If we have a private question.
For an example of why: my startup was initially rejected from Startup School, then accidentally accepted, and then we kicked butt and won the YC Startup School Grant out of 10,000+ startups. Then we got a YC interview and were rejected for what (I think objectively) was a pretty random reason. And I understand that the stated reason isn't necessarily the full reason.
It was still a very enjoyable and super helpful experience overall. The advice, $10k cash, and cloud credits have helped tremendously and it's still helping a lot.
I just wish I could have competed against other startups for acceptance into the core YC program, rather than have a few people attempt to judge how much of an "animal" I am in 10 minutes as they groggily try to wake themselves up with coffee. Not a knock against them at all (still a very long-term PB fan!), just the process.
Because I know I'm much better at competing with hard sustained effort over the long-term than I am at seeming super impressive on first impression.
Anyway, that's my suggestion.
We will hopefully be ramen profitable soon, and may not try for YC again because it is mentally exhausting. But whatever we do, Startup School was a huge boost for us and YC asked nothing in return, so thank you very, very much.
This was our experience during the YC interview as well. Since we had an end of day slot, most of the partners were yawning as we walked in :/
Agree on Startup School - amazing resource for us that we keep revisiting
https://www.wired.com/2011/04/judges-mental-fatigue/
Does YC has stats about acceptance vs the time of the interview? That would be interesting.
There are tons of great applicants to YC, moroever, as you hint, it's going to be pretty hard to really evaluate these entities on a case by case basis.
Though I've never been on the finance side of days-long pitches, I have however done this for hiring, and I always felt bad in those situations wherein I was very tired and had some smart people in front of me, and I had to make a decision that was barely going to affect my life, but would definitely affect theirs quite dramatically; and one has very little information to go off of.
It's inherently noisy channel.
Just do your thing, and try not to worry about it.
I'll bet that anyone who makes it to any stage of interviewing has pretty good chops on some level.
(Easier said than done of course)
I don't think you can expect to be completely objective/unbiased in this kind of situation...
Sam has done so much for YC and I know is doing and will do amazing things with OpenAI.
I will continue to lean on him for his insight and advice.
Congrats, Geoff!
I think he was also on here helping manage the mea culpa from last year’s StartUp School email mistake.
Both were good to see.
I wish him luck in his new role.
I'm in academia though.
In recent years YC has taken admirable steps to fund solutions to the world's biggest problems (the climate crisis, health, nutrition, etc). Would be curious to hear how you see those efforts evolving!
YC's core program will still be run out of Mountain View this summer. We'll all look hard at what that will look like in the future. No firm plans to discuss yet except, of course, YC China.