The YC Founder Directory
ycombinator.com
ycombinator.com
1. Seems like YC is all aboard the B2B SaaS train. This is funny because early last decade B2B SaaS was known as mostly a lifestyle business category, while investors focused on consumer facing tech and big ticket enterprise products
2. It appears that the big tech employee track and the startup track are one and the same now. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that entrepreneurs and employees are very different from one another.
(I didn't meaningfully attend college at all and am in this directory.)
I searched entries for my University and the data needs some cleansing:
- Universidade de São Paulo [11]
- Universidade de São Paulo (USP) [8]
- University of Sao Paulo [4]
- Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo [3]
All of these refer to the same University. The last one is one of the University's engineering schools.
(Imagine the end of term meeting. “What did you do at ycombinator? Regex? Tell me about that.”)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/founders?yc_locations=...
I'd guess a directory of 10,000 YC alumni could be awesome, if you're a new YC founder doing B2B sales cold calls.
(YC might connect their current/recent startups to each other. But this could help you put shoe to the pavement, and knock on many more YC alumni doors, where you have the name of a likely well-placed person, and a small "in" with them. Unless that's frowned-upon.)
That's exactly what I did for a recent hobby project of mine[0]. In my case, I've a db of 30K entries with gzipped size of ~600kb. This serves well for the few hundred visitors I get every day.
How does this affect anything in a discussion about an explicitly fixed scale problem?
Roughly paraphrasing, the comment was something like "male, male, male, male, male, male, male, male, female, male, male."
I think this comment was flagged and hidden.
Please be kind + compassionate in your replies, but I'm curious why the original comment was suppressed. What happened?
Sorry, but that just not an acceptable response to a rejection. Startup accelerators do not exist to empower women founders, make the world a better place or other such grand idea, they exists to make money and you failed to convince one such accelerator that you can make money for them. It's as simple as that. Biases might affect their decision process, but that's a problem for their business, not yours.
Edit: here's the thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34267515
>> I've always been super curious about the YC application vs. accepted demographics. ESPECIALLY who gets told to come back with a co-founder. I applied as a solo woman technical founder with a product that is already close to ramen profitability. Going in, I thought this already made me an outlier - especially because I'll be able to tap my network and hire a founding team with some cash in the bank.
The tepid response during YC interviews was jarring. I know the panels are an exhausting marathon, but my group partners acted like they'd rather be anywhere else than talking to me. I got the impression that maybe I'd been invited to fill a quota, and the Zoom interview was just going through the motions.
The whole experience made me sit down and reverse-engineer the actions needed to hit 10-15k MRR by Q2 2023. With that amount of cash flow, I can reach out to angels directly. Just 6 angels in for 30k/1% party round is 180k @ 3M post.
If you're a woman with a similar story, I'm an angel investor (B2B, Saas, manufacturing). Reach out (email in profile.
If YC is trying to interview a certain number of under-represented founders per batch (quota), then that seems like an earnest attempt to change their demographics.
However, after like 15+ years in the tech world, I've noticed that quota-based targets train people to tune out. I don't think that's misogyny, since it's a pretty natural reaction to check-out if you don't think your input will impact an outcome because there's a mandated quota.
Does that make sense? I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but I don't think you're assuming good intent or approaching this discussion with the curiosity I've come to respect on HN.
You say you have $2m and $50k expenses. You can self-fund a 4-person team to get to PMF if you want to, without YC's $500k. But based on these 2 signals, you seem risk-averse and not actually willing to go all-in to your company. Personally, I'm a male and didn't get a YC interview for any of my YC applications, but I can't feign sexism over that.
* When an angel invests 30k, I get value beyond the cash amount.
The angels I reach out to are founders with multiple successful exits, board members of other startups, and have 20-30+ years of experience. I get access to a fountain of wisdom and the person is motivated to answer my emails and take my calls when I'm stumped by a challenge.
I'm not good at EVERYTHING (who is), but I am proactive about getting help when I need it.
* A priced seed round sets the value.
Let's say you own 100% of a fine work of art, which you've priced at $10M. There's just one problem - only you value it at 10M, so there's no anchor for the real-world value. To get a return on your investment, you have to find a buyer that agrees with your valuation.
What if instead you owned 25% time-share of a work of art (this is a silly asset class, just using it as an example) that you and 3 other people price at $10. If you want to realize a return, there are now at LEAST 3 other prospective buyers that agree on the market value of your shares.
* There are more people like me out there.
I make angel investments in under-estimated Founders, because they're often overlooked by the pattern-matching lemmings in the institutional investment world. This isn't charity either; since a fund-raising round is similar to an auction, there are fewer investors bidding and betting on these founders. That gives me an edge.
I also tend to invest in "work horse" companies, not necessarily potential unicorns. Institutional investors have to chase unicorns that produce outsize returns, but I can participate in seed rounds that never raise after a seed or Series A.
There's a fund that follows the same thesis (https://tinyseed.com/) but I don't know of many institutional investors who make these kinds of investments.
* The best time to raise money is when you don't need it.
In the example I gave (6 x 30k @ 1% for 180k/3M post-money for a business earning 10-15k MRR), I have options for revenue-based financing and other kinds of debt.
Like I said, a fund-raising round is like an auction. If you have leverage or alternatives, you can command a higher price.
YC's startups get 125k for 7% + an additional 375k SAFE, which gets priced when you raise another round. If you sell another 15-20% on demo day, YC can end up owning roughly 20% of your company for 500k.
So, all I could think of during the tepid interview was "y'all want 20% of this business, but are acting like you're at the dentist." People didn't even introduce themselves (names) or ask mine. I know this wasn't intentional rudeness, it's due to application volume. The factory-farming way YC operates made me realize I could engineer better circumstances for myself and my business via an angel round.
Hope that all makes sense.
How will YC own another 13% if you only sold another 15-20%? That would mean you sold 2-7% for 60k - 200k at a 2.9m valuation, unrealistic. Seed rounds themselves will be 10% - 15%, $2-5m at a $15 - 50m valuation. Most likely they're getting another 1 - 3% for that 375k if you raise a standard seed.
I agree that YC could've got a lot more impersonal with the huge 500+ batch sizes these days. But I still don't agree that the "connections" you're making or making "more people like me" are important when you're spending the money you say you need by raising from your own angels. Raising from your own angels stands as important because you're getting cash for operations and advice, no brainer. I think there's a good reason why founders angel invest after series B+, when they're possibly able to pull liquidity to the tune of several million dollars, making the $50k angel investments trivial. It shouldn't be your focus right now.
You can see from a glance that is NOT a representative sample of the population, and that's based on looks alone. Let's not even mention things like the way you talk and present yourself, educational and employment background. God forbid you are one of those neurodivergent people - Google even has a cute word for those poor undesirables: lacking googliness.
Bottom line, entrepreneurship is just anohter political occupation that relates to power over other people. It cannot function otherwise than as an extension of power relations in society, because those relationships permeate the market and affect the businesses` ability to make money. Startup survivorship is so low and the pool of qualified applicants so inexhaustible, that an accelerator cannot but work to enforce those stereotypes and power structures: why waste capital on a militant atheist founder in a devout society if there is even the slightest chance some parts of the public will boycott their products?
And having a 80% of a full chance on account of gender is in this context a minor problem compared with a 0% chance of anybody that does not talk the talk investors expect for purely cultural reasons.
I'd say don't take it too personally. If you search the YC companies directory it would not be easy to find a solo founder company. The lack of interest you saw could have been that they had already decided that you needed a co-founder early in the process.
It's actually quite good to have made it to the interview stage.
It's an awful lot like AngelList.
> Any way to opt out of being included in that?
I think there probably is. It might even be opt-in. How do you get people to opt in? Have them check their information is correct and remind them to until it's launched.
> We’re also enabling any YC company to opt into having their YC application video, written application answers, and Demo Day video public on the YC Startup Directory
I see someone I know would have said no if asked, for example, as their time at YC was pretty awful and resulted in what they consider to be shameful failure.
That said, I still agree it should be opt-in.
Probably because in an age of targeting phish paired with browsers that strain to run whatever JavaScript or whatever you hurl at them, the founders are rightfully concerned someone who’d be stopped by the secretary can slam their inbox because they misticked some box.
(But what do I know? I’m a venture socialist slamming lattès in the museum when everyone else is at work.)
(The only thing I’ve ever founded is a lemonade stand)
But they banned me.
"Make something people want...that the censors approve of."
I don't know.
> could you share a bit more?
I still have not been able to get to the bottom of it. My ex stole a bunch of money from me, lied like crazy and ran off with our two daughters (this part is heart breaking and kills me every day). We are in a bitter legal battle (an ironic thing is I am ordered to pay her legal bills), and she has sadly perjured herself multiple times. She somehow got YC involved, and was able to steal $50,000 from my business Mercury account. I couldn't believe it, and still haven't gotten an explanation or apology from Mercury. I raised bloody hell on the forums when that happened, and so I'm guessing the ban was related to that. I think it might be a cover your ass thing, as they really fucked up that one and are probably worried I'll sue (which I may, as I have great cause and people have been encouraging me to, but I'd rather focus on more positive things in life).
They've done their best to censor me, but luckily there are mostly honest people there and many stick up for me. I'll keep fighting for the truth.
It will show the dead, but not their children.
For me, it’s always reliably shown everything.
Here's a recent comment from the user dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271566
And here's his page, where the comment can't be seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
---
And here's another comment, also from dang, where he talked about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264605
> this how HN's software works these days. We didn't do anything specific to the thread; it's just that users flagged the root comment.
The reason might be that users often pick fights with mods. Dan’s comment page might be overwhelmed by such threads if left unchecked. pg once noted that pg’s own account was highly watched relative to other accounts, so maybe users were following Dan around and adding fuel to the very fires he was trying to put out.
The reason I say that is because I can’t find any examples of this phenomenon except his account. Do you know of any? E.g. this thread does show up on the flagged user’s profile page, contrary to what others were saying. It’s right below this one for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=breck&next=34266186#...
It also seems to show up on everyone else’s page: mine, tptacek’s, etc.
Cheers for pointing that out. Stuff like this is fascinating, and we rarely get the chance to nerd out about it.
EDIT: interestingly, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265016 does show up.
There are no exceptions (...at least, none that I'm currently aware of). Dang's "missing comment" actually is on his page, just not where I was looking.
The comment was new, but it was a descendant of one of dang's older comments, so it appears further back in his profile than where I looked.
One time many years ago, I almost emailed a bug report claiming the very same thing. Luckily I noticed right beforehand.
It speaks to Dan’s dedication that he did so much for the site in a single day that both of us missed his comment buried in the avalanche. :)
In fairness, the discussion was a little confusing, since it was combining a few different topics (showdead, OPs thread, flagging, and admin’ing) so a mixup probably isn’t too surprising.
HN is completely fascinating, and I appreciated the analytical eye you were bringing to it. If you keep doing that, you’ll notice a ton of surprising little details over time. Minimaxir tried to document them in “undocumented features of hacker news” and the list is still far from complete. Plus it’s cool that the site is ever-evolving.
One of my favorite new features is that if you go to an old submission, e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 (or thereabouts), all the users’ names will show up in green if they were a new account at the time. I.e. it preserves the historical fact of someone being a new user in a given comment thread.
It’s such a small detail, yet there are quite literally thousands of such small details that all add up to something wonderful.
Regardless, have a good weekend, and cheers for the chat.
Probably 20% of the time I send an angry email to dang (generally about censorship), it turns out I did something dumb and read the site wrong.
I double check and triple check, but still often make silly mistakes. (He is always gracious about my mistakes).
Correct - this how HN's software works these days. We didn't do anything specific to the thread; it's just that users flagged the root comment.
Btw I wasn't part of any internal YC discussions about banning anybody but I know and like breck from our time in W09 together, I have a lot of experience with this on the HN side, and you're unlikely to be able to extract the real story from material on the internet.
Speaking generally, there's an asymmetry with stories like this: one side can take to the open internet and say anything, while the other side can't or won't—and sometimes one of the reasons, ironically, is to protect that very person.
Forget YC, the $50k, and your startup right now. It seems like you're experiencing mental illness which is distorting your ability to see things accurately. 12 weeks ago you stated: "Our team is going to radically accelerate the cures for cancer in 12 weeks."[0], but there is no team and you haven't done that. It seems like delusions of grandeur from psychosis, maybe related to pandemic isolation. It's apparent to anyone seeing your HN submissions and twitter. It's why people from YC are "ghosting" you. You need to immediately see a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, and get to the bottom of this. Do it for your family. Your startup and change-the-world ambitions can wait one year.
In situations like this, they often won't help themselves. I recently went through it with a close friend. https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1602163797560627201
My wife went through it with a family member.
I just wanted to reassure you that even if your comment has no effect, it's not "your fault" -- it turns out that there's ~nothing anyone can do, short of dragging them to the hospital.
Once our family member was hospitalized and started taking medication (they initially refused), he snapped out of it very quickly. Less than a week, I think. But it was very difficult to get them into the hospital in the first place. In my friend's case, he believed that everyone in his apartment was going to attack him; in my family member's case, they thought that black cars were full of agents trying to get them; and it appears that in OP's case, he feels that YC's out to get him, when it's anything but.
It's often just one of those sad situations where we can't do anything but be kind and empathetic.
For what it’s worth, HN has a long history of this kind of thing. It’s probably more frequent now because HN has grown several orders of magnitude in a relatively short time. (You can get a feel for this by graphing item IDs vs time. I haven’t done it, but I bet it’s a steep J curve.)
Totally agreed about how surprising it is that anyone can break. The other aspect is, they’re not broken — there’s a chance they’ll take your advice and turn their life around. It’s a terrible illness that people can recover from. Like you, I hope he does, especially for his family’s sake.
Take care; have a great weekend.
Exagerating about these things is a personality trait, not a mental illness.
Maybe the papers are totally crank, but as I said, not immediately apparant
HN users tend to think similarly to each other and are often wrong.
I offer an alternative theory: that I'm saner than almost anyone and a talented and tenacious builder and will indeed lead the project that reduces cancer deaths by 50% by 2027.
Let's look at the evidence and the credibility of the sources behind the 2 positions.
> there is no team
Anyone with a web browser can determine this is false. You could have said "small team". It's true, I thought we'd be on our way to 100 by now, and instead are still in the low double digits, but saying "no team" is a lie, and big strike against your credibility. Some recent quotes: "the best experience of my life", "It is really great working with you and the team."
That being said, I feel bad about the job I've done at leading the team. I have been under constant attack for months, and that has been a distraction and hard on the team.
> 12 weeks ago you stated: "Our team is going to radically accelerate the cures for cancer in 12 weeks."...you haven't done that
You left out a huge part of that quote: "I just need people to #LetMeCode. And unfreeze my bank accounts." This hasn't happened. Instead it's been the opposite. I've been harassed to this day—personally and people on my team, have had even more money stolen/frozen, and been banned and censored from many forums that I helped build. I've also had my children kidnapped, and haven't seen them since September. Anyone who knows me knows my daughters are my top priority in life, and that has not been easy. Had people simply remained neutral, we would be further along with CancerDB.
What I learned was that: there are really bad people in this world AND there are people who are total cowards and do really bad things out of fear.
I've had to adapt our strategy appropriately and shore up our flank defenses while going on the attack against this kind of cowardly behavior.
> related to pandemic isolation
Lol. I am a 1% social person. People think because I post a lot online I must be on the computer all the time. I don't own a phone. When I'm AFK, I'm in the real world, and have lots of friends, and no one who spends time with me would call me isolated. Your data again, is very wrong.
> It seems like delusions of grandeur from psychosis
It's not a delusion of grandeur. I am grand. Look at my 3 long bets. Very contrarian. Very grand. Either I'm experiencing a 20 year "psychosis", or like I said, I'm smarter and saner than most anyone.
I think it's the latter. Let's look at COVID. I called COVID right from the very first datadump, on February 18th, 2020 (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1228117546974371840). I then went on to build the Covid Data Explorer for Oxford's Our World in Data that has been used by over 100M people, including I think every president of every country. In winter 2020, when the vaccines came out and then the FDA cancelled the control groups, I called bullshit, despite extreme pressure from everyone I knew, and now have been vindicated.
And yes, on the matter at hand, I got into YCombinator. Twice. The first time I spent a lot of time helping my batchmate AirBedAndBreakfast.com. The second time PG wanted me so bad he went from 7% to 3%! (Smart move, as that class became their 2nd most valuable of all time, spawning a startup called Stripe, again that I was involved in helping in the early days).
> It's apparent to anyone seeing your HN submissions and twitter.
Plenty of smart people are on our team and our side. The sheep call me mentally ill, the honest ones call me a man of honor.
> You need to immediately see a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, and get to the bottom of this.
Lol. I did! One said "he doesn't need to see a therapist they need a divorce lawyer". And the other—who I saw at the insistence of my wife—knew an order of magnitude less about the medication he wanted me to take than I did! She wasn't happen with that meeting, and I later found out in court her and that phony went to court in Hawai'i and tried to get me involuntarily committed (the court told them rightly to screw off).
Here's the bottom of it: I am an honest, sane person in a world full of cowards and liars. We have now 2 statements and 2 theories. The "I'm crazy" argument supported by lies, and my statement, backed by evidence. My daily peaceful existence and the continued growth of our products and new friendships is pure evidence that I am fine.
> Your startup and change-the-world ambitions can wait one year.
See I have people coming to me begging me to help save their loved ones. They don't have a year. I've already shed many tears and been to many funerals. This is real. This is war.
I will not slow down. Not so cowardly sheep can feel better about themselves. (Not speaking of you there, but specifically the people I know personally who have told me to "slow down").
I applaud you for stating your theory out loud in public, and opening yourself to criticism. My harsh words are not so much directed at you as they are the argument, which has been disproven over and over now, that I am crazy.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BipolarReddit/comments/xxjd25/i_was...
https://medium.com/@bipolarguy321/going-manic-with-a-fitbit-...
These are your words from your past self:
"Mania is like an invisible drug. I had been off it for years. I had been vigilant. But after a long stable period, I had forgotten and now my guard was down. I didn’t recognize it as it was happening.
Looking back, this was probably the time to catch it. To go see my therapist. To get back on meds. To reveal my condition to some more people and ask for help."
Sound familiar?
"My behavior became textbook manic. My ideas and claims became more and more ambitious — topics that had seemed complex to me before suddenly seemed simple, I could learn anything, solve any problem, change industries.
With my software project I started to feel the paranoid need to move fast"
You need to walk into the closest psychiatry office and tell them you have Bipolar and are in a manic episode that is distressing your family. You can stabilize and get your situation back to normal. I promise you the cancer startup can wait a few months until you do that and get things under control.
I wrote in silico models of the brain. Couldn't figure it out. Turns out it's a lie. System people do not like people who excel and so created a fake condition and labelled them crazy and that they need to be medicated and hospitalized. That's my position. And it's a very strong one.
You will not be able to prove that it is real, because the data is not there. Bipolar disorder is as real as the Covid vaccines are effective. Covid lockdowns/mandates/vaccines btw is my proof that society can easily fall for mass delusions. Tom Cruise was right about psychiatry being largely a mass delusion.
You can look me up on Google Scholar and Github. I know what I'm talking about. Do you?
What you have been doing recently isn't working, objectively. You're living on your own right now and financial numbers are only going down. These are objectively worse. You've accomplished a lot before this and still can, but you need to see the psychiatrist first and trust your past self. I promise you this is how you get to see your daughters.
?? Have you seen our traffic numbers? We had a minor dip during the Xmas break, but now back to record numbers.
> You're living on your own right now
I'm rarely sleeping on my own ;)
> and financial numbers are only going down.
?? Which financial numbers? This will be a record month for us.
Talking to you is like talking to an NPC. You make a statement, I provide data that it is false, you don't take that new evidence into account to adjust your reality calculations (https://www.rootclaim.com/).
Browsing some of your submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=twitter.com/breckyuni...), it seems like there are two sides to the story of your battle with YC, where we only currently can read about one (your side).
Yes. I was in the Airbnb batch (when it was called airbedandbreakfast.com). I was also in the Stripe batch (when it was called /dev/finance).
PetaSales is my first one (dead, I had a lot to learn).
NudgePad is the second one (acquired by Microsoft in 2014).