How Y Combinator Started

There is nothing more heavenly, more sublime than that rare situation in life in which the self-indulgent choice and the ambitious choice align. There's a keen insight to be had there.

Unfortunately, those moments are very rare.

For instance, at least, in terms of my personal temperament and disposition, I have found that I most enjoy life, from a "human" perspective, in places that are terrible places to do business, and may, in fact, have very dysfunctional local economies, high amount of corruption, etc. I'm the kind of person that has the most fun in the colour of Greece, Italy, southern Spain, Portugal, Argentina, etc. I can appreciate the comparative orderliness and clockwork of Teutonic and Anglo-American civilisation, but it doesn't make me happy, and yet I need that whole universe in order to sustain my livelihood in any practical sense. But everything else about it doesn't make me very happy.

I wish there were some way to reconcile those two. I haven't found any place that has an optimal intersection of cowbell on the one hand, and practicality on the other. Maybe it exists, but I haven't found it. However, my natural sense is that there is a inherent, perennial tension between the two.

That's why that particular phrase really got me. I wish dearly for such a Shangri-la.

As a co-founder of Berkeley based company from YC S11 batch. Darn it! Berkeley would have been a great place to start YC. With Berkeley campus supplying a lot of CS students and the easy-going counter-culture that Berkeley provides (which gels well with counter-intuitive funding strategy of YC). It would have been great! Of course, the VCs would've to trek to Berkeley to attend demo days but that filters out the people who aren't serious. :)

A lot of 'this is how I became successful' biographies seldom provide that level of detail. Whilst I still find them interesting, I found PGs writing to be more inspirational (to me anyway) because it's almost like a 'how-to' guide.

Congrats to everyone who has ever applied and the YC team! You have changed the rules of the game for the better...

I'm in Berkeley and quite like it here but that's also because I mostly avoid networking events. Berkeley's startup culture is a bit weird because the city is in some ways anti-software business. If YC were here, it would have been enough of a political force by now to have actually shifted the epicenter of Silicon Valley around enough for Berkeley to be taken more seriously as a place for startups.

Knowing that there was a place out there for entrepreneurial geeks like me helped tipped the scales for me; YCombinator plus Hacker News itself has made me feel like I am not alone in trying to make it as a geek-entrepreneur and I am glad for it.

YC + HackerNews has made the tech world feel like a smaller, more accessible place for me.

And not to take anything away from YC's effort but I find it rather amusing that first time some good hackers take their turn at improving the VC industry they transform it and become (arguably) the most successful investors in it.

I wish more people would try to improve the VC industry. There's at least a few YC-level waves that could occur. AngelList the best example.

What this says me, and hopefully you is this: "that inconsequential thing you are staring today.. do not be so sure it is that inconsequential. Most of all just do it"

Personally I find that one of the most important reasons to think long and hard about a name. Most startups go through many pivot points until they finally get it right. Choosing a name that is overly representative of the present business model can lead to team lock-in that could spell the death of a company before it even gets going.

It seems a wiser decision is to go with a name that represents a startup's future ambitions instead of its present circumstances.

I'd love to read a "where are they now" post on the first couple batches of founders, along with some quotes from them.

I attended the "How to Start a Startup" talk in 2005. I remember going home and reading pg's website, the whole thing, cover-to-cover. Later that year I met Steve Wozniak at the first Startup School held in Cambridge. Woz, Chris Sacca and pg left a lasting impression on me. I had never witnessed that level of information density and knowledge sharing. Amazing to look back at those humble beginnings. Always grateful for YC and the HN community.

>"If you're accepted, we'll deal with the paperwork for you. We'll incorporate you, get you a corporate bank account, supply simple, generic employment agreements for you to use, and so on. We can give some advice about patents, though you don't have to deal with that in the earliest stages; you have a year after making a discovery to file a US patent application for it." [http://ycombinator.com/old/sfp.html]

However, the best part of the story was the I'm-quitting-my-job smile.

now pg, please put some left and right padding on those static pages =]

http://web.archive.org/web/20050324062234/http://ycombinator...

I wonder what the best batch size is: each cohort seems to be larger than the last. When does it makes sense to do three, four, or six a year as smaller batches.