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I imagined that it would become sort of what in fact I imagine probably it would become even bigger than it has become today
Google wave was a good idea um they just like they just launched it like New Coke or something you know if they had launched it like a startup it's like here look there's this little thing that doesn't matter
I think they're trying to be Bell Labs or you know B whatever Bell Labs is now um and that's great I think that's great that they're not just sitting there like you know trying to turn up the screws on um advertisers or something like that
I think they made something like 500 of those things right uh so all they had to do is like find 500 people to buy these computers and they launched apple
in apple like the W was was like he was not a super forceful person but he did not let Steve Jobs change anything about the apple one computer like there was one thing he wanted to change I think like fewer expansion slots and was said no right that's it like Steve knew Steve Jobs knew where the limits were so Steve so like but was didn't give a damn about the business stuff so Steve Jobs was off selling the thing and was built it and they were each masters of their own domain
we redesigned YC to be shed and it has been ever since and it works just fine like 68 no problem right yeah each partner has no no it's not each partner we have three silos three silos each one overseen by a group of Partners so basically it's like three little Y combinators and we know little why combinator works right solves the problem
it felt big to us because as we later realized we embodied an N squared algorithm up till the summer of 2012 YC did not have any kind of sharding every partner had to know what every startup was doing
you cannot predict that that is unpredictable
Dropbox Airbnb and stripe were all like we didn't even need the full 10 minutes
we decide whether to fund people or not immediately after the interview
they were all no-brainers at the interview
I would say airbnb's value is comparable to dropboxes valuation
Dropbox is the most successful on a valuation level of any y as have this week as of this week 1010 million change
the most successful startup that is run by a single founder now is Pebble the Smartwatch
we have funded some single founder startups
we prefer to fund startups with more than one founder
in the best startups what happens is each founder is king of their own domain
it works so badly when you have a startup that's started by some dude in the business school ... and then he goes and finds some ... Meek undergraduate computer science major to realize his vision
do the founders have to get along okay if the founders hate each other you're in big trouble
we only decided to have demo day about halfway through ... and demo day is now ... nobody does demos at demo day
having dinner once a week ... turned out to be good too
now the funny thing is the word incubator has changed nobody even remembers those stupid things in the '90s now it means why combinator
the old incubator model ... they were going to control you ... that model seemed to me ... would I have done that? no
I think originally we used to ask for 6% ... $6,000 per founder for the summer because we knew you could live on that in Cambridge
I imagined that it would become sort of what in fact I imagine probably it would become even bigger than it has become today
the reason it's 3 months is cuz that was summer vacation right and it turned out there were a lot of things we got right um three months turned out to be just about right
they were the model of what not to do
the early version most people here probably never even knew what the incubators in the bubble were like but they were their idea was they would do all your funding ever right Y combinator is just supposed to be first gear and then you go off and raise money on at the market at Market rates from whoever
in that first first batch were Sam Alman who started looped Reddit was in that first batch Kiko which was started by the founders who went on to start Justin.tv AKA twitch all in that first batch Aaron Schwarz was in that first batch too
we got lots of applications we got more than we expected hundreds of applications
we had better go out here and um plant the flag
I thought wow it's so much better here um the start the streets are paved with the corpses of startups uh you know the weather's so nice um what I thought was actually someone is going to start the Y combinator of silic Valley and it better be us
when y combinator first started it was a summer program for undergraduates that was the that was the idea
we've got like 10 full-time Partners maybe 20 people total I don't even know exactly 632 startups we funded
Y Combinator is going to have to grow right we grow as the number of startups grows and the number of startups has been growing um and why combinator it's like this it started out you saw what it was like it was just that that was in my kitchen that picture um and now we've got like 10 full-time Partners maybe 20 people total I don't even know exactly 632 startups we funded it's turned into this giant thing and I'm no good at running giant things Sam however is going to be good at running a gian