We realized recently that a lot of people don’t understand very well what Y Combinator does, so I wrote something explaining that in detail. Since YC has been shaped by the needs of hundreds of early stage startups, this should be interesting not just to potential applicants but to anyone curious about startups, because a portrait of YC is in some ways the complement of a portrait of the average startup.

Y Combinator runs two three-month funding cycles a year, one from January through March and one from June through August. We ask the founders of each startup we fund to move to the Bay Area for the duration of their cycle, during which we work intensively with them to get the company into the best shape possible. Each cycle culminates in an event called Demo Day, at which the startups present to an audience that now includes most of the world’s top startup investors. (…)

If the startup either hasn’t decided what to work on or wants to change their idea, then we talk about what the company should do. That usually means satisfying two constraints: something (1) users would want, that (2) the founders of this startup would be good at building. We have these types of conversations surprisingly often. Startups modify or even replace their ideas much more than outsiders realize.

{ Y Combinator | Continue reading }

illustration { House Industries }

economics, experience, technology | October 5th, 2010