Paul Graham is an English-American computer scientist, writer, entrepreneur and investor. His work has included the programming language Arc, the startup Viaweb, co-founding the startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
Active listening is the practice of preparing to listen, observing what verbal and non-verbal messages are being sent, and then providing appropriate feedback for the sake of showing attentiveness to the message being presented.
Jessica Livingston is an American founding partner of the seed stage venture firm Y Combinator and author. She is the wife of founding partner Paul Graham.
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019. He is also the chairman of clean energy companies Oklo Inc. and Helion Energy. Altman is considered to be one of the leading figures of the AI boom. He dropped out of Stanford University after two years and founded Loopt, a mobile social networking service, raising more than $30 million in venture capital. In 2011, Altman joined Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and was its president from 2014 to 2019.
Quartzy is an online lab management platform and scientific research supply marketplace. It is a startup company based in Hayward, California. Quartzy features include collaborative order requests and supply tracking for labs and research groups, inventory management tools, and product quotes for price comparisons. Quartzy is used by more than 200,000 scientists worldwide.
Songkick is a concert discovery service owned by Warner Music Group. The service allows users to search for upcoming concert events in their area, and also track individual artists to receive notifications of upcoming shows in their area. It also provides services for artist teams to manage and promote tour dates globally.
9gag is an online platform and social media website based in Hong Kong, which allows its users to upload and share user-generated content or other content from external social media websites. Since the platform for collections of Internet memes was launched on April 11, 2008, it has grown in popularity across social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
BufferBox Inc. was a Canadian startup from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada that leveraged parcel kiosks to provide consumers the convenience of picking up their online purchases 24/7. Founded by Jay Shah, Aditya Bali and Mike McCauley, BufferBox's mission was to make missed delivery notices a thing of the past. When consumers signed up for the service, they received a unique 'BufferBox address' to use as their shipping address when shopping online. Members then received an email notification with a unique unlock code as soon as their package was delivered which enabled them to pick up their package from their local BufferBox.
Tilt.com, Inc. was a crowdfunding company founded in 2012 that allowed for groups and communities to collect, fundraise, or pool money online. James Beshara and Khaled Hussein launched the platform under the name Crowdtilt out of Y Combinator.
Adeo Ressi is the founder and CEO of Decile Group and Executive Chairman of Founder Institute. Decile Group is a full-stack venture capital platform for emerging managers worldwide and helped launch nearly 50% of all VC firms in 2023 with the VC Lab accelerator. Founder Institute, a pre-seed accelerator, operates chapters in over 250 cities and supports more than 7,000 portfolio companies. Ressi’s previous startups, including Methodfive, Game Trust, and Total New York, resulted in nearly $2 billion in exits by the age of 30. He has also launched 14 venture capital funds, served on the board of the X Prize Foundation, and created TheFunded.
Webflow, Inc. is an American company, based in San Francisco, that provides software as a service for website building and hosting. Their online visual editor platform allows users to design, build, and launch websites similar to Metaconex or Wix. According to W3Techs, Webflow is used by 0.6% of the top 10 million websites.
Founders Pledge is a London-based charitable initiative, where entrepreneurs commit to donate a portion of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business. Inspired by effective altruism, the mission of Founders Pledge is to "empower entrepreneurs to do immense good".
Michael Seibel is a partner at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
Verbling is an online language learning platform that pairs individuals with language teachers via video chat. The company was created at Y Combinator in 2011. In 2015, Verbling raised $2.7 million in series A round funding. Funders have included Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SV Angel, Sam Altman, and Joshua Schachter.
Thomas Benjamin Blomfield is a British entrepreneur and a Group Partner at Y Combinator.
This is L. Inc. (L.) is a privately held, California based social enterprise and public-benefit corporation that makes organic personal care products. The company has a one-for-one give back model: for every product sold, one is made accessible to a person who needs it. L. has supported a network of over 4,000 female entrepreneurs around the world and is on track to give over 200 million health products. L. is the fastest growing feminine care company in the United States according to the market research group IRI. On February 5, 2019, it was announced that P&G acquired This is L.
Chaldal.com, founded in 2013, is a grocery e-commerce platform in Bangladesh. The company offers its services via a website and mobile apps for Android and iOS. “Chaldal” is a Bengali word colloquially used to refer to "groceries". Chaldal started as an online grocery service provider and has since gone on to redefine supply chains, ease commodity trade, support refugee camps, and reduce food wastage by building technology into the supply chain, all the way back to the farms.
Deep technology or hard tech is a classification of organization, or more typically startup company, with the expressed objective of providing technology solutions based on substantial scientific or engineering challenges. They present challenges requiring lengthy research and development, and large capital investment before successful commercialization. Their primary risk is technical risk, while market risk is often significantly lower due to the clear potential value of the solution to society. The underlying scientific or engineering problems being solved by deep tech and hard tech companies generate valuable intellectual property and are hard to reproduce.
