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Aaron Iba (born June 18, 1983) is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is known for co-authoring Etherpad, co-founding AppJet, and for his work as a partner in Y Combinator. Iba graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 with a degree in Mathematics.
Iba grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts and then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was there that he teamed up with David Greenspan to win the annual Battlecode programming competition in 2003. [1] [2] [3] Iba and Greenspan would go on to attend the Y Combinator program, where they created AppJet [4] and Etherpad. [5] Iba would go on to become a partner in Y Combinator, and was named "one of the best hackers among the YC alumni". [6] [7]
Iba is also an Angel investor in over 10 companies, including Meteor, PlanGrid, and Light Table. [8]
In 2007, Iba co-founded AppJet, a company providing JavaScript development and hosting tools. AppJet received funding from notable investors including Paul Graham, Paul Buchheit, Trevor Blackwell, Mitch Kapor and Scott Banister. [9]
AppJet failed to gain traction with developers, but in 2009 the company used its own tools to launch Etherpad, the first web-based realtime collaborative text editor. [10] [11]
In 2009, AppJet was acquired by Google for an undisclosed sum. [12] [13] [14] [15] The Etherpad technology and team were merged into the Google wave project. [16]
In 2011, Iba became one of 6 full-time partners in Y Combinator, where he oversaw and participated in numerous investments in startup companies. [6] [17] [18] [19] [20] In 2013, Iba left Y Combinator to found PayGarden, an Alternative payments company borne out of insights he gleaned as an investor in various online merchants. [21] [22]
Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, PagerDuty, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Dropbox, Twitch, Flightfox, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $300 billion by January 2021. The company's accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, relocated to San Francisco in 2019, and has been entirely online since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Forbes characterized the company in 2012 as one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley.
AppJet was a website that let users create web-based applications in a client web browser, with no other client software. AppJet was founded by 3 MIT graduates, 2 of whom were engineers at Google before starting AppJet. They launched their initial public beta on December 12, 2007, allowing anyone to create a web app.
Etherpad is an open-source, web-based collaborative real-time editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document, and see all of the participants' edits in real-time, with the ability to display each author's text in their own color. There is also a chat box in the sidebar to allow meta communication.
Samuel H. Altman is an American entrepreneur, investor, programmer, and blogger. He is the CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
Qwiki was a New York City based startup automated video production company acquired by Yahoo! on July 2, 2013 for a reported $50 million. Qwiki released an iPhone app that automatically turns the pictures and videos from a user's camera roll into movies to share. The company's initial product, an iPad application that created video summaries of over 3 million search terms, was downloaded more than 3 million times and named by Apple as the best "Search and Reference" application of 2011.
Leah Culver is a computer programmer, startup founder, and angel investor.
Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often government-funded, generally take no equity, and rarely provide funding, accelerators can be either privately or publicly funded and cover a wide range of industries. Unlike business incubators, the application process for seed accelerators is open to anyone but highly competitive. There are specific types of seed accelerators, such as corporate accelerators, which are often subsidiaries or programs of larger corporations that act like seed accelerators.
AngelPad is an American seed-stage startup incubator, launched in September 2010 by Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas with six other former Google employees as mentors. AngelPad provides mentorship, seed money, and networking at two 10-week courses per year.
Flutter is a gesture recognition technology startup based in San Francisco, California, United States. Founded by Navneet Dalal and Mehul Nariyawala, the company received early-stage funding from Y Combinator and was acquired by Google in October 2013.
Meteor, or MeteorJS, is a free and open-source isomorphic JavaScript web framework written using Node.js. Meteor allows for rapid prototyping and produces cross-platform code. It integrates with MongoDB and uses the Distributed Data Protocol and a publish–subscribe pattern to automatically propagate data changes to clients without requiring the developer to write any synchronization code. On the client, Meteor can be used with any popular front-end JS framework, Vue, React, Svelte, Angular, or Blaze.
Optimizely is an American company that provides digital experience platform software as a service. Optimizely provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities, as well as web content management and digital commerce.
Wunderlist is a discontinued cloud-based task management application. It allowed users to create lists to manage their tasks from a smartphone, tablet, computer and smartwatch. Wunderlist was free; additional collaboration features were available in a paid version known as Wunderlist Pro, released April 2013.
Daniel Gross is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Cue and later founded the startup accelerator Pioneer. Gross was born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1991. In 2013, Cue was sold to Apple where Gross led machine learning efforts until joining Y Combinator as a partner in January 2017. Gross is also a technology angel investor and contributor to the technology news site TechCrunch.
Evan Beard is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and co-founder with Ashton Kutcher of the media company A Plus (aplus.com). A Plus ranks among the largest websites in the US, with 30 to 50 million monthly unique visitors, and six months after launch was the fastest growing website in comScore's Mobile Metrix database. Beard has been recognized on the Forbes "30 under 30" list which features the "brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents" and Business Insider's list of the "most inspiring and influential people in New York tech". Prior to A Plus, Beard co-founded Etacts and ArmorHub, both acquired by publicly traded companies.
Mention is a social media and web monitoring tool. The media monitoring tool provides real-time alerts for a company's keyword and allows users to monitor millions of sources in real time and in 42 languages. Mention can be accessed from a mobile app or the web-based app. The media monitoring company has offices in New York and Paris.
Gigster provides a service that allows users to get tech projects built on demand. It was co-founded by Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan and based in San Francisco, California. They received seed funding from Greylock Partners, Bloomberg Beta, as well as notable angel investors and founders Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Justin Waldron of Zynga, and Emmett Shear of Twitch, among others. They were a part of Y-Combinator's Summer 2015 class.
Qasar Younis is a Pakistani American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He was the co-founder CEO of Talkbin, and is the former COO of Y Combinator. He left Y Combinator in March 2017 to start Applied Intuition, a technology company that is building advanced softwares and infrastructure tools for self-driving vehicles.
Convoy is an American trucking software company co-founded by CEO Dan Lewis and CTO Grant Goodale.