Related Research Articles
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.
Timothy Cook Draper is an American venture capital investor, and founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), Draper University, Draper Venture Network, Draper Associates and Draper Goren Holm. His most prominent investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood, Ancestry.com, Twitch, Cruise Automation, PrettyLitter and Focus Media. In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage for his purchase at a US Marshals Service auction of seized bitcoins from the Silk Road website. Draper is a proponent of Bitcoin and decentralization. Draper was also one of the first investors in Theranos.
Justin.tv was a website created by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007 to allow anyone to broadcast video online. Justin.tv user accounts were called "channels", like those on YouTube, and users were encouraged to broadcast a wide variety of user-generated live video content, called "broadcasts".
Justin Kan is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platforms Justin.tv and Twitch, as well as the mobile social video application Socialcam. He is also the cofounder and former CEO of law-tech company Atrium. In 2024, he announced the launch of Stash, an e-commerce and payment platform tailored for video game developers.
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur and investor best known as the CEO of OpenAI since 2019. 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.
Ben Huh is a South Korean-American internet entrepreneur and the former CEO of The Cheezburger Network, which at its peak in 2010 received 375 million views a month across its 50 sites.
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 is highly competitive. There are specific accelerators, such as corporate accelerators, which are often subsidiaries or programs of larger corporations that act like seed accelerators.
The Global Mobile Internet Conference is hosted annually in Beijing and Silicon Valley. Mobile executives, entrepreneurs, developers, and investors from around the globe and across platforms attend GMIC each year.
Emmett Shear is an American Internet entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder of live video platform Justin.tv. He served as the chief executive officer of Twitch when it was spun off from Justin.tv until March 2023. In 2011, Shear was appointed as a part-time partner at venture capital firm Y Combinator. In November 2023, he briefly served as interim CEO of OpenAI.
Exec was a company based in San Francisco, United States, that provided companies and individuals access to on-demand personal assistants and cleaning services. Started by Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv, in February 2012 with co-founders Daniel Kan, his brother, and Amir Ghazvinian, Exec was backed by Y Combinator and other prominent investors. The company was acquired by Handy in January 2014.
The Muse is a New York City-based online career platform founded in 2011 by Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos, and Melissa McCreery.
Daniel Gross is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Cue, led artificial intelligence efforts at Apple, served as a partner at Y-Combinator, and is a notable technology investor in companies like Uber, Instacart, Figma, GitHub, Airtable, Rippling, CoreWeave, Character.ai, and others.
A robotaxi, also known as robo-taxi, self-driving taxi or driverless taxi, is an autonomous car operated for a ridesharing company.
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, and the CEO of Applied Intuition, a technology company that is building advanced software and infrastructure tools for self-driving vehicles. Prior to Applied Intuition, he was the COO of Y Combinator during Sam Altman’s tenure as President. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Talkbin.
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.
Kyle Vogt is an American businessman. In 2013, Vogt founded Cruise Automation, where he served as the company's President, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer until resigning on November 19, 2023. Cruise develops self-driving car technology and, since being acquired in May 2016, operates as an independent subsidiary of General Motors.
Cruise LLC is an American self-driving car company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, Cruise tests and develops autonomous car technology. The company is a largely autonomous subsidiary of General Motors. Following a series of incidents, it suspended operations in October 2023, and the CEO resigned in November 2023.
Snappr is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco whose primary business offering is an on-demand professional photography booking service. The company also offers a free photo analysis tool for use with social media profiles. Snappr's key investors include seed accelerator Y Combinator.
Brex Inc. is an American financial service and technology company that offers business credit cards and cash management accounts to technology companies. Brex cards are business charge cards, which require at least $50,000 in a bank account if professionally invested, if not with $100,000 to open, and cardholders who default won't damage their personal credit or assets. Emigrant Bank issues the Brex cards.
References
- ↑ "40 Under 40: The Most Influential Young People in Business 2017". 17 August 2017.
- ↑ "Twitch founder Justin Kan quits Y Combinator to start his own incubator - Silicon Valley Business Journal". Archived from the original on 2017-03-10.
- ↑ "Daniel Kan '05 - Lakeside School".
- 1 2 3 Clifford, Catherine (26 April 2016). "This 29-Year-Old Entrepreneur Was Rejected by 35 Potential Employers. Now, He's the Co-Founder of a $1 Billion Startup. Here's How".
- ↑ Empson, Rip (15 January 2014). "Handybook Hoovers Up Exec For "Under $10M" To Sweep The Home Services Market".
- ↑ "GM Buying Self-Driving Tech Startup for More Than $1 Billion".
- ↑ Ohnsman, Alan. "GM's Cruise Poised To Add 1,100 Silicon Valley Self-Driving Car Tech Jobs". Forbes .