Paul Graham is an English computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, investor, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, co-founding the influential 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.
Cherry Creek High School is the oldest of seven high schools in the Cherry Creek School District in the Denver metropolitan area. It is located in Greenwood Village, Colorado, and is the largest high school in the Denver metro area, with an 80-acre (320,000 m2) campus and approximately 3,800 students. Cherry Creek High School is ranked 19th in Colorado.
Lala was an online music store created by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bill Nguyen. The service allowed members to legally create online shareable "playlists" of their own uploaded music which could play full length songs for other registered Lala members, purchase MP3s, stream music on a one-time basis or as inexpensively purchased "web songs," buy new CDs from the Lala store, leave blurbs on other members' pages, and participate in the community forums. Lala contracted with major labels and offered a large catalog of albums to stream or purchase. Their home page claimed over 8 million licensed songs available.
Trevor Blackwell is a Canadian-American computer programmer, engineer, entrepreneur and roboticist based in England.
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, Kan announced that he had founded Stash, a payment and e-commerce platform 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.
Lu Qi is a Chinese-American software executive and engineer who is the head of MiraclePlus, a startup incubator in China. Previously, Lu was the head of Y Combinator's China until it was shut down. He was formerly the chief operating officer of Baidu until he stepped down in May, 2018. He has served as the executive vice president of Microsoft, leading development of Bing, Skype, and Microsoft Office, and software engineer and manager for Yahoo!'s search technology division.
Posterous was a simple blogging platform started in May 2008. It supported integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. It was based in San Francisco and funded by Y Combinator.
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.
Ali Rowghani is an Iranian-born American businessman.
Upwave, formerly Survata, is a marketing analytics company based in San Francisco, California. It is the leading Analytics Platform that provides software and data to plan, measure and optimize brand marketing. Upwave rebranded from Survata in September 2020. Upwave’s data has been featured in outlets such as Forbes, CBS News, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. The company rebranded from Survata to Upwave in September 2020.
Meta was a company that designed augmented reality products. The company was founded by Meron Gribetz in 2012, based on the "Extramissive spatial imaging digital eye glass" technology invented by Gribetz and Mann originally filed with the US Patent and Trademark office Jan 3, 2013.
Satish Dharmaraj is an American entrepreneur, speaker, angel investor and venture capitalist, who currently serves as a general partner with Redpoint Ventures. In 2021, he was placed #6 on the Forbes Midas List of top 100 Venture Capital investors. Prior to Redpoint Ventures, Satish Dharmaraj founded Zimbra, which he then sold to Yahoo! for $350 million, in 2007.
Aaron Iba 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.
OrderAhead was a mobile ordering and payments company that allowing users to order food for pickup from local restaurants.
Garry Tan is an American venture capitalist and executive who is the CEO of Y Combinator and a founder of Initialized Capital. He previously co-founded Posterous and Posthaven. He was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, and previously a partner at Y Combinator. Tan is also known for his engagement in San Francisco politics, both as a commenter on social media and as a political donor.
Initialized Capital is a venture capital fund founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian, Harjeet Taggar, and Garry Tan.
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.
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.
