Weave, which was part of YC’s W14 batch, is going public. The founders of Weave, brothers Brandon and Jared Rodman and their good friend Clint Berry didn’t, in all honesty, impress me when I read their YC application. They seemed like nice guys who had just happened upon a sort of reasonable idea. I was wrong, and luckily we chose to invite them in for an interview. In that interview, their focus and determination were apparent. Their solution was built and worked, and their business was thriving. We were thrilled to fund them, and I quickly became their biggest fan.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/03/weave.jpg/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1200\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w600/2022/03/weave.jpg 600w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/size/w1000/2022/03/weave.jpg 1000w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/03/weave.jpg 1600w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 720px) 720px\"><figcaption>Brandon and Jared in Mountain View for their YC Interview</figcaption></figure><p>The ultimate story of Weave will best be told by Brandon, Jared, and Clint, but it is safe to say that it has been one with epic ups and downs. Even before the batch started there was cleanup to do as the original company organization was a complicated LLC which needed unwinding. And there was a cash crunch right away that needed resolution before the guys got on the road to a successful Demo Day. The good news for Weave, is that the founders had actually built something their customers wanted. The Weave solution, once integrated into an office, became fundamental to how that office ran – thus, their churn stayed low and customer satisfaction high.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/embed/rpyvQJGcQGw/" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe></figure><p>When Weave applied to YC, they supplied dentists with an all-in-one customer communications and management system. But their vision was always a larger one. They recognized that the Weave solution fit the bill for many other small health-related offices. I think, at least partially, the magnitude of this larger opportunity helped carry the team through the inevitable ups and downs of a high-growth business. There would be future cash crunches to manage, crises major and minor to overcome, and a business to expand. They kept at it, kept growing and the powerhouse company that is Weave Communications emerged.</p><p>Today, the company still supports dental offices, but also optometrists, vets, and other medical offices with similar capabilities. Tens of thousands of professional offices around the United States and Canada run their businesses using Weave.</p><p>The very best founders refuse to give up; refuse to let their company die; refuse to lose belief in their product and their vision. Brandon, Jared, and Clint worked incredibly hard, stayed the course and, as a result, Weave has become an extraordinary success. We at YC could not be happier for them and the entire team at Weave. Congrats to Brandon, Jared, Clint and everyone else at team Weave for today’s important milestone.</p>","comment_id":"61a50515cf1ec1000121a560","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2021/11/image-1024x683.jpg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2021-11-29T08:51:33.000-08:00","updated_at":"2022-03-08T15:00:34.000-08:00","published_at":"2021-11-11T08:53:00.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"Today, Weave, which was part of YC’s W14 batch, is going public. Brandon, Jared, and Clint worked incredibly hard, stayed the course and, as a result, Weave has become an extraordinary success.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71092","name":"Geoff Ralston","slug":"geoff-ralston","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/geoff.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Geoff Ralston is the former President of Y Combinator and has been with YC since 2011. Prior to YC, he built one of the first web mail services, RocketMail which became Yahoo Mail in 1997.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/geoff-ralston/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711a6","name":"#630","slug":"hash-630","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711a5","name":"Application to IPO","slug":"application-to-ipo","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/application-to-ipo/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71092","name":"Geoff Ralston","slug":"geoff-ralston","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/geoff.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Geoff Ralston is the former President of Y Combinator and has been with YC since 2011. Prior to YC, he built one of the first web mail services, RocketMail which became Yahoo Mail in 1997.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/geoff-ralston/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/weave-w14-is-going-public/","excerpt":"Today, Weave, which was part of YC’s W14 batch, is going public. The founders of Weave, brothers Brandon and Jared Rodman and their good friend Clint Berry didn’t, in all honesty, impress me when I read their YC application. They seemed like nice guys who had just happened upon a sort of reasonable idea. I was wrong, and luckily we chose to invite them in for an interview. In that interview, their focus and determination were apparent. Their solution was built and worked, and their business was thriving. We were thrilled to fund them, and I quickly became their biggest fan.","reading_time":2,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71c01","uuid":"d3f24dfb-03a9-43d1-864c-76acae7ab0ec","title":"Embark Trucks’ (W16) Road to IPO","slug":"embark-trucks-road-to-ipo","html":"<figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/embed/LzIA3pH7lIg/" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe></figure><p>Today, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://embarktrucks.com//">Embark Trucks</a>, once a startup in YC’s W16 batch, is going public. I remember interviewing Alex, Brandon and their former co-founder Michael in late 2015. Whenever we see such young teams – they were each 19 or 20 years old at the time – we have to wonder if they are actually ready to start a startup. Often, this sort of application simply represents undergrads playing games and is not a serious stab at company creation. In this case, we wondered if Alex et. al. were merely playing with golf carts and having a good time while never planning to leave school.</p><p>But almost everything about this team allayed that concern. Their thinking was startlingly clear and robust. Their answers were direct and to the point. They had a plan and were serious and, by the way, they’d already built the first self-driving vehicle in Canada. We were sold. This was a team of builders that was passionate, energetic, and committed. Those qualities make age irrelevant.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption\"><img src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/unnamed-2.jpeg/" class=\"kg-image\" alt loading=\"lazy\"><figcaption>Embark Trucks (formerly Varden Labs) Team Photo in 2016</figcaption></figure><p>The team from Varden Labs – that was Embark’s original company name – came into YC intending to build self-driving shuttles for use on campuses where the roads and pathways were far more controlled and speed could be far lower than out in the wide-world. This was a key insight for the team: that the first self-driving vehicles would be delivered in a highly constrained environment because the unconstrained problem was, frankly, too difficult. We know today all too well how spot-on they were.</p><figure class=\"kg-card kg-embed-card\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/embed/8MdVFF5HU0g/" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"></iframe></figure><p>As their time in the batch progressed, they found, somewhat to their dismay, that not only was their chosen domain, i.e. campuses, not as constrained as they had hoped, it also turned out that various campuses had such different environments that each posed it’s own, unique set of challenges. As the initial excitement around their chosen market diminished, temptations to pivot began to show up. A mining company in Australia wondered if the team could create self-driving mining trucks in mining’s own, highly constrained environment. The team was tempted to switch ideas, but, in one of the early, impressively focused decisions, they chose to stay the course, show that they could sign up campuses and grow. They continued to sign up customers, had a very successful Demo Day and raised the early funds they needed to build the initial version of the company that would emerge as Embark.</p><p>Despite this early success with their original idea, eventually Alex and Brandon became persuaded that the campus market was not the right place to start. On the other hand, they believed that self-driving trucks, constrained to highways, was an enormous market and although still fabulously difficult, a more tractable problem. So they did pivot, successfully persuading their investors to keep on riding shotgun with them. And, as always with this team, they got right down to building and in short-time had put together their first self-driving truck.</p><p>I’ve stayed in close touch with Alex and Brandon over the years and their energy, their optimism, and, above all, the clarity of their thinking has never ceased to impress me. Now, they have shown they can build a company. Today’s milestone is but one step on what I’m sure will continue to be an exciting road for us all to follow. Congrats to Alex, Brandon and the entire Embark team.</p>","comment_id":"61a504a2cf1ec1000121a54f","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2021/12/unnamed-2.jpeg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2021-11-29T08:49:38.000-08:00","updated_at":"2022-01-17T21:36:45.000-08:00","published_at":"2021-11-11T08:51:00.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"Today, Embark Trucks, once a startup in YC’s W16 batch, is going public. Congrats to Alex, Brandon and the entire Embark team.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71092","name":"Geoff Ralston","slug":"geoff-ralston","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/geoff.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Geoff Ralston is the former President of Y Combinator and has been with YC since 2011. Prior to YC, he built one of the first web mail services, RocketMail which became Yahoo Mail in 1997.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/geoff-ralston/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711a4","name":"#982","slug":"hash-982","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711a5","name":"Application to IPO","slug":"application-to-ipo","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/application-to-ipo/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71092","name":"Geoff Ralston","slug":"geoff-ralston","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/geoff.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Geoff Ralston is the former President of Y Combinator and has been with YC since 2011. Prior to YC, he built one of the first web mail services, RocketMail which became Yahoo Mail in 1997.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/geoff-ralston/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/embark-trucks-road-to-ipo/","excerpt":"Today, Embark Trucks, once a startup in YC’s W16 batch, is going public. I remember interviewing Alex, Brandon and their former co-founder Michael in late 2015. Whenever we see such young teams – they were each 19 or 20 years old at the time – we have to wonder if they are actually ready to start a startup. Often, this sort of application simply represents undergrads playing games and is not a serious stab at company creation. In this case, we wondered if Alex et. al. were merely playing with golf carts and having a good time while never planning to leave school.","reading_time":2,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71bfb","uuid":"a7b8080d-dd17-4a9f-bff2-cfd013ca6a52","title":"Amplitude (W12) is going public","slug":"amplitude-w12-is-going-public","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>Today, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/amplitude/">Amplitude, which was part of YC’s W12 batch, is going public. Their story of grit, determination, and creativity, is an epic one.</p>\n<p>Spenser and Curtis first applied to YC in 2011, but their idea, a new version of Mechanical Turk, did not impress YC’s reviewers at the time, and although they were clearly brilliant hackers, that first application was rejected.</p>\n<p>It is always a good sign when founders come back and, indeed, they came up with a new idea and applied for the Winter 2012 batch. Their company “Sonalight”, was accepted to YC W12, despite what Spenser remembers as PG’s skepticism that the technology and market were ready for the product they intended to build.</p>\n<p><div id=\"attachment_1104944\" style=\"width: 350px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1104944\" loading=\"lazy\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2011-03-22-Spenser-Curtis-at-SFO.jpg/" alt=\"Amplitude founders\" width=\"340\" height=\"299\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1104944\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2011-03-22-Spenser-Curtis-at-SFO.jpg 340w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2011-03-22-Spenser-Curtis-at-SFO-300x264.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 340px) 100vw, 340px\" /><p id=\"caption-attachment-1104944\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amplitude founders Spenser Skates and Curtis Liu – March 2011<br /></p></div></p>\n<p>Their new idea was intended to make it safe to text while driving by converting text to speech. This wasn’t nearly so common or easy back then, and despite PG’s skepticism, it was clear to us that this was a team focused on building products that customers actually wanted and needed. They successfully built the software, but had a hard time finding paying customers. It turns out that although this is a good idea (many of us use something of the sort today), PG’s insight had been right-on and at the time, it wasn’t a great business. Spenser and Curtis figured this out rapidly and by the spring of 2012 they were searching once again for the right product to build.</p>\n<p>I remember having office hours with Spenser and Curtis at the time, and they were considering a product in the education space, which naturally I loved and encouraged. But, in fact, they rather quickly settled on a different problem space that they understood deeply and which immediately resonated with their batchmates. It was also a problem for which the market had not yet, in Spenser and Curtis’s opinion, come up with a great solution. Their chosen target was, of course, mobile analytics. This, it turned out, was precisely the right idea for the team. Around this time, Jeffrey Wang, a Stanford computer scientist and top-quality hacker, joined Spenser and Curtis as co-founder.</p>\n<p><div id=\"attachment_1104946\" style=\"width: 970px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1104946\" loading=\"lazy\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2014-09-Stanford-Fall-Career-Fair-Spenser-Jeffrey.jpg/" alt=\"Amplitude Founders\" width=\"960\" height=\"720\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1104946\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2014-09-Stanford-Fall-Career-Fair-Spenser-Jeffrey.jpg 960w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2014-09-Stanford-Fall-Career-Fair-Spenser-Jeffrey-300x225.jpg 300w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2014-09-Stanford-Fall-Career-Fair-Spenser-Jeffrey-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 960px) 100vw, 960px\" /><p id=\"caption-attachment-1104946\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amplitude founders Spenser Skates and and Jeffrey Wang – September 2014</p></div></p>\n<p>When an excellent team turns to a new problem, you see results unbelievably quickly. In just a few months, they were ready to launch.</p>\n<p><div id=\"attachment_1104949\" style=\"width: 2058px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1104949\" loading=\"lazy\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/414321_3174631928052_1824851596_o.jpeg/" alt=\"Amplitude Dashboard\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1224\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1104949\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/414321_3174631928052_1824851596_o.jpeg 2048w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/414321_3174631928052_1824851596_o-300x179.jpeg 300w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/414321_3174631928052_1824851596_o-1024x612.jpeg 1024w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/414321_3174631928052_1824851596_o-768x459.jpeg 768w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/414321_3174631928052_1824851596_o-1536x918.jpeg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\" /><p id=\"caption-attachment-1104949\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The monitor on the wall had Amplitude’s analytics dashboard on it, and it was on 24/7.<br /></p></div></p>\n<p>One thing no one could ever doubt about the Amplitude founders was their ability to build: they are really strong hackers. And once they had a product, they almost immediately had customers. This was a really good sign. Within a couple of months, everyone’s confidence was soaring. We all, including PG, believed in the team and the idea, and it was pretty obvious they were onto something real.</p>\n<p>A year later, Amplitude had real revenue, was tracking billions of events per month, and the epic company they have become was taking shape.</p>\n<p><div id=\"attachment_1104947\" style=\"width: 1290px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1104947\" loading=\"lazy\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2015-02-08-22.25.48.jpg/" alt=\"Amplitude team - 2015\" width=\"1280\" height=\"960\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1104947\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2015-02-08-22.25.48.jpg 1280w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2015-02-08-22.25.48-300x225.jpg 300w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2015-02-08-22.25.48-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/2015-02-08-22.25.48-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1280px) 100vw, 1280px\" /><p id=\"caption-attachment-1104947\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amplitude team – February 2015</p></div></p>\n<p>Over the subsequent years, the team was met with lots of skepticism about the size of their opportunity, but at every stage, they simply put their heads down, built fantastic software and products, and grew. They stayed close to YC, even sharing an office with our own Michael Seibel, who was running SocialCam at the time. In the end, Amplitude managed to dominate their market and today’s public offering is a huge testament to the fearlessness and smarts which stood out nearly ten years ago. Our heartfelt congratulations to Spenser, Curtis, Jeffrey and everyone at Amplitude.</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1104942","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2021/10/Amplitude_shorthand_color.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2021-09-28T02:15:33.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-03-08T14:53:26.000-08:00","published_at":"2021-09-28T02:15:33.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71092","name":"Geoff Ralston","slug":"geoff-ralston","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/geoff.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Geoff Ralston is the former President of Y Combinator and has been with YC since 2011. Prior to YC, he built one of the first web mail services, RocketMail which became Yahoo Mail in 1997.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/geoff-ralston/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7119a","name":"#40","slug":"hash-40","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711a5","name":"Application to IPO","slug":"application-to-ipo","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/application-to-ipo/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71092","name":"Geoff Ralston","slug":"geoff-ralston","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/geoff.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Geoff Ralston is the former President of Y Combinator and has been with YC since 2011. Prior to YC, he built one of the first web mail services, RocketMail which became Yahoo Mail in 1997.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/geoff-ralston/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/amplitude-w12-is-going-public/","excerpt":"Today, Amplitude, which was part of YC’s W12 batch, is going public. Their story of grit, determination, and creativity, is an epic one.","reading_time":3,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71bfa","uuid":"54181af6-f62b-4175-9643-b6ca9aaf5250","title":"Ginkgo Bioworks (S14) is going public today","slug":"ginkgo-bioworks-s14-is-going-public-today","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ginkgo-bioworks/">Ginkgo Bioworks</a> is the first biotech company YC funded, and today they are going public. To celebrate their IPO, here’s the story of how Ginkgo Bioworks ended up in YC, and what their journey was like as YC’s first biotech startup.</p>\n<p>In 2014, YC had been funding startups for 9 years, but we’d mostly funded software companies. While we hadn’t funded many, we thought that the YC model might work well for hard-tech companies. We were especially interested in synthetic biology and the intersection between biology and computer science.</p>\n<p>At the time, the first SynBioBeta conference had yet to be held and the first synthetic biology startups had just been started. But we thought that the potential was interesting enough to put out a “Request for Startups” on our blog, a call for people working in this area to apply to YC. Here’s what we wrote:</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:25px;\"><em>“Biotech. It’s still early, but it seems like we’re finally making real progress hacking biology. There are so many directions this can go—fighting disease, slowing aging, merging humans and computers, downloading memories, genetic programming, etc. We are certain that this is going to be a surprising, powerful and controversial field over the next several decades—it feels a little bit like microcomputers in the 1970s.”</em></p>\n<p>The Ginkgo Bioworks founders read this and got interested in applying to YC. A couple of months later, they became the first biotech company funded by Y Combinator.</p>\n<p>When Jason, Barry, Reshma, Austin, and Tom joined YC, they’d already been working on the technology behind Ginkgo Bioworks for a number of years, funded by several million dollars in scientific grants from the US Government. But they were just on the cusp of figuring out a sustainable business model for their organism engineering platform and getting their first customers.</p>\n<p>Ginkgo planned a unique business model where instead of producing chemicals themselves, they’d engineer organisms and license them to other companies. This would allow them to avoid the challenges faced by other synthetic biology companies that had to do capital intensive build-outs of massive fermentation facilities. In the end, this proved to be a fundamentally sound business model that would be gross margin positive from the beginning.</p>\n<p>During YC, they still needed to prove that customers would pay for it. So during the three months of the program, they worked tirelessly to finalize deals with customers, closing $1.2M in milestone contracts. They also figured out the right way to explain Ginkgo to investors, which was not easy because their vision was so far ahead of their time.</p>\n<p>In their Demo Day presentation, Jason Kelly crisply articulated the bold vision that has been behind Ginkgo from their origins at MIT to the present day.</p>\n<p style=\"padding-left:25px;\"><em>“We’ve used robotic engineering and software to reduce the cost of genetic engineering by a factor of 5x in the last two years. This is the beginning of a Moore’s law for genetic engineering…. The last 20 years of biotechnology have been the punch card era of biotech: slow, manual, tedious programming of organisms…. Imagine what can be done with a modern programming stack on top of biology. That’s what we’re building at Ginkgo. If that sounds cool to you, you can find us in the Jurassic Park t-shirts”</em></p>\n<p>Here’s their Demo Day presentation:</p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/embed/FmD4c7hqtqQ/" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>\n<p>Yes, they really did wear Jurassic Park t-shirts to Demo Day.</p>\n<p><div id=\"attachment_1104933\" style=\"width: 235px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1104933\" loading=\"lazy\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/unnamed-1-225x300.jpeg/" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1104933\" srcset=\"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/unnamed-1-225x300.jpeg 225w, https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/09/unnamed-1.jpeg 384w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" /><p id=\"caption-attachment-1104933\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Founder Reshma Shetty on YC S14 Demo Day</p></div></p>\n<p>With this expansive vision and their solid commercial traction, Ginkgo successfully raised their first financing round at the end of the batch.</p>\n<p>Since then, they’ve executed brilliantly. They delivered on their early deals with customers, creating breakthrough organisms that produce flavors and fragrances for some of the world’s biggest corporations. They built a massive organism engineering foundry in Boston that looks like a scene out of a science fiction movie. They hired many of the brightest scientific minds in the field. As they expanded into new areas, they spun off multiple companies as joint-ventures.</p>\n<p>The Ginkgo Bioworks founders have also become some of the best evangelists for the field of synthetic biology as a whole. Through their regular appearances at YC events and conferences like the annual iGEM competition, they’ve inspired many young scientists to enter the field. In 2019 YC launched a <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-and-ginkgo-bioworks-announce-new-partnership-for-synthetic-biology-startups//">partnership with Ginkgo to let new synthetic biology startups use Ginkgo’s foundry to launch.</p>\n<p>When the pandemic started in March 2020, Ginkgo sprang into action. They converted some of their massive foundry into a covid testing lab, quickly becoming one of the largest and most automated covid testing labs in the country. That they were able to build a completely different business so rapidly, outcompeting long standing incumbents, is a testament to the brilliance and agility of the Ginkgo team.</p>\n<p>While today is a huge milestone, it is still day one for synthetic biology and for the potential of Ginkgo to transform the way the world makes things. There is still much work to do to achieve Ginkgo’s Demo Day vision of biology as easily programmable as a computer. But for now, we’re very proud to have been the first investor in the world’s most iconic synthetic biology company.</p>\n<p>Congratulations, Ginkgo!</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1104930","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/BlogTwitter-Image-Template-1.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2021-09-17T02:13:43.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-03-08T14:53:35.000-08:00","published_at":"2021-09-17T02:13:43.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71097","name":"Jared Friedman","slug":"jared-friedman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Jared.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Jared is Managing Director, Software and Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder of Scribd, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2006 and grew to be one of the top 100 sites on the web.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/jared-friedman/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7119b","name":"#729","slug":"hash-729","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711a5","name":"Application to IPO","slug":"application-to-ipo","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/application-to-ipo/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71097","name":"Jared Friedman","slug":"jared-friedman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Jared.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Jared is Managing Director, Software and Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder of Scribd, which was funded by Y Combinator in 2006 and grew to be one of the top 100 sites on the web.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/jared-friedman/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/ginkgo-bioworks-s14-is-going-public-today/","excerpt":"Ginkgo Bioworks is the first biotech company YC funded, and today they are going public. To celebrate their IPO, here’s the story of how Ginkgo Bioworks ended up in YC, and what their journey was like as YC’s first biotech startup.","reading_time":4,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71be4","uuid":"a310a566-0583-44ed-a462-01b4df14ed5b","title":"Coinbase from YC to IPO","slug":"coinbase-from-yc-to-ipo","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>Today, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/coinbase/">Coinbase has gone public. We are proud to say that Coinbase is a Y Combinator company and a member of the Summer 2012 batch.</p>\n<p>Co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong applied to Y Combinator on March 29, 2012 and began the batch a few months later. According to the Coinbase YC application, the company was initially named “Bitbank” and had not been launched; however, Brian mentions in his application that he built one of the first Android apps for bitcoin as a side project.</p>\n<p>The most interesting professional accomplishment that Brian mentions in his YC application is that he helped build the fraud prevention systems at Airbnb (which at the time was a relatively small and fast-growing Y Combinator company). In retrospect, this work experience around international payments, growth, and security was excellent context for Brian as the CEO of Coinbase.</p>\n<p>Brian is a founder who believed in something early and was willing to act on that belief to build a company before most people thought it was a good idea. The Coinbase YC application also states “Right now there are about 100,000 bitcoin users despite the relatively immature tools, which is a good indicator of interest.” 🙂</p>\n<p>At the time buying and selling bitcoin was incredibly difficult — as the YC application says: “In the bitcoin world, right now people use the open source desktop client which is scary unless you’re technical (34 digit hashes are your send/receive addresses). People also go through multi-step processes to buy and sell bitcoins through different intermediaries.” The problems at the time were clear, and Coinbase brought a simple and effective solution to the market.</p>\n<p>Much of this sentiment can be seen in Brian’s pitch at YC S12 Demo Day, which he <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://medium.com/@barmstrong/the-coinbase-seed-round-pitch-deck-50c8ec91d40b/">shared publicly. Coinbase, as a hosted bitcoin wallet, made it easy for non-technical people to participate in this new digital currency. And the impact was clear throughout the YC batch, as Coinbase signups from August 10 to August 17 in 2012 increased 20 percent daily. Then, less than one year later, Coinbase <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/coinbase-yc-s12-raises-5m-from-union-square-ventures-largest-financing-round-yet-for-a-bitcoin-startup//">raised the largest funding round to date for a bitcoin startup.</p>\n<p>After YC, Coinbase executed brilliantly. The team Brian brought together, including the addition of Fred Ehrsam as a co-founder, was invaluable — as building security systems around something this valuable and with this little margin for error or mistakes alone is a huge technical and operational challenge. Throughout all of this, I recall Brian’s calm focus and dedication in every one of our conversations, despite operating in a very noisy and excitable market.</p>\n<p>Bridging the gap between cryptocurrencies, regulators, and the banking world is not easy but Coinbase figured it out. Additionally, it’s worth celebrating that Coinbase was always a good business, i.e. it always made money. Being on solid financial footing so that the inevitable ups and downs of the market do not affect the viability or longevity of the business was an excellent strategy. I expect Coinbase will keep this strategy going.</p>\n<p>Congratulations, Coinbase team, on today’s IPO!</p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1104783","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Artboard-32.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2021-04-14T01:14:39.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-03-08T14:53:48.000-08:00","published_at":"2021-04-14T01:14:39.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Today, Coinbase has gone public. We are proud to say that Coinbase is a Y Combinator company and a member of the Summer 2012 batch.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71085","name":"Dalton Caldwell","slug":"dalton-caldwell","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Dalton.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Dalton is Managing Director, Architect and Group Partner at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO of imeem (acquired by MySpace in 2009), and the cofounder and CEO of App.net.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/dalton-caldwell/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71152","name":"Founder Stories","slug":"founder-stories","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/founder-stories/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711b9","name":"#439","slug":"hash-439","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a711a5","name":"Application to IPO","slug":"application-to-ipo","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/application-to-ipo/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71085","name":"Dalton Caldwell","slug":"dalton-caldwell","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Dalton.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Dalton is Managing Director, Architect and Group Partner at YC. 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Ginkgo Bioworks is the first biotech company YC funded, and today they are going public. To celebrate their IPO, here’s the story of how Ginkgo Bioworks ended up in YC, and what their journey was like as YC’s first biotech startup.
