Y Combinator

$\"\"$ apply here</a>. The application deadline is Feb 18th at 11:59 PM PST.\n","comment_id":"1103400","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2019-01-29T01:00:20.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T11:58:12.000-07:00","published_at":"2019-01-29T01:00:20.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71179","name":"YC Events","slug":"yc-events","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-events/"},{"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":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71179","name":"YC Events","slug":"yc-events","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-events/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/yc-120/","excerpt":"","reading_time":1,"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":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71af1","uuid":"9775112b-0262-4631-abc7-b5b369ac8346","title":"Frontier Carbon Removal Technologies","slug":"frontier-carbon-removal-technologies","html":"We’re excited to announce our new and expanded request for startups and nonprofits focusing on frontier technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Read the RFS <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://carbon.ycombinator.com//">here.

Climate change is one of the biggest problems we face as humans and we want YC to be part of driving these solutions. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-report-half-degree.html/">Research indicates that stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere.\nWhile we’ve funded a lot of great companies working on renewal energy like <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.thinkbright.mx//">Bright, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://buypower.ng//">Buypower, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.advanotech.com//">Advano, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.helionenergy.com//">Helion and will continue to do so, we’ve identified four frontier technologies to remove CO2 that we think deserve more research and attention. We worked with scientists on preliminary research into each category. These ideas press on the limit of what’s possible, and we’re not sure which side of that line they’re on. We know there are a lot of ideas out there, and want to take an expansive approach.\nWe have conviction that it’s a worthwhile endeavor to remove CO2 from the air and transform it into something else useful or figure out how to store it safely, long-term. They may seem like moonshots now, but our goal is to try to come up with technically feasible solutions at realistic costs. It’s time to take big swings at stopping climate change and put more resources into work already being done.\n","comment_id":"1103201","feature_image":"https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1611273426858-450d8e3c9fce?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=MnwxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fGNhcmJvbnxlbnwwfHx8fDE2NzAyNzI3NjU&ixlib=rb-4.0.3&q=80&w=2000","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-10-23T03:16:16.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-12-05T12:39:42.000-08:00","published_at":"2018-10-23T03:16:16.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"}],"tags":[{"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":"638a7d499132af0001d1aee9","name":"rfs","slug":"rfs","description":"Request for Startups","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/rfs/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"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/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/frontier-carbon-removal-technologies/","excerpt":"We’re excited to announce our new and expanded request for startups and nonprofits focusing on frontier technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Read the RFS here.","reading_time":1,"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":"Photo by <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://unsplash.com/es/@chrisleboutillier?utm_source=ghost&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=api-credit\%22>Chris LeBoutillier</a> / <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=ghost&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=api-credit\%22>Unsplash%22},{%22id%22:%2261fe29f1c7139e0001a71a84%22,%22uuid%22:%22c3eb1fe1-8496-4fe9-bff0-f487e40ed5a5%22,%22title%22:%22YC China + Qi Lu","slug":"yc-china-qi-lu","html":"Edit: Read <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-yc-china//">this update</a> on YC China.\nI am delighted to announce that <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSydk0XzxEE\%22>Qi Lu</a> is joining YC to launch and run YC China. I have been trying to recruit Qi for many years—he is one of the most impressive technologists I know.\nOur mission at YC is to enable more innovation than any other company in the world, and to ensure that the benefits of that are fairly spread throughout humanity. We believe that technology drives innovation, that startups can do very ambitious things if they think on a long enough time horizon, and that hackers can change the world.\nQi embodies all of these values, and China has been an important missing piece of our puzzle—the entrepreneurial energy and talent there is an amazing force. Qi will be able to take what makes YC work and adapt it for China. We are excited for Qi to come onboard as the Founding CEO of YC China and to build a long-term local organization that will combine the best of Silicon Valley and China and create a lot of innovation.\nQi will also take over as the Head of YC Research, YC’s non-profit research lab. More investment in R&D is critical to a good future for the world, and we plan to establish a new YC Research location in Seattle to drive more research.\nYC has been very successful in the world by believing that hackers – not businesspeople – can build the biggest companies. We are confident that with Qi at the helm, YC China will do the same.\nWe think that a significant percentage of the largest technology companies that are founded in the next decade—companies at the scale of Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook—will be based in the US and China. YC’s greatest strength is our founder community and with the launch of YC China we believe we have a special opportunity to include many more Chinese founders in our global community.\nThis has taken a lot of work from a lot of people, but I’d especially like to thank Eric Migicovsky, who has done a huge amount of work to establish YC in China!\n","comment_id":"1102742","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-08-14T12:45:52.000-07:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T12:06:17.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-08-14T12:45:52.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71186","name":"China","slug":"china","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/china/"},{"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":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71186","name":"China","slug":"china","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/china/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/yc-china-qi-lu/","excerpt":"Edit: Read this update on YC China.","reading_time":1,"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":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71953","uuid":"b6d568d4-d299-4d3a-8f98-2629ef5c9dc8","title":"US Visas","slug":"us-visas","html":"We’ve heard from some founders that they’re nervous about applying to YC because they worry they won’t be able to get visas to attend interviews or the summer program.\nWe will hold a day of interviews in Vancouver for founders we’d like to interview but can’t get US visas. We will also experiment with allowing companies that we’d like to fund but are unable to get visas for the duration of our three-month program to participate remotely.\nWe provide immigration assistance and advice, and we try to help find ways for everyone we want to fund to be able to come here. While we understand that remote work works really well for some companies and some programs, we don’t think it’s optimal for our semi-annual batches.\nOur goal is to fund the most talented founders in the world, no matter where they live. We think it’s an incredible asset for our country that so many of the best people in the world want to come start their companies here.\n","comment_id":"1098793","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-03-09T00:58:15.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:13:02.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-03-09T00:58:15.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"}],"tags":[{"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":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"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/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/us-visas/","excerpt":"We’ve heard from some founders that they’re nervous about applying to YC because they worry they won’t be able to get visas to attend interviews or the summer program.","reading_time":1,"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":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71950","uuid":"a8309411-d341-4cc0-8090-ea9e547ecca7","title":"YC’s Online Class (Sign up at StartupSchool.org)","slug":"onlineclass","html":"<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSYC_Logo.png/"> $\"SSYC_Logo\"$ Angelcalc, built by my partner Geoff Ralston). Founders are often surprised about how choosing to raise less helps protect their ownership more than negotiating valuation does.\nOf course, it’s easy to take this advice too far. It’s more important not to run out of money than almost anything else.\nI have recently seen several examples of companies doing pretty well and going out to raise B rounds with investors already owning 50-60% of the company. In all cases, they are having a tough time. As one very successful investor says, “one of the immutable laws of venture is that there are only 100 points on the cap table”. At some point, it gets hard to make it all work. Selling a few percentage points too many won’t kill you, but selling 30 points too many may.\nRemember that raising money is not success. Raising huge amounts of money early on is very rarely how companies win (though it is sometimes how companies lose). Be one of those companies that does a lot with a little, instead of a little with a lot. Resist the urge to seek validation by having a long list of impressive sounding investors.\nConstraints are wonderfully focusing. Excess capital usually ends up making its way into the hands of landlords of some sort anyway. And if you end up being the next Airbnb, you’ll be really happy you held on to that equity.\n<hr />\n","comment_id":"1098702","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-03-01T04:47:13.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:13:20.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-03-01T04:47:13.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","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/advice/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","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/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/dilution/","excerpt":"There has probably been more capital looking to invest in private technology companies in the past five years than any five-year period before.","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":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a7194a","uuid":"a6126463-cd3d-4248-b0e2-c65ddc163924","title":"Drew Houston on How to Build the Future","slug":"drew-houston-on-how-to-build-the-future","html":"Drew is the founder and CEO of Dropbox.\nRejected once before, Drew eventually went through Y Combinator in the Winter of 2007 with Dropbox and has since grown it to over 500 million users today.\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"125\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/309078614%3Fsecret_token%3Ds-wnoRQ&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true\"></iframe>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"scribd_iframe_embed\" src=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.scribd.com/embeds/340055864/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-eCFVXit0sFAX4F42Oz7G&show_recommendations=true\" data-auto-height=\"false\" data-aspect-ratio=\"0.7729220222793488\" scrolling=\"no\" id=\"doc_34190\" width=\"100%\" height=\"600\" frameborder=\"0\"></iframe>\n","comment_id":"1098646","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/wordpress/2017/02/Drew-Houston-How-to-Build-the-Future.jpeg","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-02-23T01:33:38.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:13:38.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-02-23T01:33:38.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71188","name":"How To Build The Future","slug":"how-to-build-the-future","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/how-to-build-the-future/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116e","name":"Top Companies 2018","slug":"top-companies-2018","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/top-companies-2018/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71172","name":"Video","slug":"video","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/video/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71188","name":"How To Build The Future","slug":"how-to-build-the-future","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/how-to-build-the-future/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/drew-houston-on-how-to-build-the-future/","excerpt":"Drew is the founder and CEO of Dropbox.","reading_time":0,"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":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71947","uuid":"7e1bb03b-4f12-4d61-9957-bb2900fdb997","title":"2017 YC Annual Letter","slug":"2017-yc-annual-letter","html":"Dear YC Community:\nIn response to a <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13203833\%22>comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress.\nOur mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone. We believe new technology, economic growth, and new ideas about how our society might function are more important than ever before.\nAs of January 1, 2017, YC has funded over 3,200 founders and 1,470 companies. This year, assuming there is not a macroeconomic meltdown, we expect the total valuation of companies that have gone through our program to surpass $100 billion. We have also funded more than 30 non-profits.\nAs always, most of the credit goes to our founders—they, and the astonishingly strong and helpful community they create, are what make YC special. The second-most credit goes to our team—I am incredibly thankful to work with such a talented and driven group of people.\nYC Companies & Investments\nWe invested about $27 million in the Winter and Summer 2016 batches, and so far we have invested about $187 million in later-stage investments from our first Continuity fund.\nWe are excited to fund companies in any space that we believe is good for the world and can eventually sustain a very large company. Some of the many areas we’re interested in are noted in our <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/rfs-news-jobs-and-democracy//">Requests for Startups</a>.\nOur largest exit of 2016 was <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.getcruise.com//">Cruise, a self-driving car company. We expect to fund many more machine learning-driven companies in the future (I will generally avoid calling out trends in these letters, because I’ve noticed doing that produced unintended consequences, but this one is so obvious and so important that I’m happy to mention it).\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.helionenergy.com//">Helion, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.facebook.com/okloinc//">Oklo, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.thinkbright.mx//">Bright are all working toward inexpensive clean energy, an area of great interest to us. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.lendup.com//">LendUp and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.coinbase.com//">Coinbase are two examples of YC companies innovating in financial services technology. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://boomsupersonic.com//">Boom and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://relativityspace.com//">Relativity Space</a> are pursuing strategies in aerospace that most companies haven’t pursued seriously in a long time, or ever.\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.ginkgobioworks.com//">Gingko Bioworks</a> is learning how to design new organisms, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.scienceexchange.com//">Science Exchange</a> is making it easier to get new experiments done. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://farmlogs.com//">FarmLogs is making it easier and more efficient to grow food, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.gobble.com//">Gobble, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.instacart.com//">Instacart and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.doordash.com//">Doordash are making it easier to eat it. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.reddit.com//">Reddit and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://9gag.com//">9Gag continue to make me waste enormous amounts of time, but I love every minute I waste.\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.docker.com//">Docker, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.plangrid.com//">PlanGrid, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://checkr.com//">Checkr, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.flexport.com//">Flexport, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://gusto.com//">Gusto are just a few of the enterprise companies we’ve seen begin to thrive. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.mz.com//">Machine Zone</a> has become one of the largest gaming companies in the world. <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.rappi.com//">Rappi, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.wave.com//">Wave, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.strikingly.com//">Strikingly are some of the many YC companies succeeding on other continents.\nIn addition to the three companies we are currently best known for—Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe—more than 50 of our companies are worth more than $100 million each.\nWe’ve funded <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.ycombinator.com/companies//">a lot of other companies</a>, but in the spirit of not exhausting your patience, I’ll stop listing them here.\nHyperscale\nThere’s one more trend I want to mention, though it’s not about a specific market. I think we’re now in the era of hyperscale technology companies. If you believe Metcalfe’s law, it stands to reason that network-effected technology companies are now far more powerful than ever before, simply because the number of people connected to the internet keeps getting bigger, and n^2 gets big really fast.\nCompanies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have powerful advantages that are still not fully understood by most founders and investors. I expect that they will continue to do a lot of things well, have significant data and computation advantages, be able to attract a large percentage of the most talented engineers, and aggressively buy companies that get off to promising starts. This trend is unlikely to reverse without antitrust action, and I suggest people carefully consider its implications for startups. There will of course be areas where these companies are naturally weaker, and these are good areas to start companies.\nDiversity & Inclusion\nIn 2016, we funded 68 female founders at 52 companies. About 22.3% of the companies we funded had a woman on the founding team, and about 12.5% of the founders we funded were women. In 2016, we funded 52 Black and Latino founders at 29 companies. 11.6% of the founders we funded were Black or Latino.\nThe percentage of women who apply to YC is roughly the same as the percentage of women who get funded. The same is true for Black and Latino founders.\nFrom the data we have available, it seems that the percentage of women and people of color applying to YC is higher than the overall percentage of women and people of color starting startups. This is encouraging, but we continue to want to understand and address the barriers that prevent more founders from underrepresented groups from starting startups and applying to YC. We still have a long way to go.\nWhile we remain committed to helping more underrepresented founders get started, we believe that’s only part of the solution. We still see significant dropoffs at the stages after YC (e.g. raising late-stage capital). The larger startup community needs to consider how little the unicorn-founder demographics resemble the early-stage demographics.\nThere’s clearly a lot more work to do here, and we’re committed to help do it. We’re hosting our fourth annual Female Founders Conference this year in June, continuing our Open Office Hours with underrepresented communities and bringing in unconscious bias experts to train our team. We’re always open to hearing how we can do a better job, so if you’ve come across practices or programs that work well to support diverse founders, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/contact//">please let us know</a>.\nYC Organization\nY Combinator is currently made up of 5 groups. I’ll talk a little about each of them here. We expect to add several more over the next few years, and in general you should expect us to try a lot of stuff (though of course not all of it will work). You should also expect us to continue to grow the number of companies we fund.\nYC (our flagship program)\nIn October of 2016, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/author/michael-seibel//">Michael Seibel</a> took over responsibility for our main program as CEO of YC. He’s doing an outstanding job, and I expect the program to significantly strengthen over the course of 2017 and beyond.\nIn 2016 (and the first part of 2017), we added three remarkable partners to the flagship group: Tim Brady, Adora Cheung and Daniel Gross.\nOne of my partners that I’d like to especially thank is Dalton Caldwell. Dalton has been a YC partner since 2013, and now runs our admissions team, which is perhaps the most important function we have. Dalton has taken a process that used to be stressful and deeply imperfect and improved it by a huge amount. Though I’m sure we’ll still make mistakes, I sleep better at night thinking that we’re making far fewer in this area than we used to.\nWhile I’m on the topic of recognizing partners, I’d also like to thank the three partners at YC that get some of the least public recognition. Kirsty Nathoo is our CFO, and Jon and Carolynn Levy are our General Counsels. They are full partners at YC but since they don’t advise our companies (as much) on business as the other partners, they are less well-known. However, they work incredibly hard and thoughtfully, and they are one of the secrets to our success. In fact, one of our most successful founders recently said to me “I tell every startup I meet they should do YC, and the reason is Jon Levy. I don’t get how he managed to take my calls at all hours of the day, because the other founders in my batch said he did the same for them, but he solved more problems for us than I can count, and also just listened to me when I had a bad day.”\nFinally, I’d like to thank our entire software team, lead by my partner Jared Friedman. We’ve had an incredible improvement in our software over the past year, and someday when the history of YC is written, I expect that people will talk about software as one of our secret weapons. This shouldn’t be so secret—one might reasonably expect technology investors to understand the importance of great software for themselves—but it is generally not the case.\nWe give companies in this program $120k for 7% ownership in their company, and work with them intensively for 3 months and then less intensively for the rest of the company’s life. We run this program twice a year, and currently fund about 125 companies per batch. While at YC, founders get access to a range of resources, advice, connections, and special deals.\nAnyone can <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/apply//">apply on our website, and all sorts of people do (here are some <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/common-misconceptions-about-applying-to-yc//">common misconceptions</a> about who YC accepts).\nCompanies often ask us how we decide who gets into YC. There are four questions I consider:\n1) Will this company build something lots of people really love?\nIf so, and if ‘lots’ is sufficiently large, the company has the chance to produce substantial earnings.\n2) Will this company be easy to copy?\nThe most successful companies I’ve worked with have a significant competitive advantage—network effect, proprietary technology, complex coordination, or barrier to entry of some other sort. I understand in theory it’s possible to build a very successful commodity company, but I don’t know how to do it.\n3) Will these founders develop into “forces of nature”?\nAs most people say, it’s hard to make money unless you invest in great founders. Defining what that means is usually left as an exercise to the reader. Here are some questions I ask myself: Are these founders relentlessly determined? Are they original thinkers? Are they smart, and especially do they have new insights I haven’t heard before? Are they good communicators (and so will they be able to hire, sell, raise money, talk to the press, etc)? Are they focused and intense? Do they always seem to find a way around obstacles? Would I work for them?\nThis is the often the hardest factor for me to evaluate, because you have to make a judgment about trajectory—you are trying to predict where someone will be in five years.\n4) Does this company have a clear and important mission?\nWithout this, I usually get bored. More importantly, companies that don’t have this usually have a hard time recruiting enough great people to work with them, and thus struggle to become very large.\nWe especially like founders who have some sort of non-traditional background; we are somewhat suspicious of founders with extremely “tracked” lives. Startups are not a resume item, and we don’t like founders who view YC as a stop on the way to B-school. Although in many ways it’s a good problem to have, the increase in the value of YC’s brand means we have to work harder to find people doing a startup for the right reason: to bring an idea they’re obsessed with to life, and willing to do something unreasonable to see it happen.\nWe have had great success funding “unknown” people, and we will keep doing this—it’s one of our two or three best secrets. Please help us spread the message: you don’t need to be experienced, well-known, or have an impressive resume to get into YC. We fund smart, ambitious people with a great idea and evidence that they can build things.\nIf you know a founder who should apply to YC, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.ycombinator.com/recommend//">you can recommend them to us</a>. That said, companies don’t need a recommendation or introduction, and most companies we fund don’t have one.\nAs I mentioned before, I think the strength and quality of our community is one of the most important things we have to offer. As with any community, this emerges from a complex set of factors, but I’ll mention three here.\nOne of the most important cultural values PG and Jessica put in place was to do the right thing for founders, even when it is not in our own short-term interest. When I was going through YC, it was the thing that most stuck out to me as different from other investors.\nAnother cultural value they created is to try to fund only good people (in the sense of doing the right thing, though separately we evaluate for effectiveness). We sometimes get this very wrong, and dealing with the repercussions is the most unpleasant part of our job. However, we manage to get it right a lot.\nThirdly, we have a ‘pay-it-forward’ mentality. Startups in the batch know they can ask any alumni for help, well beyond normal Silicon Valley expectations. Later, when they’re successful alumni, they help new companies without us ever asking.\nYC Continuity\nYC Continuity is our growth-stage fund. We started it in 2015, and it’s run by Ali Rowghani. Last year, Anu Hariharan joined as our second YC Continuity partner.\nWe do this to provide a source of friendly growth-stage capital to companies and founders that go through the YC program, especially to companies that other investors may not fully understand. We also hope to be a force for good in the growth-stage investing market.\nYC Continuity will begin to experiment with programs to provide more advice and resources to growth-stage companies in 2017.\nYC Research\nYC Research is a non-profit research division of YC. Although we think startups are a good structure to align people to solve a problem, they are clearly not the best solution for everything. For some important problems, a non-profit research lab is a good approach.\nWe sometimes fund and run internal groups, and sometimes fund external organizations.\nSo far there are 5 groups: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/basic-income//">Basic Income</a>, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://openai.com/blog//">OpenAI, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://harc.ycr.org//">HARC, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://cities.ycr.org//">New Cities</a>, and <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-research-universal-healthcare//">Universal Healthcare</a>.\nBasic Income is studying the effects of giving people unconditional monthly cash. We are currently in our pilot phase in Oakland. We are continuing to learn and make changes, and work with various public agencies and governments to enable the full-scale study. We are planning to run a larger study than we originally intended, and we hope to start fundraising for it soon.\nOpenAI is trying to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. In our first year, we released Gym, Universe, and a number of new ideas that were at the limits of my understanding but that I enjoyed reading about. In 2017, we hope to achieve significant new milestones that are not possible with current AI technology.\nHARC is a group headed by Alan Kay inventing new ways for humans to learn and understand more. My visit to <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://harc.ycr.org/project/realtalk//">Bret Victor’s lab</a> last year, which is a sort of computerized interactive room, remains one of the new technologies I think most about.\nNew Cities is still in the exploration phase, but we hope to have more to share over the course of this year.\nUniversal Healthcare is a project on which we are partnering with Watsi to study how we can use technology to make healthcare both better and more affordable.\nWe grew a little faster than we were expecting, so we are trying to take a breather on further growth at YCR. But we may still add one more group in 2017.\nStartup School\nStartup School is our new MOOC (which we will supplement with our existing series of conferences). It will be open to anyone (unless we get absolutely overwhelmed with interest) and is free. We will stream talks like the ones that happen during YC dinners, provide advice to startups, and help them connect to other startups in the program and other people that may be helpful.\nAlthough we clearly stand to gain from this, we are doing it because we believe spreading the message about entrepreneurship and making the necessary information, community, and connections freely accessible to everyone who might want to start a company is important.\nThis year, I’ll be teaching it.\nIf this goes well, we hope to offer it every year. In future years, we also hope to explore how something like ‘financial aid’ might work for people that need a small amount of capital to help get their startup going.\nHacker News\nHacker News (HN) is an internet forum, created by Paul Graham shortly after YC got started and now run by Daniel Gackle. Its original purpose was to try out the programming language PG was developing—a dialect of Lisp called Arc, that HN still proudly uses today—and to be a place to find interesting things to read.\nHN’s initial users were fans of the essays PG had been publishing about startups, programming, and a lot of other things. Soon it became a hub for everyone interested in YC and startups YC was funding. YC and HN grew up together, and many YC founders started as HN users.\nHN remains focused on startups, programming, and lots of other things—anything intellectually interesting goes. The HN community has developed many unique features over the years, such as the “Show HN” format, where users share something they’ve made, and monthly “Who Is Hiring” threads that have helped many community members find jobs.\nHacker News has 3.4 million users per month and 350,000 users per day, with 4 million pageviews a day. There are just under 1 million registered accounts, with several hundred added each day. Users post around 1,000 articles and 6,000 comments to the site per day.\nThese numbers are all growing, but relatively slowly, and we like it that way. Internet forums are notorious for degrading over time–one of the ways PG described HN was as an experiment in seeing how long a forum could stay good before it deteriorated. We’ve mostly managed to stave that off, for 10 years now, but we’re always mindful of this risk.\nHN has grown into the leading community for tech and startups on the internet, known for its emphasis on civil, substantive discussion—at least in theory! Our team affectionately refers to HN as “the worst internet forum, except for all the others”.\n<hr />\nWe are only about 30 years into the age of software, about 20 years into the age of the internet, and about 2 years into the age of artificial intelligence. Each of these by themselves is a technology revolution that I believe we will look back on as being extremely significant; taken together, I believe they will represent the most significant technology revolution in human history—I believe we are likely to have less in common with whatever we call the most intelligent species on the planet in 600 years than we did with humans 60,000 years ago.\nIt’s an exciting time to do what we do.\nSam Altman \nPresident, YC Group\n","comment_id":"1098587","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-02-20T00:14:04.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:14:03.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-02-20T00:14:04.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. 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He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"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/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/2017-yc-annual-letter/","excerpt":"Dear YC Community:","reading_time":12,"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":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71940","uuid":"2a4ad3bc-6e6f-4da6-a480-cf59fba42425","title":"YC Research: Universal Healthcare","slug":"yc-research-universal-healthcare","html":"Four years ago, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://Watsi.org/">Watsi became YC’s first non-profit. They’ve since raised over $7.5 million to fund life-changing healthcare for more than 10,000 patients in 24 countries.\nToday, we’re excited to announce that YC Research is funding Watsi for a project that will study using technology to improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare. Currently, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.who.int/whr/2010/10_summary_en.pdf?ua=1\%22>up to 40%</a> of all healthcare funding is wasted on operational inefficiencies, fraud, and ineffective care. Watsi’s goal is to improve the efficiency of funding, making universal healthcare possible.\nFor the initial project, Watsi will fund primary healthcare for a community in the developing world and build a platform to run the system transparently. Once the platform is in place, Watsi will start to experiment with improving the quality of care and reducing the cost – e.g., by streamlining operations, minimizing waste and fraud, and identifying medical errors in real-time.\nIf this works, Watsi plans to make the software available to governments to fund healthcare more effectively and provide universal healthcare for their citizens.\nIf you’re interested in getting involved, email <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"mailto:connect@watsi.org\">connect@watsi.org</a>.\n","comment_id":"1098484","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-02-07T02:48:23.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:14:59.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-02-07T02:48:23.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71193","name":"YC Research","slug":"yc-research","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-research/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710c1","name":"Sam Altman","slug":"sam-altman","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/eifaoe14zqiueje28oo9.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He was the president of YC from 2014-2019. He studied computer science at Stanford, and while there, worked in the AI lab.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/sam-altman/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71193","name":"YC Research","slug":"yc-research","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-research/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/yc-research-universal-healthcare/","excerpt":"Four years ago, Watsi became YC’s first non-profit. They’ve since raised over $7.5 million to fund life-changing healthcare for more than 10,000 patients in 24 countries.","reading_time":1,"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}],"filter":"By Sam Altman","featured":null,"pagination":{"page":1,"limit":10,"pages":8,"total":71,"next":2,"prev":null}},"url":"/blog/author/sam-altman","version":"a2ce9abc7c2080e819915df4aacfcc5c01cd09b5","encryptHistory":false,"clearHistory":false,"rails_context":{"railsEnv":"production","inMailer":false,"i18nLocale":"en","i18nDefaultLocale":"en","href":"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/author/sam-altman","location":"/blog/author/sam-altman","scheme":"https","host":"www.ycombinator.com","port":null,"pathname":"/blog/author/sam-altman","search":null,"httpAcceptLanguage":"en, *","applyBatchLong":"Summer 2025","applyBatchShort":"S2025","applyDeadlineShort":"May 13","ycdcRetroMode":true,"currentUser":null,"serverSide":true},"id":"ycdc_new/pages/BlogList-react-component-628862b1-d5f5-43d2-8f86-5758f12fde70","server_side":true}" data-reactroot="">

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YC China + Qi Lu

by Sam Altman8/14/2018

Edit: Read this update on YC China.

US Visas

by Sam Altman3/9/2017

We’ve heard from some founders that they’re nervous about applying to YC because they worry they won’t be able to get visas to attend interviews or the summer program.

YC’s Online Class (Sign up at StartupSchool.org)

by Sam Altman3/6/2017

Dilution

by Sam Altman3/1/2017

There has probably been more capital looking to invest in private technology companies in the past five years than any five-year period before.

Drew Houston on How to Build the Future

by Sam Altman2/23/2017

Drew is the founder and CEO of Dropbox.

2017 YC Annual Letter

by Sam Altman2/20/2017

Dear YC Community:

YC Research: Universal Healthcare

by Sam Altman2/7/2017

Four years ago, Watsi became YC’s first non-profit. They’ve since raised over $7.5 million to fund life-changing healthcare for more than 10,000 patients in 24 countries.

Recent Posts By Sam Altman

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