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Jun 12, 2024 | 
ycombinator.com | Greg Kumparak |Y Combinator |Lindsay Amos
Tracy Young is unstoppable. In 2018, Tracy and her co-founders sold their company PlanGrid for $875 million. By 2021, she was ready to jump back in and do it all over again with a brand new startup: TigerEye. TigerEye builds AI-powered planning and revenue management software for businesses, combining AI and machine learning with a company’s own historical data to help them predict their future. It’s “Moneyball but for business,” as Tracy puts it.
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May 30, 2024 | 
ycombinator.com | Greg Kumparak |Y Combinator |Dalton Caldwell
by Greg Kumparak5/30/2024If you build something because you need it, chances are good others need it too. RevenueCat (YC S18) is an excellent example of this. While adding in-app subscriptions to an iOS application, RevenueCat’s co-founders realized they were spending a ton of time building out the behind-the-scenes plumbing. It was necessary work, but it meant way less time for the features they actually wanted to create.
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May 24, 2024 | 
ycombinator.com | Dalton Caldwell |Greg Kumparak
by Dalton Caldwell5/24/2024When a major new technology comes out, huge new opportunities open up for founders that get in on the ground floor. Fortunes were made when the app store came out, when online payments became easy, and when the web itself was brand new. Moments like these don’t happen often.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
ycombinator.com | Dalton Caldwell |Greg Kumparak
by Dalton Caldwell4/17/2024When you’re making important decisions as a founder — like what to build, or how it should work — should you spend lots of time gathering input from others or just trust your gut? The answer: it depends. It depends on who you are, what you’re building, and what you know here. We often see founders getting it backwards.
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Mar 21, 2024 | 
ycombinator.com | Dalton Caldwell |Greg Kumparak
by Dalton Caldwell3/21/2024It’s easy to analyze your way out of taking the first step. It’s something we see a lot, particularly when founders try to choose what to build based on what they think VCs will like. These founders will find a great problem that theycould solve, only to convince themselves it’s not “venture scale.” Before they’ve written a line of code or even talked to a single person about it, they’re trying to predict market opportunities and exit strategies a decade down the road.
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Nov 15, 2023 | 
ycombinator.com | Greg Kumparak |Garry Tan |Y Combinator |Dalton Caldwell
by Greg Kumparak11/15/2023Casetext started out in 2013 as a crowdsourced law library — a sort of “Wikipedia meets reddit” for the law. Ten years later, Casetext is one of the biggest mega wins to date in AI, capable of turning weeks of arduous legal work into hours or minutes. Just months ago it was acquired for $650 million dollars. What happened between those two points?
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
ycombinator.com | Greg Kumparak |Y Combinator |Ryan Choi
Getting people to visit your startup’s website is just step one. Getting them to actually sign up, buy something, or even just care to learn more is a whole different challenge — and it’s one where good design is crucial. For this episode of Design Review, Aaron Epstein is joined by YC’s newest Group Partner, Pete Koomen, to cover some of the seemingly small things in a page’s design that can ultimately have huge impacts.
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Oct 19, 2023 | 
ycombinator.com | Dalton Caldwell |Greg Kumparak |Y Combinator
by Dalton Caldwell10/19/2023If you’re an employee of a late-stage company right now, how would you know when it’s time to move on vs. time to double down? It’s an especially pertinent question today; the late stage funding market is… slow and the IPO window is still effectively closed. Is this a good time for employees to consider working for a smaller/earlier stage company? The fact is that there isn't an easy answer — it can really vary from person to person, and situation to situation.
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Oct 6, 2023 | 
ycombinator.com | Greg Kumparak |Dalton Caldwell
Founders are inherently busy people. A lot goes into making something people want. For this episode of Office Hours, YC's Group Partners are talking about productivity — what works for the founders they help, and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t. In many cases, it’s about taking just a bit of time to get introspective; is that trendy new productivity tool actually helping you get things done faster, or would a simple notes app/spreadsheet work better with the way you think?
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Sep 13, 2023 | 
ycombinator.com | Dalton Caldwell |Y Combinator |Greg Kumparak
by Dalton Caldwell9/13/2023Is trying to live your life exactly like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg a good strategy? How seriously should you take advice from famously successful people? It’s hard not to give advice when you’re successful, but context matters. Is the person giving advice thinking about all the steps they followed in the early parts of their career, or just what’s possible for them today because of those steps?
