Y Combinator

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Y Combinator

Type	Limited liability company
Founded	2005
Headquarters	Mountain View, CA
Industry	Venture Capital
Products	Investments
Website	www.ycombinator.com

Y Combinator is an American seed-stage startup funding firm, started in 2005 by Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston. Y Combinator provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year. From its inception to 2008, one program was held in each of the US cities of Cambridge, Massachusetts and Mountain View, California; in January 2009, Paul Graham announced that henceforth the Cambridge program would be closed and all future programs would take place in Silicon Valley ^[1]. In exchange, they take an average of about 6% of the company's equity^[2]. Unusual among startup funding firms, Y Combinator provides very little money—about $5000 + $5000 per founder^[3]. This reflects Graham's conviction that between free software, dynamic languages, the web, and Moore's Law, the cost of founding a startup has greatly decreased^[4].

As of January 2008, Y Combinator had funded 80 startups, the best known of which are reddit, Loopt, and Justin.tv. The number of startups funded in each cycle has been gradually increasing. The first cycle in summer 2005 had eight startups. In the summer 2007 cycle, there were 19.

Y Combinator was started after Graham gave a talk at his alma mater, Harvard (where he earned a PhD in Computer Science), which became, "How to Start a Startup".^[5] He suggested founders seek seed funding from "angel investors", preferably those who had made money in technology. He half-jokingly added "but not me", but, feeling guilty^[6], he soon after organized Y Combinator to offer seed funding to startups.

[edit] Portfolio

Companies that have received funding from Y Combinator include:

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Company website

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