Getting Started

I drove down to Mountain View to meet the new YC Winter ’18 batch and share some seed-stage lessons we learned as we grew. I’d love to share these here and hope they’ll be helpful for other entrepreneurs as well.

*Description from Goodreads:* Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an

I recently dug up my introduction to Founders at Work, which I wrote in 2006, and I was amazed how accurate it still seems: –––––– Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at...

A lot of the advice we give startups is tactical; meant to be helpful on a day to day or week to week basis. But some advice is more fundamental. We’ve collected here what we at YC consider the most important, most transformative advice for startups. Whether common sense or counter-intuitive, the gu

In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley regarded us as irrelevant.

I often talk to people who want to start startups in their late 20s and 30s, but can’t.

When people ask me for tech career advice I find it helpful to lay out the three paths I’ve encountered most in my career: founder, executive, and employee. I wrote this post though because when I talk to people about their careers I’m surprised at how often they focus on only one of these paths wit

Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be? I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting a startup could well become as popular as gra