Startup Investor School Day 1 Live Stream

And the way the course is organized is there's a lecture and then there's a Q&A afterwards. So please hold your questions until the Q&A session at the end unless an instructor explicitly says they want questions during their talk. I will also take questions from the streaming audience too. To ask a question, please use the Twitter hashtag pound YCS. I will take as many of those questions as we can, time willing.

So there's a mixture here of watching a class of accredited and non-accredited investors. For the accredited investors, as most of you know, we are going to be extending an invite to YC Winter 2018 Demo Days, which are March 19th and 20th. It's a virtual invite; you can watch it online. But also, as a cool little kicker, we're going to invite randomly ten of you to come in person to YC Demo Day, which is kind of a pretty special occasion. I hope whoever comes enjoys it a lot.

This is our first time teaching this class; hopefully not the last. We do ask you guys to give us feedback for what worked, what didn't work, what was too obvious or too subtle, and what was missing. At the end of the class, there will be a survey. I'll say this again at the end, but please do give us feedback. You can also give us feedback real-time as you like; you can email me at Jeff GEOFF at Y Combinator.com anytime you like. Honest opinions are great.

I want to start off also by pointing out I won't be up here very much; it's mostly a bunch of instructors from inside and outside YC. They're all volunteers and they're very busy people. They've been gracious enough to donate their incredible experience and time to us, and I'm very grateful for everyone who agreed to do this.

Before we get started, I wanted to spend a couple of minutes saying why we're doing this. How many of you have made angel investments before? Could you raise your hands? So you don't need any of this crap; you guys have already done this. Okay, so there's a lot of experience, and we know there's a lot of experience. But we're doing this for mainly two reasons. One is that angel and seed investors are a critical part of this startup ecosystem. It's the first money in; usually, it's what allows companies to actually take flight and become real, big, interesting, scalable companies.

It's also a little self-serving. We think that more great angel investors and great seed investors are great for YC companies, and we hope you will invest in YC companies. We also think it's good for you, for people, for all of you who have invested. You know, it's an amazing way to get a window into the future, to be part of this future that founders are really creating, to get a window into what's going to happen. So it's all good.

What are we hoping the outcomes will be? Venture investing has been around for hundreds of years, but really the kind of venture investing that we think of in Silicon Valley for the last 50 years—this guy named George Doriot made a... He was a VC; he was an early VC, this firm called ARDC. He made what we'd consider a seed investment of $70,000 in 1957 into this new tiny computer company called Digital Equipment Corporation, sometimes called Digital, often called DEC.

And that $70,000 turned into 35 million dollars, which a lot of people found pretty interesting. That led to what kick-started an incredible flowering of innovation and a lot of wealth creation that has never seen the like in the world. We hope that some of y'all have that same experience, hopefully investing in YC companies. It's still possible and there's lots of examples, and if we're lucky, some of the folks who are gonna talk to you will give you some of those examples.

We also hope that you all become better, smarter investors after this course. I'm sure that's why some of you are here—some of you are here to get some of those insights, and I'm sure also that you will tell us if we achieve that goal. And lastly, we want to create a permanent repository of this information so anyone can make use of it in future years. So we hope...