Work at a Startup Expo 2019

So thank you so much. Quick round of applause for making it out here for all these companies that we're going to be having a walk across here. It's two o'clock, we want to keep it on time because we have a lot of great stuff to get through.

So this is where we are in the schedule. I'm going to give a couple of opening remarks and we're gonna have Jeff, the new president of Y Combinator, come up here and kind of give his talk on why I see and work at startups. Then we're just going to roll right into the first half of the pitches.

So, you know, we have 40 founders here who've all started startups, who have all gone through Y Combinator and raised money. They are super excited. You saw it out there, they're super excited to meet with you, tell you about their company, tell you about their business; more importantly, because you guys were engineers, tell you about their products, what stack they're using, and hopefully get you excited because I think that what they're doing, each and every one of them, they got an amazing mission and they would be fortunate to have you on their team.

So we'll start with the first 20. It's gonna be like demo day: two minutes each. I'm gonna try to move pretty fast, and then we're gonna have a quick intermission. We're gonna do the next 20 and then after that, hopefully around 4 o'clock, we're all gonna move back into that room. So if you found some founders that you really liked or products that you really liked, make sure you can go and meet them. Make sense?

Yeah? Alright, alright. But first, hi, I'm Ryan. I have sent, I hope each and every one of you an email. It felt a little bit like spam; I feel a little bad. I hope you forgive me, but I'm glad you're here. My job at Y Combinator is to help these founders as well as the broader YC ecosystem find and work with amazing engineers.

Why would I want a job like this? So when I graduated from college, I had the chance to be the seventh engineer at salesforce.com. I got to work directly with Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, the founders. I got to build things that I would not have been able to build anywhere else. It's a 50 person company; one day, Marc comes up to me, he's like, "I think we need to build something that is for like developers, not just these salespeople. What is it?" Right?

And so I got to build the API, right? I got to build an API fresh out of college. I got to build the first marketing suite, I'm gonna build their first internal billing system twice, and I got the few things that I would never have been able to do and learn more than I would never, throughout my entire career, right?

And so I obviously think that working at startups is amazing, and I am super excited to be helping these founders and these companies work with you guys. And the other thing about my job is I get to engage with so many engineers, two colleges, do people who sign up for working at a startup, and I generally want to help each and every one of you.

In all transparency, obviously, I would love for you to work at a YC company, but I'm open to chat about lots of things if you guys are interested. So things you can ask me about—things I love chatting about: I love chatting about engineering. Right? Again, I was an engineer at Salesforce; I was there for eight years. I loved it so much because I got to grow with the company. It was an amazing experience.

And then from there, I got to go to another startup and do it again, even smaller. I ran an engineering team at a company called Zora, then went public last year, and Vera was an engineering manager. Again, one of the most personally and professionally satisfying things was finding great people, putting them in roles where they would just excel and crush it. They learned a ton, and it helped the company, and a couple of them were actually here today.

And so I'm just super excited to be working with each and every one of you. If you guys want to talk about engineering careers, process, you know, moving into engineering management, I'm here to chat. I also love talking about products and platforms, so most recently, I was a PM at Lyft. I got to be ...