Jessica Livingston Introduces Startup School SV 2014

Good morning! Hello everyone, welcome! I'm Jessica Livingston with Y Combinator. We're going to get started now, and today’s a really special [Applause] day. Today is the 10th Startup School we've ever done. It's pretty amazing to think we've been doing this for a decade.

Out of curiosity, was anyone at the first like rainy, muddy day at Harvard in 2005? Any one person? That's so cool! Woo! Anyway, we've gotten, as you can attest, it's gotten much more higher production value. We actually have this beautiful carpeting on the stage today, so we're excited, and we have a great lineup of speakers.

Thank you all! I know a lot of you traveled here to come, and I hope you have a great day. Um, so we're going to get started. We have Ron Conway of SV Angel as our first guest speaker, and there are three remarkable things about Ron.

First of all, he knows everyone in and everything about the world of startup investing. He was basically the first internet investor, so he knows a lot of stuff. He’s also rare in that he’s totally upstanding. Um, you can trust him implicitly, and you can't really say that about all investors at all. And lastly, he works his butt off. Um, he does an unbelievable amount of work for the startups he funds, most of which he's not able to even discuss.

But we're going to hope to get a few of his stories out of him today. Um, I’m also delighted to announce that Paul Graham is making a guest appearance this morning to interview Ron.